Getting ready to pack stuff up and head on out for Indio. If anyone is interested in following along this weekend (cellphone connections permitting, of course), here's my little Coachella moblog:
and the spiffy version dave helped out with is here
To the dustbowl!
Thanks Dave for helping out on a little special project Wendy and I will be doing at the MIA 05 festival. We're going to be doing a test run of it for Coachella... I'll post the info once I've set it all up.
Now the excitement really kicks in! It's better than Christmas Eve! Excel spreadsheets floating across the net with color-codings based on genre, breakbeats, gothness, whatever. Plotting out who I stay 10 minutes for and who I watch for the full set. Scheduling margarita breaks. When do I get to see the huge lightning machine go off? Probably best during New Order, since they're boring live. Do I go early or do I sleep off the hangover? We'll see. Must be there by 3pm each day; earlier depends on the speediness of my old body's recovery. And the willingness of my Coachella travelling partners.
Yes, tickets and passes are in hand. Directions to hotel, hotel to venue and back printed. Money in wallet. Need to do the SavOn run for the little essentials - chapstick, sanitary wipes, bottled waters for car, hotel, bag. Pick some comfortable clothes out.
The rumors begin in earnest on the net and I can't stop reading them. Cocteau Twins and Doves are definately out; no one has really replaced them. Expanded set times for key acts. Bullshit. David Byrne has been bounced around for weeks now; we all know Interpol is around, as is Beck. Will Interpol do a full set, or will Carlos D spin somewhere? Will Beck be there at all? Will they be letting Andy Dick in after last year's messy public arrest on the grounds? I say, let him in but don't let in Tommy Lee and his stupid fucking Segway. What a prick.
Who's the annual special guest? And where the hell is he going to fit in on the schedule? Who's playing at the afterparties, and where are they? Must be plotted and charted!
They must have printed the handout maps/schedules by now... so are we going to be reduced to free-floating group rumours again? Pieces of paper stuck on the various tents which will announce "Your favorite band ever was the special guest and they just finished 10 minutes ago". We all know the official text-messaging updates don't work for shit out there.
Ah, who cares. The desert calls. I can't fucking wait. "In the flat field I do get bored..."
ah, bauhaus.
went out with john a few nights ago, didn't get back until 4am. went out to dinner and then drinks with greg, anna and doug friday. didn't get back until 3am. on the plus side, greg's going to play on my 42 minute opus which will be unveiled in buffalo in june, so i'm excited about hearing what he'll be bringing to the piece. then last night was packed.. dinner with dehais and myra and more than a few margaritas, off to see the wonderstuff (an unfairly forgotten band... and even those that remember them think the singer's a bit of a bastard, but i've always been overly fond of them and him). enjoyed the show, unfortunately, we had to leave earlier to head off to an art show for mike, celine, carmen and tony which was way the hell out in los feliz. and then a bar out there. didn't get home until 1:30.
i would like to sleep tonight, i'm thinking.
My must-see list for this years..
Saturday:
bauhaus
weezer
chemical brothers
wilco
doves
bloc party
mercury rev
m83
ambulance ltd
josh wink
tiga
the kills
unkle
secret machines
swayzak
razorlight
Sunday:
nin
new order
bright eyes
gang of four
prodigy
roni size
junkie xl
mia
tegan and sara
stereophonics
british sea power
the bravery
kasabian
matmos
and david byrne if the cocteau twins replacement rumors are true.
I love Slate.
Taken from:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2117125/
Trippin' is about ecology in the same way that Charlie's Angels is about feminism – it obliquely reminds you of how kick-ass it would be if the problem didn't exist in the first place, while simultaneously allowing you to watch blond girls take their clothes off. The Charlie's Angels connection makes it all the more fitting that last week's episode featured Diaz's fellow angel, Drew Barrymore. Together, the two marveled at the radical simplicity of the indigenous Chilean people (this show's condescending racism toward the "exotic" communities it visits could be the subject of an entire doctoral dissertation) while discoursing on the importance of buying recycled toilet paper.
Barrymore is a 30-year-old woman, and Diaz is 32 – a fact I mention only to contextualize such dialogue as:
(During a canoe trip after a campout):
Barrymore: I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal … awesome.
Diaz: (laughing) I'm so jealous right now. I'm going to the woods tomorrow.
Barrymore: It was awesome.
After the two return from separate guided hikes:
Diaz: Did you learn so much?
Barrymore: Oh my God yeah. So intense.. with the loving and feeling and tree-touching and the learning.
After that 25 bands thing, I got thinking about all the shows I've been to. I have most of my ticket stubs still stored somewhere... but i'm too lazy to find them and go through them, at least today. I've seen more shows than this, but I'm just using itunes and memory as a guide.. so these are all the bands I've seen that I actually own at least a song or two from. Obviously there are more - opening bands, festivals, whatnot.
Amazing how bored I get when stuck eating lentil soup for lunch.
808 State - Air - Alanis Morissette - Andy Prieboy - Andy Stochansky - Ani DiFranco - Aphex Twin - Atari Teenage Riot - Autechre - Bad Religion - Badly Drawn Boy - Banco de Gaia - Basement Jaxx - Bauhaus - Beastie Boys - Beck - Belle and Sebastian - Belly - Berlin - Big Red Button - Billy Talent - Bjork - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Blue Man Group - Blur - Body Count - The Breeders - BT - Bush - Butthole Surfers - Cardigans - Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine - Charlatans UK - Charlie Mars - Chemical Brothers - Christopher Lawrence - The Church - Cibo Matto - Clan of Xymox - Cocteau Twins - Concrete Blonde - Consolidated - Cowboy Junkies - Cranberries - Cranes - Creatures - Crystal Method - The Cult - The Cure - Curve - Daft Punk - Dandy Warhols - Daniel Ash - Darren Emerson - David Bowie - David J - Dead Can Dance - Death Cab for Cutie - Deep Sky - Depeche Mode - Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy - Dramarama - Duran Duran - Echo and the Bunnymen - Echobelly - Eels - Einturzende Neubauten - Elastica - Electrafixion - Electric Skychurch - Electronic - Emergency Broadcast Network - EMF - Erasure - Fatboy Slim - FC Kahuna - Felix da Housecat - Filter - Fischerspooner - The Flaming Lips - Fluke - Frank Black - Freaky Chakra - Front 242 - Garbage - Gary Numan - Gene Loves Jezebel - Goldfrapp - Gomez - Goo Goo Dolls - Gorillaz - Green Day - Groove Armada - Gus Gus - Hooverphonic - Hope Sandoval - Iam Mcculloch - Iggy and the Stooges - Information Society - Interpol - Jane's Addiction - Jesus and Mary Chain - Jesus Jones - KMFDM - King Missile - The KLF - Kraftwerk - Kula Shaker - L7 - Ladytron - Laibach - Laurie Anderson - LeAnn Rimes - Leftfield - Lemonheads - Libertines - Lightning Seeds - Liz Phair - Lords of Acid - Love and Rockets - Lunatic Calm - Lush - Manic Street Preachers - Marilyn Manson - Mazzy Star - MC 900 Ft Jesus - Meat Beat Manifesto - Miles Hunt - Ministry - Mission UK - Moby - Mogwai - Morcheeba - Morissey - Mudhoney - Muse - My Bloody Valentine - My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - Ned's Atomic Dustbin - New Order - Nick Cave - Nine Inch Nails - Nirvana - Nitzer Ebb - No Doubt - Oasis - Oingo Boingo - Old 97's - The Orb - Orbital - OMD - Paul Oakenfold - Paul Van Dyk - Pearl Jam - Pet Shop Boys - Perry Farrell - Peter Gabriel - Peter Murphy - Pigface - Pink - Pixies - PJ Harvey - Placebo - Pop Will Eat Itself - Porno for Pyros - Portishead - Primal Scream - Prodigy - Propellerheads - Psychadelic Furs - Psychic TV - Queens of the Stone Age - Rabbit in the Moon - Radiohead - Rage Against the Machine - the Ramones - Rasputina - Ride - Rollins Band - Ruby - Sandra Collins - Sasha - Scheer - Shamen - Simply Jeff - Sinead O'Connor - Siouxsie and the Banshees - Sisters of Mercy - Skinny Puppy - Sleeper - Smashing Pumpkins - Sneaker Pimps - Sonic Youth - Stellastar - Stereo MCs - Sting - Stone Temple Pilots - Suede - Sugar Ray - The Sundays - Swervedriver - Tahiti 80 - Tenacious D - That Dog - The The - Tori Amos - Tricky - UNKLE - Underworld - Utah Saints - Way Out West - White Stripes - Wonderstuff
There's a lot of bands I really like i've never seen. strange. well, coachella will be adding a few more to the above list...
it's not the second coming, but it's pretty damn good. i think i read a sentiment i agree with earlier on today ... it's not the best nine inch nails album, but it's definately the best album that'll come out this year. which i mostly agree with, except there's these nagging rumours of an original line-up massive attack album coming out later this year...
anyway, the heavy radio play of the first single, the hand that feeds, bodes well for a sea change in popular music. granted, it's obviously written to be a pop song, but that's ok. it's a good pop song. we could use some of those again.
fuck a nut... just doing my music news round and dead can dance are touring again?!? how the hell did i miss that? us in september.. woot!
when you stay home and work on a saturday night. I scored midnight showing Star Wars tickets at the Arclight!
And I didn't wait in line at the wrong theater for a month either!
But this one I like. Thanks Pat.
* Reply to this message telling me which of these 25 artists you have also seen.
* Take the ones from my list that you have seen, and post them in your own LJ.
* Add more until you have 25. They don't have to be in any particular order.
01. New Order
02. Bjork
03. Bauhaus
04. Depeche Mode
05. Prodigy
06. Morrissey
07. Moby
08. Gomez
09. Garbage
10. Butthole Surfers
11. The Cure
12. Nitzer Ebb
13. Fischerspooner
14. David Bowie
15. Nine Inch Nails
16. Living Colour
17. Berlin
18. Eels
19. Jane's Addiction
20. Henry Rollins Band
21. Crystal Method
22. Ministry
23. Underworld
24. The Dandy Warhols
25. Beck
I took the predominantly punk list and turned it a bit electro. Woot.
First, let it be said that I don't really like the Wiltern. The half general admission, half weird feeding stall setup kind of blows, particularly if it's a sold out show and the floor is so packed you can't really even move. I was originally happy to find out we had floor tickets, but we ended up in the back of the hall by the bar so we could actually see and breathe.
Not entirely thrilled with the show. Shirley looks great, having wisely ditched the femi-nazi look of the last tour. Eric's playing bass and not only does he sound great with them, it looks like he's having a blast. It's much more of a rock-band sound now, which I had a bit of a problem with... I mean, these guys have been doing the electro-rock thing for ages, and it's finally starting to be really popular (the bravery, bloc party, etc) so now they ditch it live and go for straight up rock interpretations of all their songs?
Maybe it's just a matter of playing a few more shows and tightening everything up, but quite a bit of the set was pretty sloppy and sounded off. The new songs they played sounded the best, which tells me in advance not to expect too much synths on the new album. Oh well. The all have quite a bit more confidence on stage than before, which I guess is also good, but again, I missed the Garbage of yore. I'll check them out again when they come back through town and see what time and road-testing does to the set.
The other thing - GREAT light setup, poor usage and design. If you're going to blow all that cash on a kick-ass concept, why did you make everything look like cheesy screensavers?
Ah, how easily my life could have ended up that way. Thank god I found music.
Anyway, I'm sure most people know about the whole line-up thing for Star Wars III... they started a few days ago, lining up outside the Chinese Theater. Which won't be playing the movie. It's actually going to screen at the Arclight (yay! booze! tickets online! reserved seating so you don't have the battle the fat guy that actually ran for the first time in 2 years to get a seat for himself and the life-size yoda he brought along!).
Anyway, it's all pretty funny. If you've got a bit of extra time today, like I did, you can check out the bloggers scoffing at blogging.la, which is some great reading, or better yet, listen in on the internal politics of the dorks themselves debating their predicament at lingingup.net. Now that's some seriously funny shit.
Used connections to score garbage tickets. Very happy. Eric's playing with them now so it should be an interesting show; they've always been great live, even with the continued decline in album quality. First single's alright, but reviews have been uniformly crap for the album. We'll see.
We've recently got hooked on arrested development, since there's no sopranos, battlestar galactica, west wing or 6 feet under at the moment. heard great stuff about it, and wendy added the season 1 dvds to our netflix batch awhile back. Burned through the season in a week. Funny show. Bittorennting all of season two now to catch up; tivoing and saving the new ones as they come in to watch in order. ain't technology grand?
Probably off to see Fever Pitch tonight. Read the book ages ago, loved it... saw the original movie, pretty good. It's about soccer, not baseball. But we're going to see it with the biggest red sox fan in the world, which should make version 3 interesting at least. But my stomach is still churning at the thought of paying to see jimmy fallon and drew barrymore.
Skeely left for the tour yesterday... marie the day before.. it's a bit lonely in venice. Only wen, myself and EJ are left. Oh well. It's a short tour.
Wen and I both signed up for extension classes this semester.. it's good to be back on campus. I'm taking a class is cosmology for shits and giggles. the prof is the science advisor for battlestar galactica and a total sci-fi dork. i'm going to enjoy this one.
ended up getting up to quite a bit this weekend... wen's art show on friday... which she actually didn't invite anyone to but people found out anyway, strangely enough. we actually missed mike and krista who came down from altavista or some other godawful far away place, but did catch michael, celine and carmen and ended up getting giddily drunk with them on cheap wine and beer in paper bags. saturday we ended up going to another art show with much the same crowd and headed back to their place post-show for more cheap beer... it was enjoyable but i apparently stepped on some inter-group dynamic toes that evening and ruined some guy's night and stature with his posse. oh well.
today, off to the market with the skeelereno who's taking off on tuesday to hit the road for a month plus... then lunch at finn's where david joined us and filled us in on the continuing soap opera of his life... a brief break for nap and gym, then over to ej's where a ton of randoms where around to catch a bit of the sox / yankees opener and drink beer and bbq strange beasts... before heading off to the 'wood for dinner at tuk tuk with john and myra and discuss coachella plans. post dinner we ended up running out to the virgin megastore so i could catch up on a few things... in this haul, a lot of coachella bands i've been ignoring for too long...
the bravery... bloc party 'silent alarm'.. brights eyes 'i'm wide awake it's morning' and 'digital ash in a digital urn'... some other random things like beck's 'guero', mars volta 'frances the mute', the church's 'el momento descuidado' and morrissey's 'live at earl's court'. of course, fischerspooner isn't out until tomorrow so i guess that'll be an itunes purchase..