amplified to rock
This will be my last post before I leave. Everyone gets to leave work at 2 PM today, so that cuts in to my blogging time significantly.
Owen wrote to tell me that it's easy to shut off that seizure-inducing sidebar at Lost at Sea: just right-click and uncheck "play." Sounds good to me.
I might write from Phoenix, I might not. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure what the plan is, I don't know how much running around I'll be doing. I will definitely be back next Wednesday (that's the 6th). If you're bored and looking for something to read, check out the stuff in the sidebar. It should keep you busy for a while.
Have a good weekend, everyone--I'll talk to you later.
Today is the day I leave for Phoenix. Today is also the day that I overslept and was late to work. Not that it matters, I have nothing to do anyway.
My plane leaves at 10:05 tonight, I make it to Sky Harbor (I love the name of the Phoenix airport!) at 11:45 Phoenix time. I'll probably end up staying up all night talking to Amanda. It's one of those things where I know I'll be exhausted but it really won't matter, I'll always be able to muster up enough energy to tell just one more story, to make just one more joke, even though it means we'll be up for another hour or two. I'm excited.
Now, on to the rawk: Lost at Sea's redesign has been known to cause seizures in small children. I wish there was a way to make all that busy-ness stop, I find it hard to pay attention to the content with the flashing banners and that scrolling side-thing distracting me. If the people at Truckfighter think they're the biggest dicks in independent rock journalism, they're smoking some very potent crack. The idea of a column on how to write a tour diary made my skin crawl, so I didn't bother reading it.
I'm with Jeff: New Elliott CD = good. I bought it on his recommendation and it was worth my $11.
I'm going to send these pants to Golf Sissy Jeff as a gift. That way he can wear them while he sits around watching golf on TV. Jeff is such a Golf Sissy that he probably puts the TV on mute and plays some sensitive emo crap in the background.
I've never linked
Superstar in Stereo before. One of the staff writers emailed me a while back to alert me to the site's presence. I like it. A lot. According to a posting from the webmaster on the site's message board, they're currently in the midst of a redesign, with a scheduled launch date of today or tomorrow. I hope the new design is as nice as the current design, which is colorful and fun but not overdone. The writing is decent, there's some originality to their content (no columns!), and they have a sense of humor. The emphasis seems to be on live reviews, and they also have a nice gallery of photos from live shows. Good stuff, check it out.
The
Mil Mulliganos, those kings of the rawk moves, got mentioned in the
Chicago Sun-Times. I'm glad they're getting some attention--they deserve it. They're playing the Metro on Tuesday, September 19--you should go! I won't be there because of stupid school.
Also, thanks to Mark (who would get a link if he had a website) for sending me links to the Hideout home page and this Chicago punk shows page. I appreciate it!
There are people here to fix the security system (or upgrade it, or some such nonsense). We have dubbed the guy "Ponytail Man" because of his very early-90s slicked back ponytail. It's one of those "I'm into industrial music, but I have a job, so I couldn't do anything too extreme with my hair, so I shaved most of my head and left some at the top. But my dickhead boss won't let me wear it down, so I use a bunch of gel and put it in a ponytail for work" ponytails. And he has more keys than any human being could ever possibly need, and he jingles them constantly.
He and his co-worker were standing in my doorway talking about my desk. His co-worker said that she couldn't climb on my desk because it was "too dirty." Cluttered, possibly--I am working, y'know. But there isn't a speck of dirt on this desk. She made me feel like some sort of slob, like a manure truck had just unloaded its contents into my workspace.
Attention, Chicagoans (or anyone willing to travel to Chicago to see a show): At the Drive-In is playing on November 4 at Metro. I'm not peeing my pants with excitement over that, but I'll probably be there. Granted, the only ATDI I've heard is some EP that I picked up a few months ago, and it's all right but it didn't blow me away. I'll probably pick up the new one when it comes out (or borrow someone's copy if I'm feeling particularly cheap that day). Also, the Independent Arts Festival will be at the Centrum Hall (uh, like the vitamins?) on October 6 and 8. The lineup looks good: Shellac (who are just amazing live) and The Oxes (whose live show is supposed to be great) are part of the lineup, along with Loraxx, Robbie Fulks, and High Dependency Unit. I'll be at that too, let's
meet up.
I get most of my Chicago show information from the Chicago Reader's Early Warnings page. The drawback is that it only lists the larger venues, so places like the Fireside Bowl and the Hideout get left out. Let me know if you know of a place on the web that has reliable, updated listings for the smaller Chicago venues--I'd appreciate it. Every time I find a page with listings, they're two months out of date. I don't care who played the Fireside in June, I want to know who's playing in September.
Apparently, threatening to poke them with a stick works:
us|against|them has updated. Now, if only
Indieshite would get back to their pre-expose glory...
Line Noise has redesigned again. It looks good. And I really need to get a hold of Jacqueline about doing some writing and editing for Line Noise. Her emails are likely buried in the "respond to this" folder, along with, well, everyone else's email. Seriously, I could win a "World's Worst Correspondent" award.
I discovered this through my referral logs. It's like epinions, only it's geared specifically towards websites. Someone reviewed my journal site, which is kind of cool. I joined up just because I like blabbing about websites. Unfortunately, there's no weblog category yet, but I'm sure it's coming soon. I'm in the process of reviewing all the online journals I read (yeah, the ones in the sidebar over there) and I'll start adding the webzines when I'm finished with the journals. (And hey, if you decide to sign up, use nanette74 as the referral. I'd appreciate it.)
Okay, so I managed to miss the first day of school. This isn't my fault, I swear! It seems that the genius who is the registrar at
Governors State managed to schedule both of my professor's classes on the same day (Thursday) at the same time (4:30-7:20 PM). Once they realized their mistake, they decided to move one of the classes (the one I'm in) to Tuesday. Of course, they didn't bother to tell any of the students. So this morning at around 9:30, my professor called me to find out if I had missed yesterday's class because I didn't know about the schedule change.
The schedule change also means that I will miss next week's class as well because my flight doesn't arrive at O'Hare until 7 PM. I'm going in to meet with her tomorrow afternoon to get the syllabus and find out what I'm missing. She made it sound like I'm going to be really overwhelmed with the makeup work, but somehow I doubt that. This is Governors State we're talking about here, not Harvard.
It's kind of nice to have class on Tuesday instead of Thursday. Thursday night classes interfere with rawk shows (Sleater-Kinney, GBV, Flower Ten, etc.) and nothing ever happens on a Tuesday night. Plus, I've had class on Thursday night for the past year and a half and I'm kind of tired of it. Now, my Thursdays will be all my own and I can spend time sitting around watching Popular on Channel 9. Stop laughing, it's a funny show. You can't not love Mary Cherry. (Sophie will back me up on that.)
I would really like to corner Craig Griffith over at
Pitchfork and ask him what possessed him to write
this review. I just need answers, really. I need to know if this is all some elaborate in-joke that is unfunny to anyone not in the know, or if it was intended to be amusing to all audiences. I'm afraid that it was intended to be amusing to all audiences, and I'm afraid that it failed miserably. Thanks to Ewan over at
Indieshite for pointing me in the right direction.
I'd also like to take a second to make fun of Jeff for watching golf. Golf is for sissies.
us|against|them promises a big update today. They'd better deliver...or I'm going to their houses with a sharp stick, and I will poke them until they update!
I am linked here. Another Chicagoan, yay!
I heard three Journey songs in the car today. I have been in my car for a total of half an hour today. Steve Perry is out to get me. Why does the rawk station have to play two songs by JOURNEY when I am on my way to work? Why can't they play two songs by someone good? Then I heard "Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'" on my way to pick up some lunch. It almost caused me to lose my appetite.
Time has been going by really fast lately. I can't believe I'm going to Phoenix at the end of the week. I feel like there's been absolutely no time between the day I made the reservations and the day I'm leaving. I feel like there's a pile of things I wanted to do before the end of this month that aren't going to get done. I start school again on Thursday. I had meant to do more work on my thesis before my other classes start up again, but I haven't done anything. I have a whole list of people to contact now (thanks to everyone who helped!) and I have massive amounts of reading and research to complete, and soon I'll have another class tying up my time.
Meeting up with Matt Bowden on Friday night was wonderful. I wasn't really sure what to expect. Seeing someone who was once a very close friend after five years can be really awkward, but it wasn't this time. I don't think there was ever an awkward silence, probably because we were all so busy swapping stories about people we haven't thought of in years. I'm glad that he's living in the Chicago area now, and I'm really looking forward to seeing more of him.
us|against|them and Indieshite need to get themselves together and start providing me with entertainment. It's annoying when the two sites I check most frequently have decided to not update for several days.
