Proud of the Weekend:

3 Gallons of Chocolate Ice Cream
Mulholland Drive
West Side Story Impersonations
Gemini
Destination Chocolate Starship
Feline Medley

I labored long and hard over this list in Epic Literature class:

1. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Don't Stand Me Down
2. Prefab Sprout - Steve McQueen (Two Wheels Good)
3. The Strokes - Is This It? / Room on Fire
4. Orange Juice - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever
5. Scritti Politti - Songs To Remember
6. Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas
7. Steely Dan - Aja / Gaucho
8. Yes - Fragile
9. 10cc - Sheet Music
10. The Clash - Sandinista!

Edwyn Collins

I hope you get better soon. I'm sure you will.

Oslo in the Summertime

Basically I've been listening to Don't Stand Me Down by Dexy's Midnight Runners and shut up right now because you have no frame of reference for anything. Step off, basically. I'm listening and tetting so way into it. The past few days I've felt a sort of distance from most music for some reason- so into it that I get a prolonged chill that lasts from the bookstore to the music center- where I thought up a whole essay bout how cheap country-western violins (in this case from Don't Stand Me Down's "The Waltz") are so much more effective than any Vivaldi (this causes a complete breakdown between high and low culture, you see, if Johnny Moe in his pick-up truck is getting the same thrill or better as John Von Molineaux in an opera house in Prague, who's right? You see?) - and this isn't just because I left my new hooded sweatshirt somewhere. Its thrilling that I forgot (High School Tyler would never have forgotten) and its more thrilling where I forgot it.

There's this huge distance between this album and anything else. It makes me want to start listening to soul music exclusively in the hopes that there will be small monologues about adopting a song ("Reminisce, Part 2") that will be tucked away on some obscure album or other, but honestly I don't know how it could come close to this. Last year I had a tent in my room and would sit in it and try, honestly, to read some shitty tangential Russian women's literature and end up just listening to this album because I desperately wanted to get it. I think I appreciated one or two songs, but never really got the full picture.

Its their first two excellent albums stretched out and further. "Thankfully Not Living in Yorkshire it Doesn't Apply" from their first album, for example, its lyrics are really great but you can't understand them because they are sung very quickly and high pitched, the song is kind of a novelty for its 'ooh ooh ahh ahh' chorus, its the monkey song, don't you know, but stretch it out and you get the "I would relate my thoughts to you, but I'm not that stupid to put my faith in you" and this acerbic exclusiveness, writing off entire towns as having nothing of value "Lord keep me away from Leeds", its more than just the monkey song.

With Don't Stand Me Down we get the entire hi-res 5 megapixel version and then some, the widescreen view where you get the incidental talk, the hypothetical talk before the songs, the introductions that don't make sense as introductions, only as a prelude to the songs uncanny logic. You get the intro to "This is What She's Like" which makes me crack up as I'm writing this, Kevin Rowland denying to his bandmate that, what, there's no girl, what you talking bout, who, who, what's who like? and then jump into crooning about her, after having been moved over into the sphere of singing, as if his words could only be related in song.

Anyway. The room has playfully been sprayed with hairspray by the housemates. I am Indian-style sitting on the bed, listening to this album on headphones and craning the neck towards the window so as to get as much fresh air as possible. This is a good joke to me, one who has been getting uneven sleep and already have problems with the lungs which are only further confounded by possibly bruised ribs, which I am thrilled to have.

Life On Mars

I had an idea to do a really heavy metal album as the next James Rabbit album. I mean, its pretty clear that we're far from pop epiphany. I feel like I have to play better technically before I can place my instrumental abilities on the backburner and write simple songs. Right now I write simple songs but can't even manage to play them. You look at a band like Wire and how they're supposedly not (circa Pink Flag) trained musicians or whatever, but man, so much better even at playing shitty bar chords than I am. I guess the fingers don't care. I got a blister on top of another blister from playing the ukelele too much this weekend. Also when I say heavy metal I don't mean double bass drum and stupid sounding guitars, I mean that there is going to be a lot of crash cymbal and distorted bass. Maybe the guitars will all be clean. They'll definitely be able to pass between even the strictest of border crossings.

Things are looking up, sideways, they're looking some way. As far as music goes, I have to do something about my talking about music habit. I avoid it as much as possible, but I think too many times that none of my friends have any idea what I'm talking about (with the exception of Mike and Lewis, who always surprise me). Nicky and the Dreamers I'm a little worried about. We have to get this second album recorded. So many times in life things become a mad dash for me to just get a grasp of the moment through relics of the present. Albums, for example, I find myself struggling to complete before they lose personal relevance. Maybe what this says is that I should spend more time on each song. Or maybe I'll take this as it comes.

The reason I am going to college is so I can become a teacher so I can have the same schedule as I had when I was in school. I figure teaching is the same as learning except you don't have to worry about looking like you are paying attention. It pays well enough. I don't need any fancy gold rims on cars or large speakers. I just need a cheap car and an open schedule. This is so I can continue to do albums and you know, when the going gets good, quit being a teacher and tour the country non-stop. I'll be thirty and ready to start living.

In the meantime, I'm filling up the days with music that I actually like. I don't listen to the Talking Heads because I don't like them that much. I don't listen to Radiohead because I don't like them that much. I don't listen to the Beatles because I figure they'll always be around and I don't have to pay any extra attention to them. I don't listen to Led Zeppelin because I don't like rock and roll that much, even though they are probably the best rock and roll band. I'm sorry that everything I write is either about how I love some obscure music that you wouldn't even like or a mission statement or both.

History class? Fuck it. Once again, like everytime I head into things with this my-way-or-the-highway attitude, it will work itself out. Summer is not the end of the universe. I'm a little bit more worried about the epic literature class and not knowing every single character that comes up. We have a final in the class and I'm worried that I'll have to participate in some sort of study section.

I ate eight pancakes last night.

Further Realizations of Poor Pitch

This is what happens when I am in Santa Cruz by myself:

Listen to Genesis.
Record Prefab Sprout covers with ukelele accompaniment.

BLANDimal Collective Just Kidding

I'm listening to Animal Collective right now and earlier in the CD I thought 'hey, Tyler, you are so stupid, why did you put them so low on your list of the year' and I said 'because, self, though they have a few spectacular songs, it doesn't do anything for me as a whole' and then tonight I thought 'you idiot! number one of the year!' I had an Animal Collective moment earlier this evening. I was filled with a great appreciation for the music and a great distaste for the people that the band probably are. I kept on wanting the album to maintain a certain flow, which it does, but it gets really boring during the twelve minute song. Anyway. I'm back to not changing my mind about it.

Soon-To-Be-Innocent Fun

I am trying to write songs but not being able to do it. Its a bit of pounding three chords out on the keyboard and thinking 'hey, these chords used to go somewhere' and then switching on over to jazzmind and then thinking 'hey, I'm not quite feeling this yet, go back a bit' and then getting caught in the middle ground, playing a keyboard drum part for the fiftieth time and realizing that no, I don't want to play the second verse same as the first, I'd rather drum solo through it. I can write songs in the Nicky and the Dreamers framework, where we are all under pressure of the moment (the only thing we have is now), but when I'm writing songs alone all of that stuff seems unapproachable. This is probably because I feel weird sitting there by myself and shouting. I keep on thinking about what it is that I lack, based on good songs that I hear (trying to lay off the Prefab Sprout) and I keep on thinking that I just have to dedicate myself to the qualities of a pop songwriter that I lack.

But if I'm dedicating myself to everything that I'm not, where does that leave me? Am I just a specter in the way of where a more corporeal, maybe more productive Tyler should be? Should self-improvement move in baby steps or in bounds? Can't I just get out that hit single now? Have the royalties at least roll in as my songwriting powers dissipate? Where's there a good drum set and recording engineer and will they work for free?

If the fall quarter taught me anything about music it is that you can't just rest in your notebooks about it. Music has to be a vibrant, social force. Several dozen albums don't mean anything if nobody has heard them, less if they didn't care about them. When I am two feet in front of you, my only goal is to make you care about it. I feel that the distance between song idea to drum part to bass line to overdubs to cd to cover art is far too great to get the message out, whatever it was loses its effectiveness.

One of the things I miss now, having worked with other musicians, is the comfortable ambivalence of every-other-part. I can't just write a melody and expect the ground of a bassline and a drum part to spring up from under it, I have to write everything at once now. And I'll write a good little chord part for a verse and then put a bunch of melodies and basslines and whatever on top of it and BAM I've got myself a thirty second little song. With no lyrics or vocals. That, come to think of it, isn't really a step forward for me. I've gotten very good at writing inoffensive little bits, though not marketable as commercial music or soundtrack music. I've got to weed out the dregs and the bilge and concentrate on the golden chalices of pop.

I'm nearly through listening to two Arthur Russell CDs in a row. Its a little bit draining. This is the kind of music that happens in my head when I'm standing in an art gallery and thinking 'this would be nice... if we just took out all the art'. My roommate has gone to sleep. It is six fucking forty.

FUCK.

I'm Going to Keep Talking About Prefab Sprout

"Couldn't Bear to Be Special" finds Paddy McAloon belting beyond belief just saying the title of the song. For a second the spit and rage shatters the distance between your ears and his brain. Unfortunately the rest of the song is kind of shiny keyboards and an awkward backing vocal hook that is awkward but its okay because I don't have to share it with anyone else.

With Prefab Sprout there's this unstoppable rambling, usually in the lyrics, but sometimes it affects the lyrics. The song "Horsin Around" is just ridiculous with change-ups, from slow to snappy and fast and jazz and abstract and its like his maniac words are just twisting things around. "I - Deserve - To - Be - Kicked - So - Badly - You - Deserve - More - Than - I - Sold - You - For" and the song just conforms to his every whim. And then there's this apocalyptic bass rundown, but let me check on that. Yeah, apocalyptic.

I have to trust the lyrics sometimes. Like 'Hot dog, jumping frog, Albequerque' I just have to trust that those aren't bad lyrics and that he's going somewhere with that. Just like the end of From Langley Park to Memphis where he's talking about being crippled in a war and it borders on bad taste, but I've got to trust that he really means something and I'm just not listening well enough and he's being either ironic or really sincere and like a child.

There is a Prefab Sprout album that I'm not really that fond of. Its called 'Jordan: the Comeback' and each song is very spare and is written kind of shallowly. I think there's a song about the street performer Moondog where the lyrics are like 'moondog, fly with me to the moon' and all of the accompaniment is so rectangular and literal. Jordan is kind of a double album, so that can be an excuse for this, after a while you pay more attention to the fact that the song exists than the fact that yes, it does need a guitar part, because that will make the song sound fuller. I'll tell you later how I know this.

Kansas is for the Farmers

Busted the voice like a car engine somewhere Friday night, west of Arizona. I was singing a jazz song last night and was told that I 'sang like the guy who does all of the Disney movies', (known to his fans) as Randy Newman. This is probably my favorite compliment. If I can't ever be a soul singer, at least I can keep shouting to keep the voice like Randy Newman's. I woke up this morning and made the 'scales of justice' with my hands, moving them up and down, 'permanant damage, Randy Newman, permanant damage, Randy Newman, permanant damage, Randy Newman' I forgot where I settled it, but I can feel my voice getting better already, so stop your fussin.

Watched the Big Lebowski last night. Everytime I watch it, it is always a religious experience for every person in the room. More than the periodic bouts of hilarity, there's always a hushed tone of reverence. We all knew it was the perfect movie. When it ended we all clapped.

It happened to Lewis: his mom went on a blind date with Tony Wilson before he was famous 'he was a prick' and he met Lonnie Donegan when he was thirteen, but he didn't know it until later. Who is this guy??

Lewis, I hope your knee is better.

What's the deal with Nilsson talking over all of his songs? Like at the beginning of "Cuddly Toy" he's talking to the engineer about adjusting the piano level and ALL through the Nilsson Sings Newman album he's telling somebody something about how to add something to the backing vocals or when he's doing harmonies he'll ask to hear one line louder than the others. Is this intentional? I would think as a songsmith he would want the recording process to be as invisible as possible, if he was trying to make some sort of meta-songwriter comment, couldn't have he written some lyrics to that effect?

Goodbye Old Paint, I'm Leaving Cheyenne

Its good I guess.

Cockney Rebel. They're like if Roxy Music were a one trick pony. I happen to like the trick very much. Or maybe spring. Or maybe spring. Or maybe...

Sometimes I feel like Paddy McAloon after "The King of Rock and Roll". People don't see him for the "Goodbye Lucille"s or the "Appetite"s or the "Don't Sing"s, they just see him for the 'hog dog, jumping frog' line in their biggest single. My favorite line in the song is '...up from / these shoes / my baby blues'. The way he says 'my baby blues' just makes me ecstatic with fear that I won't ever be recognized. Not just famewise either.

Its important to note that nobody who would read this knows who Prefab Sprout is.

Yeah Yeah

So the best band in California right now recorded their debut album in one weekend. Some of the tracks are studio and some of the tracks were recorded live at an impromptu show. They had everything from build-up epics to acapella odes to romance. There are only fifty copies of the album floating around.

The logical step for the second album would be to attempt more of the same, pound out some more catchy glam-rock tunes on a whim, but no, they took their time and got schooled in the fine art of - Hot Jazz. That's right, acoustic guitar solos, skits, a flute, their second album is going to have all the good stuff kids go for.


We're playing at the Porter Soundbox on Friday.

This Magic Moment

In my dream last night I was walking around my dream version of Sacramento. I say dream version because it is like a remixed version of Sacramento. The drums are a little distorted, the guitars are replaced with keyboards and the bass is more electronic sounding. Anyway, basically locations are the same but the way you get there is way different. Like to get downtown instead of taking the freeway, you just walk through a bunch of residential areas that are a mess of twisted steel and happy homes.

So my companions and I, instead of walking on sidewalks, tiptoed over concrete precipices and inched along the sides of chain link fences. We walked by a swim class in progress and everybody was wearing bold primary colors. For some reason I remember thinking 'oh no, that's my class and I'm supposed to be in attendance right now'. I successfully avoided the swim teacher's gaze but ran into the teaching assistant as we crossed in front of the equipment shed. He was listening to Dinosaur Junior's song 'Freak Scene' which is my favorite song of theirs. There may have been awkwardness but it passed.

We were at my house somehow and it was two stories like this place in Santa Cruz known as the Cedar House. Its like an obvious upstairs and kind of a secret downstairs. My friend Evan was living downstairs in the garage/basement area. It was raining outside really hard (like it was in real life) and my back bathroom had this weird gate to the backyard though it made no sense for privacy purposes. I stood there and watched rain fall down really heavily and slowly and beautifully and there were a lot of white picket fences in my backyard. We went downstairs to get Evan to start walking around with us.

We went into this comic book store and there were a bunch of people waiting for someone to sign their comics. I didn't really want to be there, but for some reason we were there. So we're looking at these weird guns they have on the walls and all of a sudden everybody rushes up to the front of the store and there's this guy in a police uniform getting off the back of a really unimpressive unicorn. It was a unicorn for sure, but its coat was kind of dull and its horn wasn't really that long. I guess they were there to get unicorn man autographs, but that doesn't really make that much sense.

I went outside and found myself with a sandwich in my hand. I ate half of it and put the other half in my shoe for eating later. I found a bottle of Nyquil and thought 'I should drink some of this' but didn't because a) I didn't want to make myself sicker by sharing with mysterious Nyquil strangers and b) I had work in the morning and didn't want to make myself sleepier in my sleep. Next time I'll dream medicine in more sensible places. There were a lot of grass stains on my pants for some reason when everybody finally came out of the comic book store. Looking back on it, I probably should have spent some time with the unicorn.

So we were going back to UCSC, up Bay street and I guess were in a car and I was driving. All these bikes, the take back the streets gang or whatever, started driving in formation in the middle of the road right in front of us so we couldn't get by. I manouevered the car through a gap between bikes but they sped up in front of us and at this point in time a large circular flying machine started whirring around about fifteen feet in front and above us and I told everybody in the car 'hey look a UFO'. Most of the bicyclists sped off, allowing easier driving. This giant FBI van pulled out in front of us and started shooting blue lazers at the UFO and I continued to drive sensibly. I looked behind us and the sky was full of seagulls with really long, majestic tails.

As It Stands:

The weekend looms. No matter what happens, I'll be perfectly content with things. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like Booker T. Washington telling my congregation to 'drop your bucket where you are', like the only way things will change is if I improve what I currently have, work on some arbitrary facet of myself, rather than extending beyond myself and pushing for something in a radical direction. This is what W.E.B. DuBois would have wanted me to do. The title of my short-answer response paper in history 25B is "Booker T. is Wrong". Did Theodore Roosevelt just sit back in his armchair as someone else hoisted the flag on top of San Juan hill? Did John Wilkes Booth just say 'fuck it' and go home? History doesn't really remember the homebodies. History remembers the charges up hills and last stands in alleyways.

I took a history midterm today and probably wrote myself too literally into the essays. Also didn't include enough 'concrete proof' or whatever. All of my friends that have just become history majors I'm trying to talk them out of being history majors. What's the point of letting your memory run your life? At its best it is a superficial take on literary theory, using boring old reality as its template, rather than a work of art.

Today I was dancing in the sculpture studio to "Iko Iko" and felt at once very old and very young. Old because this was something I had done before, (not exactly this, but the general idea of dancing in a studio of some sort to some sort of foreign pop music - like the time I got this one email and painted the backroom red to some Gilberto Gil song), I felt young because I was -dancing- to -"Iko Iko"-. There are a lot of times nowadays when I'll be in the middle of some situation and not really worry about where its going next. Maybe its because I trust the people I'm with, or maybe I just trust the idea of trust. Maybe I've become jaded or something and genuinely don't care. What is it when you begin to accept that you don't always have to stress out over certain things anymore? Am I growing up or regressing?

Because when the paranoia sets in I start to do the thinking thing, worrying what any little movement/change in anybody is about. He's throwing coins at me from across the street - does that mean that he hates me and I've wronged him in some intangible way? How do I undo this? My boss didn't say hi to me when he walked past my cubicle, does this mean he knows that I sometimes take sixteen minute breaks instead of the alloted fifteen minutes? Is this person trying to stall me from getting ahead? Is everybody trying to stall me from trying to get ahead? Where the fuck am I even going with any of this? I don't mean 'where am I going with what I'm writing?'. I know where I'm going with this. Its a different this. Sometimes when things are the way they are it seems to me they are this way because they couldn't be any other way. Sometimes I'm a really big believer in fate. Sometimes I think I can change things, but you know its fate that I feel that way and fate even if I change it. Fate doesn't matter, though, what really matters how I feel. Right now I feel cautiously optimistic. Where I end up at the end of the weekend is anybody's guess. I'm just excited for the Superbowl.

Right now I'm wearing Dexy's Midnight Runners* like they're sort of comfort blanket. Am I too young for this music? I feel like I should be thirty or thirty four and have just gone through my first divorce. I should be listening to something like the Arcade Fire or LCD Soundsystem right now, building up my common-era credibility. As it stands, I can't wait for tomorrow morning so I can walk to work in the perfect weather listening to Prefab Sprout.


*This summer I had a job maintaining a lawn. It was really hard work and took a lot of time and stress on my part. I got paid something like fifty dollars for a months work of sweating. I remember listening to Dexys Midnight Runners a lot on my walks back and forth from the not-that-close location. The fact that I was a lawn mower this summer makes me feel very young.

So I'm a little kid

The dream I had last night was I was getting ready to go to a wedding. I wasn't dressed up or anything because dreaming dressing up would require my conscious self having some conception of dressing up which if you've ever seen me 'dressed up' you would know isn't true. Anyway, I was in this field with a few other people who I don't remember, but one of them could have been Conner. The field had grass that grew very high and everyone else was putting the finishing touches on getting ready. All of a sudden, one skunk crawled over through the tall grass and I felt alerted and told everybody else. As soon as I said this, the skunk went bonkers and sprayed. I didn't see the first spray, I was running. I thought I was safe but I guess there were other skunks. The second skunk got me. Basically I was running and I turned and there was this big yellow cloud, like mustard gas or something. I thought 'Oh Jesus! Now I'm definitely not going to be ready for the wedding!' So I was running still and I kept on getting attacked by skunks! Its like, dudes, leave me alone. You've already got me, isn't that what you wanted? I finally escaped by getting on a big metal slide and sliding away. The thing I was concerned about most was that my hands had gotten skunk-spray on them and that that would affect my eating food at the wedding reception.

Theater

I miss the smell of walking out into the night after finishing a performance. I miss the smell of sawdust on stage as a play gets physically constructed. I miss washing glue out of my hair.

I didn't really like my working in theater except for a few select moments. When performing, I always felt like I was cheating myself and the audience that I wasn't putting more into my performance. Just like band, when I'd sit there and look at the trombone section and play as disconnected as possible, because each quarter note was a step closer to 3:10. The reason I kept doing theater was because of friends, but probably more for these secret moments that I didn't know I was stumbling into at the time. Slurpees, for example, taste so much better after having washed off stage makeup.

Theater is so much more positive of a community than Music. When I'm performing musically I feel almost nihilistic, I don't know if nihilism is the right term for it. Its like I'm trying to win the room and if that doesn't work, nothing matters. And when its over, even if I have won the entire room, nothing matters. The way music is set up, people can leave easily if they don't like it. With theater (at least the theater I have participated in so far) you feel like people are paying so much attention to you despite your lack of dedication to the task (well, my lack of dedication, I don't know about how into acting you are). Plus, its more awkward to leave in the middle of a play than in the middle of a song.

I think that actors are the smartest people there are. This hasn't always been true about the actors I have personally known, but you know that William H. Macy and Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman are smarter than any astrophysicist. Steve McQueen was the smartest man alive. Also the strongest and classiest and most attractive.

The Current Excitement

Prefab Sprout - Swoon

It seems like they get to the point FINALLY every single time like thirty seconds before the song ends. This is a really good device. It keeps me not bored. This is a much jumpier and punk album than Two Wheels Good, though I like that one better.

Cockney Rebel

They're like a lesser version of Roxy Music that I like more. With Roxy Music, there's a few stellar songs, but they're kind of all over the map as far as rock textures go, I can't really get my head around it. I'll try real quick. Hold on. I guess I enjoy it, but I have to pay a lot of attention. I like the songs when the singer (of Cockney Rebel, now) will gasp and huff and do these things to make like an actual Brian Ferry (who is just trying to make like an actual David Bowie). I really wish that in the eighties singers had tried to ape Bowie with the huffs and gasps, but instead all we got was a singer like David Byrne- yelping and whelping, choosing percussive persuasion over any sort of nuance- so the rich glam heavy-breathing tradition is lost.

The Blue Nile - A Walk Across Rooftops

I really like them based on the title track of this album, but after that the slidey bass and same keyboard sound and the way he always sings everything as if its the thing he means most, especially the repeated lyrical motif of 'I am in love', 'I love you honestly', 'sincerely I love you', 'seriously , love love love', being the emotional center of every song... actually I still really like them and this album. There's a time and a place for this, though, and its not really that time or that place. But how cool is it that the album begins with a song about walking across rooftops and I actually have to walk across rooftops? If I listen to it in the evening sometimes it looks like the ocean is on fire.

The Books - Lost and Safe

Remember a while ago when I was talking about the Books first album and how I hated it so much that I threw it in a corner (this dresser-obscured corner of the backroom that must have like fifty cds in it)? I wouldn't throw this one. I'm not sure if I'm crazy about it yet, but its less jarring and approaches pleasant. The problem with this, like the problem with the Blue Nile is that if I'm in the mood for pleasant, I want to reach for something like Orange Juice or The Go-Betweens or something really life-affirming.

The Go-Betweens

They're this band that I am just starting to trust with things. Like I know if I put on any of the two albums of theirs that I own, it will work out well. Well in a new and different way from any of their other songs. This intrigues me. I've just got to put them on this list I have of bands that I trust. There are a few of their songs that have just hit me upside the head with wonder, these two songs are "Two Steps" and "Spring Rain".

The Wedding Present, David Gedge in General

Everytime I hear his voice its really comforting. He's like a stuffed badger that I carry with me and pull out whenever I feel threatened. Our relationship has to remain superficial though, there cannot be the actual moment when I pull David Gedge out, it has to be one of these 'someday' things, where I can hold him and his voice in some high, unusable, regard.

Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

Saturday night I had a sword broken on my arm. I watched the sword shatter and remember thinking 'this is going to hurt sooner or later'. Thirty minutes later I was pogoing up and down to "Take Me Out" (how does this song get away with still being played!?!) and explaining to whoever would listen why it was the greatest song ever. But the rest of the album, still kind of boring to me. I woke up on Sunday and started to make a list of songs that I still really enjoyed from the past couple of years, the other one I thought of was "Fell in Love With A Girl" by the White Stripes who are going to have a pretty nice Best Of someday.

Downtown Disillusionment Tour

So Modest Mouse Tonight. Nick quickly this evening recorded a love valentine in the form of a five song EP and after some quick 'hey check to see if this plays' we set off to see if Isaac Brock would accept his present and take him away from the drudgery of school and on tour with the Mouse. It was a Twenty One and Up show, which prevents Nick from getting in, so we decided to wait it out behind the Catalyst.

Of course there's already people there, because its the Catalyst and its the Mouse. We hang out by the dumpsters that are full of former catering platters and videogame magazines. There are these two undergrad giggling girls, some creepy moustached bipolar guy talking to them and this chilled out stoner guy nearby. Nick and I start talking to the stoner guy, who's from Felton and the bipolar guy scares away the girls. He comes over to us and starts to ruin our evening, offering us awkward conversation:

"I'm really just here to talk to Isaac Brock about how we're both bipolar and how he deals with that"
"I bought two Bright Eyes CDs earlier today. If you hate Bush, you'll like them."
"Did you know that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy comes out May fifteenth? It stars Sam Neill and Mos Def. Can you believe that? An American Black playing Ford Prefect?" (he actually used the term "American Black"!)
"I'm a film major"
"I've been kicked out of every coffee shop in Monterrey"
"Your from UCSC? Do they still have poetry jams there?"
"I play the bass too, I have a '79 Rickenbacker"
"I guess I'm not skinny enough to be your friend"

So Modest Mouse starts playing and they play a set mainly made up of new songs which breaks the hearts of Nick, Felton and I. The bipolar guy has since left, his 'ride' being a skinhead with an exuberant-as-sin pitbull. The four good songs they played were 'Interstate 8', 'Paper Thin Walls', 'Float On' and some other good one from the new album. We could hear them pretty well, despite the barrier of a door and like seven security guards between us and them. The bass drum was really loud and the guitars were kind of sloppy. Nick and Felton talk about hardcore bands.

The band finishes and doesn't play an encore which sparks riot into the hearts of the cigarettes-and-baked-in-tan crowd who can't really pull off a riot, despite being in such a liberal town. They're all riling themselves up and getting thrown out by these burly security guys and offering witty Norcal retorts like 'this HELLA SUCKS!!!' Some guy totters out and looks at us for a minute and tells us 'heroin is cool' and then goes to stare at a mural for a while. We decide to go out front, thinking maybe Brock is out there.

So we're walking out front and who do we see? LEWIS. Effin Punk as Eff Lewis. effin never gave a care about the Mouse Lewis. Nineteen year old Lewis. He's hanging out with these two guys who look like Billy Idol and who were apparently connected enough to get him in for free and backstage. They're all screwdrivered out, but we talked to Lewis long enough to know that we are going to forever trust him forever more on everything. These connections! Its all coming together, Johnny Rotten, the tour van, Punk DVD, Hot Topic, Warped Tour, Lewis was not lying, nor has he ever lied. He's probably telling us less cool stuff than has happened to him. He plays the flute, for Christ's sake!

So the bus isn't coming for a while, we decide to go back to where we were before and its more heavily populated now with gritty semi-hip kids who will settle on talking to the Modest Mouse roadies, because, hey, they're pretty much in the band, almost. We're back there expecting Isaac to come out with a bottle of Coke and a box of pizza and say 'hey, come on in, friends!' but he doesn't. But... the door to his dressing room opens and we see him shirtlessly sing/yelling and applying underarm deodorant AND he has a huge blue cross tattoo on his back. Nick said it was an anchor, but I only saw the cross part of it. It could have been an anchor. We took a bus back and I wrote an essay.

I always say that every show I go to is going to be the last and that it would have been better if I had just stayed outside. Last night it was. At least it will be better when it gets warmer.

Fifty degrees of seperation,
Tyler

Update: This morning in class (8 am!!! And yet I doze off less than I do in Heroic Epic), a guy at my table was at the Mouse show last night and described it as sucky and crowded. There were problems with the monitors (which is professional-speak for "vanity speakers") and so between every song Modest Mouse had to fiddle with cords and try to remember the phrasing to beginnings of songs. I had forgotten about these long pauses, which would last between five and ten minutes, and remember thinking at the time, 'wow, it would sure suck to have to pay for that'. He said they played eight songs which seems about the right number.