i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

I don't do memes often but I like talking about music. ALSO I AM REALLY BORED.

( that concert/music meme that's floating around )

Today, while I was sitting on my couch cleaning data for import into our system at work, I got an email from a spammer informing me that I could Work From Home. Thanks, spammers, but I already took care of that part of my life. For once I'm a step ahead of the spammers! I still don't have a penis to enhance, but I'm pretty okay with that.

I meant to post the rest of this yesterday and just completely forgot.

( setlist and notes for the old 97s )

pls don't repost or icon without asking, kthx. xoxo.



( warped pictures )

the rest are here. i have a lot more to say about the weekend but i'm still not quite awake.

TONIGHT FIRST LET'S TALK ABOUT THE MOTHERFUCKING SETLIST:

( truckers at the cradle, 05.14.08 )

This was a show that started as mellow as the rock show ever can (which is not very mellow) and built up into this huge screaming flailing amazing tempest. Patterson shrieked and tossed himself around the stage, and dripped sweat all over me and emptied half a water bottle full of Jack onto his shirt during People Who Died. Mike Cooley was amazing, the most amazing performer I have ever seen, and by the time he drawled thiiiiiiink I'm gonna call the po-lice I was barely still upright, clinging to the stage with my fingers, and when he sang life ain't nothing but a blending up of all the ups and downs, I actually tilted sideways right into triskellita who just laughed at me and let me lean on her while I stared at Cooley with a huge stupid grin on my face. Neff can rock it when you put a guitar in his hands that much. Shonna danced, turning her back on the crowd and shaking her ass while she pulled harder on the Jack than any of her boys. The crowd shrieked and surged and gave the band back everything we got. We got Ronnie and Neil. We got Road Cases. After the show Mike Cooley thanked me and Shonna called me darling. There was absolutely nothing bad at tonight, nothing at fucking all.


I have six rolls of films and I am pretty damn sure they're some of the most phenomenal shots I've ever taken and I cannot afford to get them developed, and that breaks my fucking heart.

The good:

1. the Truckers remain the best goddamned rock show I've seen this year.
   
   
2. The Dexateens, who didn't blow me away with their studio stuff, are completely fantastic live -- interesting sonically and visually, tight harmonies, great guitar work. Plus they're all adorable handsy twenty-somethings with guitars. You know I love those.
   
   
3. Shonna Tucker is all of the following things: hot as hell; fantastically talented; bad ass; adored by all five of the little boys in the Dexateens, plus also both her lead guitarists. I'm gonna write Shonna/Spencer Smith and it's gonna be amazing, because Shonna very obviously enjoys the affection of younger men. \o/
   
   
4. Mike Cooley is one of the most exceptional guitar players I've ever watched. He also has a collection of ugly flowered shirts to rival Ryan Ross's.
   
   
5. At one point during "You and Your Crystal Meth", Patterson was flailing around screaming like Patterson does, and every eye in the place was on him, except for mine, because I couldn't stop staring at Cooley's hands on the fretboard of his guitar. And then Mike Cooley, goddamn motherfucking Mike Cooley, looked down and caught me staring at him with my mouth half open. Because I'm kind of a total doof like that.
   
   
6. I got to spend the evening with good folks, talking music and travel and photography. (quicknow, I rocked it with Maluca from Flickr & her crew, plus S. & A. & the kid, all night. Quality people.)
   
   
7. Patterson sang the second verse of "the Company I Keep" first, and then cracked up on stage.
   
   
8. Definitely at least two tapers' rigs halfway back in the audience.
   
   
9. mike cooley mike cooley mike cooley mike cooley patterson hood shonna tucker mike cooley brad morgan mike cooley.

The Bad: ( a few brief complaints that have nothing to do with the truckers themselves whatsoever except that Patterson writes too many goddamned songs )

The Set List: ( truckers at the cradle, 05.13.08 )


TIME FOR BED NOW.

Here is the most important thing to know about the Josh Ritter show at the Cat's Cradle tonight: the hipsters danced. The hipsters in the CH don't dance, but tonight the hipsters danced. And they sang at the tops of their lungs. And they had actual emotions! It was a goddamned motherfucking miracle.

I'm loopy with joy and exhaustion, and I couldn't have asked for a better set list if Josh had let me write it myself:

Mind's Eye
To the Dogs or Whoever
Wolves
[a long digression about the nice weather in the South, and how Josh enjoys seeing all the exposed flesh, and possibly someone in the crowd flashes him at this point, because he thanks someone for "doing that"]
Good Man
Open Doors
Come and FInd Me
Me & Jiggs
Wait for Love
Snow Is Gone
The Temptation of Adam
Girl In The War
Rumors
Right Moves
Long Distance Call
Wildfires
Empty Hearts
Kathleen
--
You Don't Make It Easy Babe
Lillian, Egypt*

He remains one of my all-time favorite live performers -- there's just something about someone who so genuinely enjoys what he does every single night, genuinely enjoys his fans enjoying his music. Josh Ritter is fucking amazing. Easily a top five of 2008 set. (Revised list, in order: Truckers in Richmond, Josh at the Cradle, Weakerthans at the Cradle, Jason at the Berkeley, RRRGLT in whole.)

* now with more juggling of apples during a piano break. i don't even know. it was magic.

The Weakerthans could rock my face off any day of the week, and I will never, ever, ever get tired of taking pictures of John K. Sampson's stupid little face and stupid hands on his guitar and stupid little sneakers on stage. UGH. Definitely a top-five set of this calendar year.

(So far, the top five, for the record: Truckers in Richmond, Weakerthans at the Cradle, Jason at the Berkeley, Jason in Charlottesville, RRRGLT in whole. I loved seeing the Cobras et al, it was super fantastic and well-worth all the driving, but I fully expected them to get bumped from the top five by the Truckers' two-night stand at the Cradle in May, and, hell, 2/3rds of the venues here haven't released their summer schedules, much less their fall schedules. The Year Of Rock Musics continues apace. With much rocking.)


In other news, I wouldn't trade the Triangle music scene for any other. It is genuinely delightful to see musicians I respect and enjoy just out at a show, enjoying the music and being honest fans of the people playing. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, for example, was in the crowd last night (bum-rushing backstage and making John K. Sampson play old songs), as was Perry, the lead singer of one of our favorite groups of local rockers, who need to put out their damn new CD before I have to start spreading totally false outrageous rumors about Perry out of boredom. Our local scene > your local scene.

I don't have a Cobras icon or a Jason icon at the moment, so Gee will have to do.

1. COBRAS. We rolled back in from Norfolk at something ridiculous like 2 am this morning, and we both passed out for a couple of hours before shep. got up to go to work and I got up to go to the mall and have my film developed and work for a few hours at Panera.
   
   BUT THE COBRAS, YOU GUYS. ( cobras in charlotte and norfolk )
   
   
   
2. Aaaaaaaaaand pictures are here. I know it's a little rude, especially in a fandom that runs on bartered media, but: you're welcome to use any of my photos, but please ask permission before you do, and don't repost them or icon them without my name attached. If you're interested in my photos but not the Cobras, my favorites are this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.
   
   
3. I'm gonna write Nate/Cash. CashNasty: best name for a Johnny Cash cover band y/mfy?
   
   
4. Okay, kids: rec me your Cobra fic (I am not picky about pairing or au or kink or anything, I want it ALL) and your the Cab fic. HIT ME WITH ALL OF IT. (I know I read a fantastic Cab GSF story a few weeks ago; just straight-up GSF, no sex pollen or aliens made them do it or anything involved. AND I DIDN'T BOOKMARK IT. *sadface*)
   
   
5. Anybody who paid attention to either my del.icio.us or my last.fm last week knows that I spent pretty much the whole week obsessing about Jason Isbell, the Drive-By Truckers (both pre- and post-Jason), and photography. ( more about the truckers and jason and my fascination with the disintegration of that partnership )
   
   
   
6. Bobby Knight is joining the ESPN studio analysis team. Prepare for bleeping, ESPN! The General on ESPN = the greatest thing to ever happen to sports news, for real.
   
   
7. I had a question here about integrating the auto-generated machine tags for Flickr photos that Last.fm creates on event pages with sorting my Flickr photos, but then I just went and added anything tagged with "concerts" to a single set and solved my problem for myself. Holy crap, that's a lot of (fairly mediocre until recently) concert photos!
   
   
8. Can I complain about Flickr for a minute? I mean, don't get me wrong: it's the best online resource I pay for right now (I bought a permanent account on LJ a million years ago and so have not paid for it in years), and I am happy to give them $25 a year for my Pro account, because I have something close to 5000 photos up there. But I would like, very much, to be able to view a set and then see a list of all tags that appear on photos included in that set. And I can't figure out where to complain to them about that!
   
   
9. My concert schedule between now and Memorial Day involves eleven shows and at least two trips out of town, so I guess it's safe to say that my fandom for 2008 is "driving long distances to see people I love play music". And that's without checking the schedules of at least three of my local favorites. That'll be 21 shows by June. Um, thank you, bandom? I think somehow this is Pete Wentz's fault. Everything is Pete Wentz's fault!
   
   
10. THIS IS AN EPIC OBSESSIVE ENTRY, JESUS.

I am really, really ridiculously tired. *falls over exhausted*

Things about which I educated myself this weekend:

• The Providence College men's basketball coaching line, producing coaches I loathe since Michael Jordan was in college!
  
• Mike Montgomery, former Stanford and Golden State coach.
  
• the 1993 UC-Santa Clara men's basketball team, a team I think fondly of as "that team full of surfers with hairs in their eyes", who upset #2 Arizona in the first round of the tournament.
  
• Steve Nash, who played on that Santa Clara team!
  
• Deron Williams, a dude I tend to think of as "Dee Brown's smart, sarcastic sidekick".
  
• Dwight Howard. D.HO <3
  
• David Padgett's hometown, major, and favorite musicians.
  
• A bizarrely large amount of random trivia about R.E.M.

What did I ever do without Wikipedia and the rest of the modern internets? Previously, when I had questions such as "who coaches the Stanford basketball team, again, and when did Mike Montgomery leave?" and "where did Steve Nash play in college?" and "was Herb Sendek an assistant or a head coach at Prov?", I had to rely on the barest hope that somebody had put the entire history of the Providence coaching staff online somewhere in an ugly web page. Not anymore!


Ugh, you guys, why are tickets to the R.E.M./Modest Mouse/The National tour so expensive? I mean, that's a rhetorical question, I know why they're so expensive, but I really, desperately want to see that tour and tickets -- shitty tickets -- start at $64, and I just. Can't afford that. I mean, fuck, I'm even willing to go out to Walnut Creek in Raleigh for this show -- the venues in the CH and downtown Raleigh have spoiled me, I want all my shows in tiny places where I can talk to the artists after -- and I've loved R.E.M. longer than I've loved any other band in my life, since I bought Green in 1989, and I've never seen them live, and Modest Mouse and The National, but I just can't justify the cost. Not after what we're laying out for Panic!. Goddamn live music all to hell.

I mean, I could scrimp and save and maybe eek out the cash to pay for the ticket, but there are other things that my savings should be ear-marked for: various future plans, one of the new Nikon D60s that's coming out later this year (so I can make a serious go at concert photography), living expenses, and so in the end I just can't justify it on my current budget, 20 years of love and all. And this makes me both cranky and sad.

Here, have my all-time favorite R.E.M. song: ["So Awake Volunteer" (aka the untitled track at the end of Green)] 2MB, .m4a.

( on kelvin sampson, in brief )

I posted fic yesterday: Ever Notice How Drinking's Like War (MCR, Bob/Frank/Gerard, R).

And now: let's play a game!


And by a game I mean recommend some books to me, because I have actually, finally managed to read (most of) my way through my two-page-long list of things to read. ( more about book recommendations; recommendations for me! for you! for other people!; including a list of stuff i'm looking for in a book, cut mostly for length, then made irrelevant by this immense cut-tag )

SO. RECOMMEND ME SOME BOOKS. Then tell people what you like, and perhaps get some recommendations back yourself!

If you're not interested in books: I continue to dig the Basketball Jones podcast like nothing else, and Friday night I listened to 86 minutes of Baseball America College Baseball Preseason Preview podcast (a re-listening of the first part), fully 42 minutes of which were occupied by Aaron Fitt freaking out about Cal Fullerton. (Dear Aaron: please come make some babies with me. Love, Min.) There's something innocently joyful in the fandom of college baseball; football and basketball, of course, are massive revenue sports for any university in the top half of Division 1 programs, but baseball, even at schools with routinely excellent programs (like, for example: Cal Fullerton), is still firmly in the amateur model, and it's amazing and neglected. ( in which i go on a total rant about the marginalization of college baseball AND the ncaa's stupid ass liveblog policy )

If you're not interested in books or college baseball or my crushes on NBA podcasters, well: I need a dudefriend in my life because I need someone to come over and rub my back. Also I listened to Jason Isbell's "Hurricanes and Handgrenades" on repeat for an hour on Friday, while watching the Magic/Pistons game and drinking shitty red wine. The whole experience was simultaneously depressing and liberating. I still love Rasheed Wallace more than I probably should; I have since he was having shitfits on the bench at Carolina as a baby on the defending nat'l champs in '94. 'Sheed's been in the NBA 13 years now, though -- he should have his temper under control by now. Also: there were cop cars and Jason & the Scorchers covering John Denver.

If you're not interested in any of that: we saw Doughty play a solo show Saturday, it fucking rocked, and as soon as I have money, I will be taking my three rolls of film (plus one from the Old Ceremony) to be developed, and then I will share. Doughty drew the Sad Bear in my journal. :D :D :D

If you remain uninterested: that's all I got, bitches, go entertain yourselves, I have to go sort through more licensing proposals.