from now on, I calls 'em as I sees 'em

...not like I ever did mince words. I'm more towards the "blunt to the point of rudeness" end of the spectrum.

The past ten days have totally kicked my ass into the stratosphere, and not in a good way. So no insights from me.

But listen to this song, because it's one of my favorites, even if I am embedding it via gootube (currently* I have a hateon for Google and all its minions)




* I'm sure that by tomorrow morning I'll be back to welcoming our new Googlous overlords. In the meantime I'm hacked off.

at least we know now who ate Joey's mic

Not that knowing does me much good.

Katurdayklok

Do anyting for catklok
Do anything for catklok
Do anything for catklok
Do anything for catklok

I'll teach you who poop

catklok catklok catklok!


Pipgar Pipgelf fell out of a tree



Nibbles Wartooth ate a bumble bee


Bobby Murderface Murderface Murderface


Luckles doodly doo doodly doo ding dong diddly doodly doo




PigBear Explosion



With apologies to Dethklok
& thanks to stoops for his brutal assistance writing this post.

so wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty!

you know that I'd do anything for you ...

Oops

Every time I hear the New Pornographers' lyric "the easy call, the call of search" I think for a second that they're talking about the industry I work in. They aren't, of course - no one in their right mind would write a song about the deeply boring* subject of search engine marketing, especially not a song as stirring as My Rights Versus Yours. What the hell would you write a song about, anyway? Here are some catchy ideas:

Alexa's Metrics Versus Compete's
My Conversion Funnel Versus Yours
Google Analytics Versus Omniture
PPC Versus SEO

... Yeah. I thought so. It's total gibberish to anyone who isn't knee deep in online marketing - I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a whole other language, but it's definitely got dialect status.

The other super awesome thing about the lyric in the original song is I've been hearing it wrong anyway. The full verse goes like this:

Under your wheels, your chance is with
The easy call, the called-off search
The medicine, it still won't work
But there's dangerous levels of it here

And here's the song, if you don't know it. It rocks. I can't find a link to the album version but the Letterman show is pretty close.



The one time I saw them live, I was disappointed because everything they played sounded exactly like the album, plus the band looked bored. But whatevs - the album version is a great version of the song.


* I don't find the field boring in the slightest but you should keep in mind that I also regret not having the time to learn and practice the ancient art of bonsai. So there's your measuring stick.

Gratitude

Things I am thankful for:
1. Alcohol
2. Earplugs
3. Rides home from the club

Listening

Sigur Ros. My favorite album is called ( ), and they released it with all the tracks untitled. The whole album is sung in a made-up language called Vonlenska. Later on they went back and gave the tracks names and translated the invented language. It's really pretty, and they are very hip, in part because they aren't that well-known. Plus Pico Iyer is a fan! How can you go wrong?

This is the first track on the album. It is a beautiful haunting sad song (I listen to it a lot at work for this reason).



The video is unsettling and creepy. In a good way.

Crushing

So I have been reading Sarah Vowell intermittently since Christmas when Dave got me three of her books as gifts. It was a good choice on his part because I totally love her. I was laughing on the T while I read it on the trip home. This paragraph just killed me:

The professor asked if anyone had read Camus. I, of course, had read L'Etranger in the original French, and raised my hand.* I mentioned the protagonist who doesn't care about his mother's death. Then I said that I often washed dishes with my mom. When she'd hand me a knife to dry, I would have the fleeting thought that it would be pretty easy to kill her if I wanted. I should mention that I usually sat in the back, so when I said this about a hundred heads whipped around to stare at me. What I should have said was, "But I don't want to kill her!" What I actually said was, "Oh, like you never thought about killing your mom."

How can you not love this woman? Plus I am always the one who ends up with my whole department staring at me like another head has shot up out of my neck. I work in marketing, which isn't quite as full of kids who were popular in high school as sales departments tend to be, but marketing is full of the kids who were the ultra cool ones wearing all black and smoking cigarettes back behind the gym. Thus they seem shocked every time when I come out with some amusing anecdote about that time my first husband went on a three day drinking binge and came home perched happily inside a garbage truck. My feeling is that it's a fucking great story and I tell it well; their feeling is that I've had some crazy wild life and it's sort of in poor taste to mention it. So it's always nice to read someone else who is okay with admitting their own humilations.


Speaking of the trip home, I had promised Dave that I'd leave work promptly at 6 so I could be home at 7 so I could see his face for a few minutes before he left to play a gig. I of course didn't leave work at 6 - I left at something more like 6:20, because I was shooting the shit with my boss, who I like a lot. (Don't get me wrong, I really like everyone I work with. They just all think I'm nuts.) As I walked to the subway, I uttered a little prayer that the trains would cooperate and I'd get home near 7 anyway and not at like 7:30, which would have totally pissed Dave off.

Then I wondered who I was praying to, since I don't believe in God, and decided that maybe I had proven that there were no atheists in foxholes. Then I wondered why I don't believe in God, and remembered that it's because I can't get past that whole bad-things-happening-to-god-people thing. Then I wondered if, supposing there really is a God, if I was going to hell for not believing. The trains did cooperate and as I pulled into my last stop I thought to say thanks just in case but then wondered if the perhaps-God who might have helped me out with the trains could hear me from underground. As if God's reception is limited like the T-Mobile network. And then I made a conscious decision to stop thinking about theological matters and listened to Sense and Sensibility on the walk home instead.


*I too read this in the original French and would also have raised my hand.

in like a lion, indeed

I dyed my hair purple.




Me and my new hair with Zoe.


curly hair in the dining room.


Lucky. He is a pushy old customer from Brookline.

He's our FIFTH cat. Pip was number 4, which was already too many, and then we acquired a fifth. So the deal with Lucky is that he belonged to a blind friend of Dave's. Lucky was diagnosed with diabetes (he's 12 and overweight), so obviously his blind owner couldn't see to give him his shots. So Dave's blind friend found a home for Lucky with another friend of hers ... except that lady was diagnosed with alzheimer's and couldn't remember the shots. So Lucky ended up back at the shelter and since he's 12 and diabetic and overweight, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life at the shelter, except we are suckers and adopted him. Two days after we brought him home, he had a hypoglycemic episode and almost died. After a mere thirteen hundred dollars, though, he was saved, and now he's not diabetic. (For now. Cats are really hard to keep stable. Zoe's back on insulin, for example, but only a small dose once a day. And we've invested in a blood glucometer and checked her blood sugar this afternoon; we'll probably start monitoring them both regularly. If I can avoid any more $1300 emergencies, I definitely want to.)

So five cats is way too many, and it's also an expensive hobby, but Lucky is super sweet. I had food poisoning last week and was running a high fever and generally felt awful, and Lucky was super happy just to lie in bed with me. He totally spooned me. Lucky (totally misnamed, in case you hadn't guessed, but Dave's blind friend's cleaning lady found him in a dumpster when he was 3), anyway, Lucky is really easygoing and gets along with the other cats, apart from Zoe, who hates everyone. He and Pip wrestle - he's the only cat strong enough to kick Pip's ass. Pip is a big boy these days - he was 9.5 pounds at the vet last month and I bet he's up to ten now. We call him "muscle boy" because he's a brick shithouse.


Look how much bigger he's gotten since August.


Pip likes cat TV.


Dave took this photo of Simone. She is his favorite. Technically Simone is still bigger than Pip, but she's a lover, not a fighter, and Pip wales on her ass all the time. (Whales? Wails? I think it's a regional phrase and I've only heard it spoken, not seen it written. Google was no help.) The brown rug with circles is in the second bedroom, which is now "the dude room", god help us. So naturally a brown rug was an appropriately masculine choice.



Sometimes Pip can be sweet.


I like how they both have their tongues out.

We are going to see Trail of Dead tonight at the Middle East Downstairs, which should be a good show. The only problem is that their set doesn’t start until 11 (which ought to make work tomorrow sleepy. My plan is to shower before the show and do a roll and stroll tomorrow morning; I figure if we get in at 1, I can go right to bed and sleep until 7:30 tomorrow morning and leave the house by 8, which will make me feel wretched, but I will be functional tomorrow for work, at least. I grow old, I grow old, and will probably regret seeing the show tomorrow.) Oh, and we’re getting 6 inches of snow today and supposed to have another 12 tomorrow. Yay New England. In the meantime we are listening to Yo La Tengo - transferring vinyl to MP3s, puttering and doing housework, and we need to hit the grocery store if we want to eat next week. A nap before the show is also very likely. Life is busy.

and just for kicks, a couple of pictures from when we were out in New Mexico over Christmas to see my parents.


The sky is so blue out there.




Some kind of cactus flower.

Random Awesome

Frank Zappa, at home with his parents. via swissmiss, who curates an awesome website. There are more in the series here.

I also really liked how Eric Clapton's mom obviously got out the good silver for the picture. Touching, somehow.

Random Yo La Tengo Songs for Monday

Stockholm Syndrome:


I apologize for the Final Fantasy video - it had the best sound quality of all the clips I could find on YouTube.





Mr. Tough


This song always makes me laugh because the vocals sound like Herbert the Pervert from Family Guy (below).

Cherry picking fun singles for Friday

It's not halloween-y but I like it anyway:

Mirah, Sweepstake Prize, from her debut album, You Think It's Like This But It's Really Like This, which i do not possess but think I might like.

(heh, I said weenie.)

The thing I really dig about Sweepstakes Prize is the 60s girl-group vibe of the opening notes of the song (chords? bars? I am so musically uneducated), and then the solo guitar adds melody and rhythm, which is maybe what picking and strumming is supposed to do, I just never thought about it before. Listen now 'cause I have no idea what the deal is with the site I've linked to but it seems pretty small and I'm not sure if the offered downloads are legal.

I also like Stray Dog and a Chocolate Shake, for straight up poppy goodness, and this video is reasonably amusing. By Grandaddy. I used to have a Grandaddy of my own. Now he's taking his dirt nap. I guess I could console myself with albums from the band but it wouldn't be the same.



And I had this stuck in my head last night at bedtime, which was a nice song to fall asleep to. The track is called He's Gone, by Leona Naess, from her self-titled album, which is another album I'd like to get my hands on.

All these songs are courtesy of the matchup created by the brilliant Pandora on my favorite Pandora station, which I listen to all day long - srsly, I don't know how I'd get through the work day without streaming music. Pandora is such a smart, smart piece of programming and analysis. If you can have a crush on a website, then I do. Here's my station

Edited to add The great American Napkin, by Summer Skinny, which is not a band I can find out a whole lot about. That link is to their myspace page, by the way, and The Great American Napkin is the second song on their playlist.

Update again: I keep forgetting songs! I also love Corvette by Golden Smog. I want Dave's band to cover this song because I think it would work really well with their style. his band does a kickass version of Jailbreak (Badfinger) and this would fit in nicely.

slice of life

So last night while everyone else was watching McCain's speech, I was out at a club watching Dave's band and then Leon Rich, the act that followed them. I was pretty tired by then (as usual) but since there were about 7 people in the club and they were all our friends, I felt like it would be really obvious if I left in the middle of the set so I stayed and half-assedly tried to hide my yawns. I was glad I stayed, though, when Leon Rich started playing a song about dead squirrels that involved some kind of United Nations conspiracy theory. The chorus was "dead squirrel, yeah". Tell me that didn't beat the GOP convention speeches!

And then after Leon Rich I took off. The nice thing about local shows is that I don't have to wait for the boys to load in their gear, I can just take a cab home. Fifteen minutes (and fifteen dollars) later, I'm walking in the front door. It makes going out on a weeknight much more feasible - I was in bed by like 12:30 and so when the alarm went off at 7 I wasn't exactly thrilled but I don't feel too awful this morning. I also stuck to beer all night, which was a deliberate choice - that club pours REALLY strong drinks, which I found out the hard way the last time Dave's band played there. So beer drinking + control top panty hose = physically unable to consume a lot of beer. The elastic in those control tops will beat beer in an arm wrestling match every time.

I think the other reason I'm tired, besides the exciting stress of a job change and the fact that I've had after-work commitments every night this week (except for Monday, which was Labor Day, but I actually spent it in the office) - ANYWAY, as I was saying before I got sidetracked by my parentheticals, I think the reason I'm so tired might be related to the fact that I've had my period for NINE DAYS. Motherfucker! It's extra ironic because if I didn't take hormonal birth control, I would likely not get any period at all, so I wouldn't have to deal with it. I am also most likely infertile so the whole birth control shebang is probably a big waste of time, not that I am interested in testing this theory the hard way. (Also I might be fucked up a different way because of not having the correct hormones swirling around. Plus amenorrhea is really bad for future bone density, and since I recently learned that both my parents are two inches shorter than they used to be, I am all about bone density. Bring on the calcium-enriched OJ!) But still, it sucks to bleed for nine days and not know when (if) it'll end.

So that's my life. Also last night I rashly promised to go out again tonight for dinner and to see another local band, the Russians, who I haven't heard of before but they sound pretty good. I think I might need a nap in between work and going out, though.

Date Night

I was complaining on Thursday that nothing had gone right for me, and it was true. But maybe the universe felt bad or something because all the stars aligned for last night.

I picked Dave up at the T around 7:30 and we headed over to Highland Kitchen for dinner. The staff said there was a 20-30 minute wait (they don't accept reservations) but they explained they were erring on the conservative side, so we havered a bit - Dave was REALLY hungry - and ultimately decided to wait. We got a drink at the bar and were seated in about 7 minutes. Our appetizer of calamari with hot peppers was delivered super fast - maybe 10 minutes after we'd ordered it? I have no idea how the kitchen managed that - and it was delicious, crispy fried calamari in a spicy batter with some kind of sundried tomato emulsion for dipping.

Dave made me try a hot pepper ("they're not that hot, really" = fucking lie) and luckily by that time the bread had arrived so I slathered my bread with butter and took a big gulp of beer and that put the fire out. Heh. His tolerance for hot food is way higher than mine, I'm wimpy. Then our main courses arrived - he had a coconut goat curry which was delicious (and also spicy; the top of his head was beaded with sweat by the time the meal was over; he was psyched.) I had a mushroom sandwich with Jack cheese, which I thought would be a portabello mushroom in between hamburger buns, but it was actually a mix of different mushrooms in between hamburger buns. Delicious, although so heavy on the Worcester sauce I couldn't really taste much actual mushroom. But I like Worcester, so no harm done. And the fries which accompanied it were sublime - homemade and hand cut. Om nom nom.

My dad is going to be in town soon and I'm taking him here - Dad will love the spicy high quality food and unpretentious atmosphere. And almost the best surprise of the night was the bill - fifty bucks. Holy crap that's cheap (for my area), especially given the quality of the food; normally a meal like that would end up running about $80. So I'm thrilled to have such a great local joint.

After dinner - the timing here worked out perfectly - we headed over to the Abbey, one of my favorite music venues in the city (it's kind of a dive - sticky floors and totally not hipsterized - but they have some great bands and I love that it's just one step up from a garage.) We saw The Sneaks, which is headed up by Johnny, our wedding photographer. (Johnny, if you're reading this, the new site is gorgeous but I can't link directly to our stuff because it's flash! Waah.) I loved The Sneaks' music, plus it was nice to meet Johnny's wife, who recognized us from the wedding pictures. The band that followed was Buttercup, and they were a tight trio, with great vocal harmonies and - my favorite part - a chick on bass! Rock is so male-heavy, it's always a surprise when a woman is an integral member of the band and this lady definitely was.

And then it was after 10 and we were fading, so we headed home and were there in ten minutes (oh, the rapture! Patronizing local places means you don't have to trek to kingdom come to get home.)

When we got home I gave Zoe her painkiller and her antibiotics - she struggled mightily to avoid these but to no avail. I told her she was "struggling her way to the grave" (Dave's line originally) but I got it all into her eventually. She's not mean about it and doesn't go for me, I think she just really dislikes having anyone mess with her mouth, which with infected rotting teeth is understandable. She growled and squirmed a lot but once it was over, she settled right down and ate her treat and forgave me right away. Same scenario this morning. Gee, only two more weeks of this!

Her appetite seems to have increased already, so while this makes dental work more likely (urgh, expensive) it also makes the prospect of a recovery more likely. We'll still go cat shopping today (for a HEALTHY one, jesus) but this takes the time pressure off a little. I just wish Zoe would quit trying to die already.

Everyone else is doing a year's best

so why not jump on the bandwagon?





So the other night Dave and I had a long stoned conversation* while he cooked dinner and I cleaned up cat barf about our picks for the year’s best album. Dave’s choice was, of course, John Davis’s solo album Arigato! (Davis is the frontman for Superdrag, one of Dave’s favorite bands ever. One of mine - now - too, if I think about it.)

Arigato! is straight-up rock but Davis is a born-again Christian and most of the songs are about God, which definitely sheds a different light on the “who sucked out the feeling” guy. “Sucked Out” was written by Davis when he was still all rock-and-rollerish and not sober; then his dad died and he quit drinking and converted. I don’t know why this background information fascinates me, but it does. (I allow the biographical information of authors to inform my reading, also.)

We saw a reunion Superdrag show this fall and no joke, it was the best show I think I’ve ever seen in my life, despite the presence in the audience of an occasional tiny fuckhead with a pierced neck. (Don’t worry, I elbowed her right back as hard as I could.) It was a reasonably small venue (the Paradise) and a sold-out crowd. (More trivia: the Paradise in Boston is where Superdrag played their last show before taking a break.) The opening acts were awesome and local to Knoxville, where Superdrag is based.

I have never seen such a high energy show for TWO FUCKING HOURS. I still feel guilty because I was sober and my back hurt from standing on a concrete floor for three hours during the opening acts and I was wearing earplugs the whole time (because live music fucking hurts) so I don’t think I looked very enthused, but I was. There inside my own head, I was thrilled. And they played all the greatest hits off the Superdrag CDs – I was surprised to find I knew every song – and a whole bunch of stuff off Arigato! (much of which I also knew, since Dave downloaded the singles off John Davis’s MySpace page (that link will take you to the page where you, too, can listen and download) and had been playing them ever since.

So we bought the album at the concert and it’s really good. It’s not Christian-christian, in that kind of safe-pop way that I think Christian rock tends to get categorized as; it’s much closer to John Donne’s gripping raw struggle with God. Which is cool to see – at leas faith works for someone, even if not for me! And while the message isn’t doing it for me, the rock does. It’s straightforward and sincere, which is Dave’s thing – he really values authentic emotion. It’s also a very skillful album – the songs are well-thought out and well crafted, without the craftsmanship ever actually taking over. A terrific balancing act.

So I liked the album a lot, but it wasn’t my pick for year’s best. Probably my personal favorite this year is Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha, which is clever and a little goofy and kind of experimental. And not quite insincere, but there’s no raw emotion, everything is polished to a high gloss. It’s very cerebral and a little cool, if you consider that a flaw, which I don’t (not for this album, anyway.) Those things are all the things that I dig, though, and that link above to the John Donne isn’t an accident – the metaphysical poets are my favorites because they take this emotion and compress it really tightly into tightly constrained boxes of metaphor and rhyme scheme and when it works, it gives me goosebumps. Andrew Marvell’s bracelet of bright hair about the bone, oh my! The risk with doing that kind of thing is that you can slide into insincere artifice (see: the later work of They Might Be Giants, or some of Pope’s poems) and just play by the numbers, which is boring and sneery.

Bird doesn’t do that, though. Imitosis is probably my favorite song on the album. I mean, how can you not love this?
“despite what all your studies had shown/
What was mistaken for closeness was just a case for mitosis”
So smart! The internal rhyming, the pun! And it’s a fucking peppy salsa number with violins! And then the chorus “we were all basically alone” is haunting. Not all the songs are that good, although I also love "Plasticities" (guaranteed to get me bobbing my head at my desk at work like a looner) and "Fiery Crash" and "Dark Matter" and ohhhh, all the songs, really.

So what I think it comes down to for year’s best is really a matter of taste. I feel kind of fraudulent professing any musical taste at all since I’m unable to create music myself (no, can’t carry a tune or keep a beat, it’s sad for me since I LOVE to sing). But I guess a lot of critics don’t necessarily produce. (Theoretically critics are well-educated, though, and my musical education is suckola.) I don’t think either of these albums is obviously head and shoulders above the other; I don’t think either album will go down in history as much more than a footnote, not necessarily because of the quality of the work but because neither is well-known.

So, blah blah blah, here’s some other stuff I found this year.

Best Album to Play When Parents Come Over: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black. Yeah, I’m sick of her tabloid antics too, but your parents will love the Phil Spector 60s heavily-produced orchestral sound. And maybe you’ll get a secret thrill from all her swearing which your deaf parents don’t notice. But although I still like the album, there’s not much more to it than what you hear on your first listen, which means I don’t listen to it very often. I bet it would be great for a party, too.

Best Guilty Pleasure: Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit It can be totally twee but The Blues are Still Blue is a fucking terrific track. Plus, soft spot for the Glasgwegians singing about cups of tea and Morningside because awww, net curtains and sweetness.

Best New-To-Me Discovery That Was Not New This Year: Butch Walker, Letters. Dave’s drummer gave him a copy of this album and it’s awesome car music, kind of sunny-yet-melancholy sensitive-songwriter boy pop. Yay! Also in the category is The Pernice Brothers, Yours, Mine and Ours.

Most Flexible Album: Fiest, The Reminder. 1234 made it into an iPod commercial, but don’t hold that against the band, because the singer’s voice is terrific and out of 14 songs on the album, there are only a few that I skip. (“Sea Lion Woman” sucks, but “My Moon My Man” more than makes up for it.) But you can totally play it with kids in the room, or parents (and no worries on the swearing), or as background music in the car, or just sit down with a drink and listen to it, and it holds up to all that stuff. Sometimes innocuous can be a virtue.

Best Pop Album: New Pornographers, Challengers. I have a feeling this album will come to mean “fall of 2007” to me, it feels very specific like that. I will note that after seeing them play in concert in bored fashion, I lost interest in this album and now only play it sporadically. I think I overplayed it, actually; my lack of interest might be due to user error and not the album. Whatever. It’s still a great poppy record, and shit, it has a LOT of really great songs on it – it would be shorter to list the tracks that suck (“Failsafe”, “All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth” and “Adventures in Solitude” is iffy) than to list the super rad awesome tracks (“My Rights Versus Yours”, “All the Old Showstoppers” – the best track on the album, I think – “Challengers”, “Myriad Harbour”, “Unguided”, “Mutiny I Promise You”, “Entering White Cecilia”).

Most Overrated: it’s a tie between Rilo Kiley’s Under the Black Light and Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky. The Wilco album has a few good tracks (“Either Way”, “You are My Face”but it seems self-indulgent (Impossible Germany is like, skippable Germany); if this was a book I’d say it needed another round of edits. The Rilo Kiley is interesting and experimental and plays around with different genres a lot – something I appreciate (see Andrew Bird) but in this case, it’s mostly not a success. Standout tracks include “15”, “Smoke Detector” – heh, I smoke in bed too - and “Silver Lining”, although I’ve got a soft spot also for “Breakin’ Up” – one of the songs where the experimentalness works. Moneymaker, on the other hand, sounds like a cover of an obscure disco song, and not in a good way. And that was the single they chose, too. Bleah. Why didn’t someone ask ME?

* all I really needed to say was stoned, huh? length is kind of implied

New Pornographers in Boston

We went out with another couple to see the New Pornographers play at the Roxy in Boston last night. We went for shabu shabu for dinner first - it's this thing where they give you a bunch of vegetables and meat and a pot of boiling broth or water to cook the veggies and meat in. It was fucking delicious and affordable. I heart Chinatown. Also, despite the fact that there were nine million people with individual pots of boiling water, the windows weren't even steamed up, because they have the most hardcore, efficient and quiet ventilation system I've ever seen.

Anyway, the concert.

That was what I could see. Thanks, Roxy, for not allowing people upstairs to the balconies.

Admittedly we didn't arrive as the doors opened and scooch down front or anything. In fact we skipped the opening act (Emma Pollock, who is from Glasgow and seems to sing innocuous folky stuff, judging by the songs on her myspace profile and by the last half of her last song that we arrived in time to hear.) So no loss on the opening act.

The band themselves were good, although man - despite not being able to see, there were crazy bright horrible floodlights that were flashing in time to the music, directly in my eyes. I saw a lot of people wincing every time the floods got started. I swear it was like the Battle of the Seizure Robots in there. (I always thought that was just a Simpsons joke, but it turns out that the joke is based on a banned Pokemon episode whose bright flashing lights really did induce seizures in epileptic viewers. Fucked up!)

But no complaints about the playing - totally professional and tight, which I would expect from any supergroup and especially this one, which has been around for a while and has been touring Challengers extensively. I even got chills during My Rights Versus Yours, although that might have just been the garlic from dinner making itself at home in my digestive system.

One of the Pornographers (heh) was holding some kind of round object up at one point and we all compared notes.

"Is that ... an orange?"

"I thought since the lyrics were talking about the sun, maybe it's some kind of model..."

We eventually realized that it was a shaker. We realized this when he started shaking it near the microphone - to absolutely no effect, since you couldn't hear anything over the electronic beeps and clapping and shit that another dude on stage was putting out with his laptop. Seriously, in the front lineup were people singing, playing guitars and keyboards and one dude with a mike and a laptop. The hilarious thing about the guy with the laptop (Mac) was that he just stood absolutely still for most of the show, like he was watching paint dry or in a catatonic trance.

Anyway - we all agreed that it was a good show and also that it was a lot of standing up and that we are all old (even though the people we were out with are, I think, both 27. Le sigh.) Most of the audience looked like they were in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, and I'd say the four of us covered that demographic pretty well. The rest of the audience must have agreed with us on tiredness, because the crowd was a lot more subdued than I'd expected - I'd attribute that to Boston stuffed-shirtness, but I've seen crowds go batshit for Weezer and Iggy Pop. (Weezer was younger than last night's crowd, and Iggy's audience was mostly older.) Maybe it's just that young professionals work harder? (... not that you could tell from my workplace.) Maybe it was the band's fault, I can't say they bothered with much patter (and what there was was completely mumbled into the mike, so even if songs were announced beforehand I had no idea what was coming besides another song, named something.) Also, I wasn't actually wearing my black rimmed cat's eye glasses, but plenty of other people were wearing glasses like that so the hipster quotient was fulfilled, I think.

During the post-mortem afterwards, one person observed that it was good, but only with about every third song was she all, "hell YEAH! This song rocks!" ... to which Dave responded, "That's because they only write four kinds of songs." Which I think is fairly accurate. They played about 50% from Challengers (the only album I really know well) but I could peg where their other songs fit into - "oh yeah, that one's like "All The Things That Go To Make Heaven And Earth". I wish I knew what the name of the last song before the encore was, because it was fucking AWESOME. (And in the same vein as "My Rights Versus Yours".)

Nico Case has pipes though, I'll tell you. She was so loud (I think - maybe too close to the mike?) but also so perfectly on key that it kind of maxed out the equipment. I don't really know how to describe this effect, except to say that it's the same thing you hear when you've got an old vinyl copy of Fleetwood Mac on the stereo turned up pretty loud and Stevie Nicks's voice kind of blats out of the speakers, as if when they originally recorded it in the studio she overwhelemed the recording capabilities of the equipment. I'm not a huge Stevie fan but last night might have converted me to Nico. (Sniffle ... wish I could sing like that.)

Final thought: last night I didn't think the live versions of the song were super different live, but while writing this post I looked up and accidentally clicked on Challengers in my iTunes liberry and they really did rock a lot harder live. Plus my earbuds that live at work suck ass.

There you have it, my not very profound (but long winded, as usual) thoughts on the show last night. I hope you enjoyed it, because I usually average about one concert a year (and even then I often fall asleep. Sorry 'bout that, Iggy. And Death Cab. But especially sorry to Iggy, who put on a fucking great show and was like this crazy flea hopping up and down, all old and wiry and full of energy and muscle tone. My celexa-induced somnolence was stronger than your manic vibes.)


...and here's where I should apologize for stealing some of Dave's best lines in this blog post. It's why I love you though, because you're funny. And also because your knowledge of Simpsons is better than mine. Thanks, doll!