I finally emerged from the rock I've been hiding under long enough that I could make the one-million-hour trip west to Blacksburg. For the sake of wasting time in the car and trying my hardest to make the butt-numbing hours of a roadtrip go by faster, I always like to visualize progress of long-distance car rides in terms of checkpoints:
Ok, so I lied. Or Google maps lied. Either way, it was a particularly long drive there. I think the factor that weighed in the most on my perception of time was the weather. It has been very hot lately, like 92 degrees, and this is not conducive to long car rides.
Things I don't like about long drives in the summer:
1. I have to wear shorts, so my thighs stick to the seat. Peeling them off every 20 minutes is the second least fun thing one can do in a car.
2. The bugs are out again, so driving fast = bug splatter on the windshield that even the Brawny man himself couldn't wipe up.
3. Heat makes me sleepy. Sleeping in the bitch seat is impossible. Severe neck pain is highly probable. This is the least fun thing one can do in a car.
But, enough negativity. This weekend was great. I haven't been back to Virginia Tech since my freshman year of college. Nothing's changed. Saturday afternoon, I packed up my hangover, had three bottles of water and a cinnabon mini and headed to campus. When I got there, I felt as though I had never left. There were no tingling nostalgia feelings when I walked by McBryde or Thomas Hall, but I did have a nagging feeling that I had an Intro Chemistry assignment due...
Basically, my weekend can be summed up by the following things:
Friends Fun Scrubs El Rod's Bollo's DT Ho-trains
Hokie Pride
Yeah, I have to say I still have a little bit. Besides, W&M football is abominable.
Monday's I'd Like to Dedicate This Song to All the Ladies Out There was "Friends Only." It was a really fun show because I got to play things that you probably wouldn't ever get to hear otherwise. I try hard to support my friends in their musical endeavors, and I've really enjoyed watching their different styles change and mature over the past few years. I'm sad to say that before the show I hadn't checked out Tommy & the Tall Girls, my cousin Tom's band. Had I gone to their MySpace page when Tom put the word out a while back, I might have played some of their stuff on my show. So Tom (who I am fully capable of beating up, just to set the record straight) is in this band, Tommy & the Tall Girls, in Toronto. I don't want to give Tom a big head, but I really respect him for his musical efforts, and I really love most every song of his I've heard. He's got a good sense of humor and an appreciation for very classic-sounding love ballads with quirky pop elements. Maybe I am just a sucker for songwriters who do that [this is where I admit that I should probably expand my musical horizons beyond the Magnetic Fields, but the truth of the matter is that I just don't feel like it]. Back when I was at Pratt (worst art school ever) I had to make a music video for my film class. Tom was coming to visit me around that time, so I used one of his songs, "Antarctica," and filmed him lip syncing to it. I think the aforementioned humor in Tom's lyrics can be exemplified in my favorite line, "And the bars don't close, 'cause they don't exist, won't have to stumble home drunk and delirious." Anyway, Tommy and the Tall Girls has Tom on lead vocals, guitar and mandolin. I probably should have left this for later, when I could hear more than the recordings on their Myspace page, but I felt it was an appropriate posting following the "Friends Only" show. "Sad Drunk Broken Heart" was probably my favorite, as a charming song from the intoxicated and lonely heart (with some really pretty trumpet and saxophone). "Brass Tacks" and "Come Out" also offer really great brass backings and both appeal to me in the same way that so many of Tom's other songs have in the past. Hopefully at some point I'll be able to see a live performance and listen to more recordings. But seriously, check these guys out, I endorse them fully.
pizza cold pizza toast with butter and jam orange juice bread crumbs sushi Italian food a cold glass of milk anything from Dunkin' Donuts the carrot cake sitting on my boyfriend's stove (that no one is eating) lima beans fruit Chinese food packets of MSG a Five Guys burger anything on the food pyramid beer pixie stix a coke orphaned children the skin on my bottom lip
WCWM sponsored one of Baltimore's biggest acts, Dan Deacon, on April 5th. Deacon made it to Pitchfork's 25 best records of 2007 with Spiderman of the Rings and his newest album Bromst has already made it to their Best New Music, ranking in at 8.5 pitchforks. He also made it to Rolling Stone's top 100 hits of 2007 with his single "Crystal Cat."
To be honest, I wasn't entirely impressed with Bromst when I first heard it. I don't want to completely shut it down, it's really just not my kind of thing. But, as a good DJ would, I promoted it. It was amazing that WCWM was able to book Deacon (usually UCAB books all the cool artists). Also, I had heard amazing things about Deacon's concerts. So I bit my tongue, played the ads that Stephen Reader and I made on both of my shows, and waited it out to see how it really was.
And seriously, all promotion and loyalty aside, it was pretty awesome.
Deacon's show was all about lights and crazy dancing. He starts with a warm up activity reminiscent of preschool teachers and crunchy yoga instructors, asking the audience to raise their arms and then crouch to the floor and wiggle their fingers. At one point during the performance, he had everyone in the audience line up and create a bridge, with each person running through and starting another link until the bridge had extended outside and then come back in.
Another bonus? His band had awesome matching white jumpsuits. Dan Deacon wore a WCWM shirt given to him by the station earlier that evening. The music was pretty great. Having been to the concert, sweating, dancing and taking photos, I appreciate what Deacon is doing, and how much work and coordination really goes into his music. I think his is the kind of music that requires extraordinarily loud volume and the ability to shut your eyes and just let loose and rock out. Otherwise it's just kind of "eh." At some point, amidst all the chaos of people flailing their arms and trying to be as close to Deacon (who was on the floor with the crowd) as possible, I realized that every good thing I had heard about the Dan Deacon concert experience had come true... like a magical fairytale.
And after the party it's the after party. I got to meet everyone but Mr. Deacon himself. Not being what you would call a "groupie" this was a fairly new experience for me. (I regret not going to the after-party Jens Lekman attended just about every day of my life) Despite the requests for unpasteurized cheese and sufite-free wine on the rider, everyone seemed pretty chill. And I'd say they seem pretty normal too, except that they were touring the US on a modified school bus for the next couple of months.
However, I was awoken the next morning by the band playing Limp Biskit on the loud speakers in my boyfriend's living room at 7:30. Suddenly the magical experience of the concert the night before turned into mild distaste for the 14 or so person band who slept on the couches, floor and coffee tables of Alice Street and then drove away in a school bus on a rainy Monday morning. Limp Biskit? Really?
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer, astrologer and alchemist from the sixteenth-century. He was the mentor of Johannes Kepler (zoiks!) and is famous for quite a few things:
1. The Tychonic Geo-heliocentric system of Planetary Orbit 2. Contributions of herbal medicines used well into the 1900s 3. Losing part of his nose in a duel with Manderup Parsberg, a danish nobleman, over who was the best mathematician 4. Getting a moose drunk
Oh, Tycho Tycho Tycho. Is that what geniuses do for fun? Go to the National Honor Society kegger on a school night--moose in tow--toke on some "herbal medicines" and fight Pythagoras' students 'cuz you think the theorem is dumb?
And what's more--you pushed that moose down the stairs, didn't you Tycho?
You bastard.
You know what? Maybe you did the world a favor holding it in at the King's cocktail party while he jabbered on about leaving behind an honorable legacy and slid his hand up the wenches' skirts. I can just picture you, standing there, doing the pee-pee dance. Sucker.
Tycho, you were such a bro. In a bad way. But I think I would get a kick out of writing your epitaph. Where's my time machine?
