I mostly use MySpace as a place where old friends and enemies alike can hunt me down with surprising ease, but once in a while– generally on the order of a few times a week– I get MySpace spam too, scantily clad “real girls” advertising some online hookup service or another.
Usually they’re pretty dull, but sometimes you come across something that just makes you smile. To wit:
Obviously, we’re soul mates.
Add comment March 25th, 2008
In the end, it wasn’t so very secret.
Ostensibly, you would find out about it via MySpace, by having the band listed as a friend and having the fortune of logging with the right window of time. Or you could have read the blurb in The Mercury and tried to guess at their oblique reference to the venue (and having never before been to The Satyricon, would have failed that).
I got lucky and happened to be going to Matador’s site to purchase the album– Real Emotional Trash– when I saw the blurb about the show off of the main page. You could go and pick up a wristband at specified Music Millenium to get in to the show, or you could just go to the door close to when the show might open and hope to get in, which is what we did.
I expected a crowd to have already massed, but we were lucky. Space was at a premium, but the secret seemed to be well-kept enough to keep us from being crushed to death.
After spending the first hour outside and the second hour in the bar next door, thoughts of playing Arkanoid crushed under the overwhelming mass of people in the bar, the show finally got rolling.
“Welcome to the free show,” SM said when at last they took the stage, “would that they could all be.”
After sorting out Joanna’s battery problems, they opened as the album does, “Dragonfly Pie” leading in to “Hopscotch Willie”, from there tracking through “Gardenia”, “Real Emotional Trash”, and a handful of other tracks, all from the new album. Despite some minor lyrical missteps, they were on their game, with Janet as always pulling everything together with her impeccable timing even in the face of the daunting SM, who likes to toy with his composition and delivery at every turn. But that what makes a live show worth it, isn’t it?
I was standing right in front of the speaker on stage left and had to improvise an earplug. That wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was good to be up so close in such an intimate venue. Spencer guessed that there were maybe 200 people which, in The Satyricon, means it’s basically packed. And, Oregon being Oregon, it wasn’t long before the cheeba smoke filled the room. (At one point, Joanna joking, “We’re allergic to weed.” SM quips about not smoking the reefer, Janet replies, “Obviously, you’re not from Oregon.”)
They wound the set down, again, as per the album, with “Wicked Wanda”, before being urged back on for the nigh-inevitable encore number. “We don’t really know internet etiquette,” said SM as he returned to the stage, questioning whether or not an encore was “appropriate” for an internet secret show, but they obliged anyway with, if I recall the name correctly, “Church on White”.
As they left the stage a second time, the crowd was still hungry for more: a chant from the center section came up, “MALK-A-MUS! MALK-A-MUS!” In true call-and-response fashion, a second contingent began their own shout: “JICKS!” “MALK-A-MUS!” “JICKS!”
Apologetically, Steve returned to the stage and told us that they would like to play more but they didn’t have anything else prepared. To the sound booth: “Don’t you guys have some house music to play about now? I know the Satyricon has fallen on some hard times…” Cue: house lights, music, and the small crowd quickly disperses, getting a bonus as we head out the door: a numbered show poster. Very cool, and certainly the best damn free show that I’ve ever seen. I look forward to catching them again at the Wonder in May.
Add comment March 7th, 2008
“In the future, everyone will be a suspect for 25 hours.”
-Ruidh’s Corollary to Warhol’s Law
Ruidh's Corollary">Add comment January 18th, 2008
Something frequently encountered when using computers is the ubiquitous error message. There are lots of them that are inane, and, indeed, there are sites out there with whole sections devoted to this.
But there’s another peculiar brand of error message: The Incredibly Specific Error. For instance, this java.lang.IllegalArgumentException:
Path does not start with a "/" character.
I could understand if, perhaps, the path as a whole was invalid, or otherwise syntactically incorrect, but in this case, couldn’t the software try just a little harder? Couldn’t it throw the slash on there itself and just kick out a polite warning?
Add comment January 14th, 2008
Rather than discuss any of these at length… here were my favorite things from this past year.
Video Games
7. Guitar Hero 3
6. Puzzle Quest
5. Assassin’s Creed
4. Super Mario Galaxy
3. Skate
2. Mass Effect
1. Rock Band
Albums
7. Sondre Lerche - Phantom Punch
6. Apostle of Hustle - The National Anthem of Nowhere
5. Pseudosix - Pseudosix
4. Radiohead - In Rainbows
3. Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero
2. The New Pornographers - Challengers
1. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Top Films
7. 28 Weeks Later
6. Grindhouse
5. Day Watch (Dnevnoi Dozor)
4. 300
3. Zodiac
2. Sunshine
1. The Darjeeling Limited
Add comment December 11th, 2007
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A televised debate set for next month among the Democratic presidential candidates will be canceled to avoid a potential conflict with striking Hollywood screenwriters, a source close to organizers said on Wednesday.
2 comments December 11th, 2007
A minor tragedy. All of the music is replaceable, but not all of the CDs are. I hardly ever forget to lock my car, but I guess the threat level has been upgraded to orange, now. The silver lining here is that they didn’t take anything else, half of the CDs were just burned copies, and I had just burned a couple of other things to listen to so I wasn’t music-less on the way in to work. Still, of the 23 wayward discs I can recall being in there, I will miss these ones the most:
Godspeed, may I recover some of you in a used record store someday.
Add comment December 5th, 2007
With my love for games that, in particular, happen to fall into a realm of “simulation”– namely, Guitar Hero and skate, of late– I’ve been stumbling across the ever-present detractors who, for whatever reason, apparently can’t fathom the reason why such games might be entertaining.
“Go out and buy a real guitar,” they whine. “Get a real skateboard and get outside, noobs,” come the plainitive wails.
Well, I have a real skateboard, and I pretty well suck at it, but I especially suck at it during the times I want to play video games the most: late at night, in shitty weather in the winter in Oregon, while I’m drunk. Getting hit by virtual cars is much less costly. And I have a real guitar, too. I’m a much better guitarist than I am a skater, but I don’t have four band members sitting around to rock out with me like, ever.
A lot of other good counter-arguments have been made to the effect that no one jumps into a Call of Duty thread and tells people to join a real army, or in a Madden thread to say “go play real football you pansies”, or into a Zack & Wiki thread to say “go find a real golden space monkey to help you find real pirate treasure you inadequate douchebags”. To the extent that many games are simulations, it seems to be those that the closer they get to the real activity, the more you hear this response. (Except, for some reason, the flight simulator community seems immune to this.)
So why do is there such a strong response from people bothered by these simulators? My first thought was simply that they saw unfulfilled potential, people wasting their lives away when they may be able to derive more real-life experience doing these things. But is dicking around on a guitar or skating in the Safeway parking lot in the middle of the night going to do any more to improve my value as a person? And if that really were the point, wouldn’t these advocates of the outdoors do better to argue their case with WoW players, who probably spend much more time ensconced in Azeroth than I do skating San Vanelona?
However, it is a strong posture to adopt. I have a feeling we might just be dealing with the “real life” guitar heroes whose lives are being threatened. Such as from the South Park production blog, where they talk about making the Guitar Hero spoof episode:
“More often than not, a dude who pulls out a guitar looks and behaves like a total douche. We’ve all seen it before: some jerk trying to impress the ladies with his badass skills banging out Coldplay as hard as he can. Ugh.”
Okay, I’ll admit: I’ve probably been that guy at some point in my college career. Well, except for the Coldplay part. So I can relate: it appears to be a cheapening of something authentic that takes some actual talent/skill, and turns it into a damn party game that (gasp!) anyone can play! Now who’s going to be impressed by my rendition of “Everlong”?
I guess I was never threatened by it because I’m a gamer first and a musician second (and a skater a dark, distant third). And so the circle of douchebaggery continues.
1 comment November 30th, 2007
Via Pitchfork, Georgie James (which, confusingly, is the name of a band, not of a person like Georgie Fruit, Kevin Barnes’ alter ego) has canceled a slate of upcoming shows due to illness, including next Saturday (11/3) at the Holocene. I was looking forward to it, but at least there are a lot of good shows hitting town between now and the end of the year, starting with Apostle of Hustle @ Doug Fir Lounge next week.
Add comment October 26th, 2007
I am now officially interested in an iPhone.
And they’re extending the SDK to the iPod Touch, too; excellent.
Add comment October 17th, 2007
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