The Dead Part of You

The Chris Hansen soundboard is exactly how I feel today.

I've had a weird-ass headache for 2 days now - it feels like a fucked up contact lens, but I'm not even wearing them today. I'm wicked-get-out tired - instead of lunch I took a nap in my car. The Carpenters have come up on the iPod - I say "Goodbye to Love" indeed. Tonight is Modest Mouse, and I'm so not feeling it right now. I know about 5 minutes before they go on I'll be in full on AI crying girl mode, but right now I just want to sleep for days.

Actually, the MM set lists look white hot - can I tell you a secret? I've barely listened to the new record once. They're not especially concentrating on new material this time around, so Issac Brock can still be my Sanjaya.

• In continuing with my love for all things fourfour, I just spent hours catching up on the Celebreality blog. Including reading every I Love New York recap in one sitting.
• In continuing with my love of unknown Lollapalooza bands, I checked out Jeepster by Bang Bang Bang via their myspace. Will I try to see them live? THE ANSWER IS I MAY ACTUALLY ACTIVELY AVOID THEM.
• In continuing with my love of words on skin, last week I got a new one on my leg...and my man fucked it up. For reals - in the tattoo chair I hear "I need to talk to you in a minute", and it sounded as bad as it sounds. "Feellng". In case you were wondering, when a tattoo artist messes up that critically, what they immediately do is start tattooing hydrogen peroxide over the error, to break up the ink. My faith is strong [we won't know for sure until the scab falls off, but it looks like a promising fix], and I'm supposed to check in with him tonight, but because I am ass full of busy through Saturday I'm not going to get to him until tomorrow.
• In continuing with my love of web-logging, I rescued most of the lost one yesterday. I may or may not bother with trying to complete the salvage and just let the wayback machine be my archive.
  

Dear Rich,

This is my new desktop image. PS, I love you.

Today, it all about the big ass music festivals.

• I was reminded of a dream I had last night about the Pitchfork Music Festival. GZA performing Liquid Swords. Really? I wasn't dreaming that?
• Coachella released set times today, and I officially decided I am way jealous that I'm not going this year. I spent an hour pretending about what I would see if I were going.
• I am, however, attending Lollapalooza in August, and have started checking out some of those lesser known bands.

And first up on that list is Bound Stems, who mostly get compared to Modest Mouse, which is pretty dead on. Maybe a dash of Pavement in there too. However, Bound Stems are missing the magic that MM and Pavement possess. A je ne sais quoi new musical energy source created within a band sparked by a singer. I do not envision myself rushing off to see Bound Stems, but if they were playing a stage before someone I wanted to see, I don't think it would be painful.

Andover, by Bound Stems, from Appreciation Night
Western Biographic by Bound Stems, from Appreciation Night

Today, my two favorite women are Jerri "I'VE GOT SOMETHING TO SAY" Blank



and Trudy "I DID SOMETHING" Wiegel



Yesterday was not a good day, so I made a tape. It was only the second time, and I know where my mistakes are. This is totally the last demonstration file, I assure you. If I ever do this again it'll sound nice.

If anyone out there can answer an Audacity question - is there a way to level the volume of the entire file once it's all put together?

You know what would be awesome? If I had the time today to write all about making tapes the way Nick Hornby does. That would be awesome. As it stands, I don't even have time to give you the track list.

I've got a million things to look at in my link dump, but this morning I noticed that upcoming.org finally got it's Yahoo! makeover, and is now upcoming.yahoo.com. I got to log in with my Yahoo ID and merge my account. It's like WEB 2.0 WAR - everywhere now I can log in via Yahoo or Google - who will win and buy all the websites! It is like monopoly!

While I was there, I updated all of my events, since there's a whole bunch of stuff I'm not even going to pretend to try and get to anymore. I just left the stuff I actually have tickets for. I was really on the fence about going to the big Kristin Hersh show tomorrow night, but now that it's stringless my decision has been made to just stay home. Maybe try and fix the old web-log, so I don't just throw away 5 years of web-logging. On Sunday I have an actual date, because you know, when it pours it rains. It was totally tempting to create an event for that - you know, put it on my calendar, as if I might forget.

There's no key quote here. It's all good.

I was pretty sure the internet was broken today, until a number of websites referred me to...to...

I'm not really sure WHAT this is. I can't even begin. Added bonus, it's already been pulled from YouTube, so you know it's white hot.

So last week was the big Lollapalooza line up announcement, and while I was slightly underwhelmed, I'm still going. The big dilemma for me has been whether Pitchfork might be better or not, because Pitchfork has Grizzly Bear, Sonic Youth performing Daydream Nation and hipsters. Lollapalooza has Daft Punk and

Well, not much else, really. But anyway, it's a weekend in Chicago and there's more than enough for me to pull together a list of things I must see

• Daft Punk
• Interpol
• Lupe Fiasco
• TV on the Radio
• Yo La Tengo

and the things I hope I have time for

• Modest Mouse
• Amy Winehouse
• LCD Soundsystem
• CSS
• Blonde Redhead
  

and of course, a ton of things I hope I get to check out including but not limited to

• Pete Yorn
• Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
• !!!
• The Polyphonic Spree
• Peter Bjorn and John
• Silversun Pickups
• The Rapture
• Roky Erikson and the Explosives
• Cold War Kids
• Fields

So it's a pretty good weekend. I work in an industry that allows me cheap hotel rooms and free airline tickets [which you think I would take advantage of more often, but I don't], so I'm good to go. See you there, bitches.

So last night was the big indie pop show at the Somerville Theater. The Books played with Greg Davis.

Honestly, I need to start off with The Books. I had never actually heard their music, just of them. You know, recommended highly by trustworthy people. And they weren't horrible by any means - just kind of - OK. Are they better on record maybe? I was expecting this complete hipster-gasm from the show and all I got was some OK tunes and some OK films and it was all very nice, acoustic guitar and cello. It just wasn't what they had been built up to me to be. The crowd loved it though.

However the real star of the night for me was opener Greg Davis. I can't remember the last time music made me feel almost physically ill.

He started out pretty unassuming, and honestly, I thought it was just going to be some shitty new-age samply shit, what with his sitting on the stage without shoes and fancy percussion instruments. What we wound up getting was a sound sculpture that held right up among artists like Animal Collective, Michael Gira's Body Lovers or even John Cage. And like Third Eye Foundation, you just sit in awe that one person is making all this noise. The transition between the two pieces was the audio equivalent of being on a Scrambler that's been running hot for 15 minutes, and it's finally slowing down, and now you really feel sick.



The merch table was way too crowded, maybe because The Books were selling oven mitts. I wasn't able to get to Greg to compliment him on his set or buy a record. Would I go see The Books again? THE ANSWER IS NO, BUT NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE BAD, BECAUSE IT JUST REALLY WASN'T MY THING.

Well now, that was fun.

So sometime yesterday morning while I was working on some - comment keywords - I broke my database, corrupted a table, whatever. The point of the story is that I'm real tired of php, SQL, CSS and fuck it. I'm just going to let Blogger do the job.

Originally, I published with Blogger for a long time, onto a domain hosted by Geocities. Unfortunately, that domain name was a little too close to my own, and I wasn't all into being Googled.

Next, I took a domain from a line in a Interpol song. Also published by Blogger, hosted on Geocities. Also, there were issues with capital letters back then.

I outgrew Blogger then in two ways - comments and tagging posts. Back then Blogger was not comment or trackback friendly AT ALL. Additionally, I liked the idea of categories, and made the decision to jump to Wordpress. Why Wordpress over Movable Type? It installed on my server easier. I bought a new domain, hosted by iPower which not only allowed server-side scripting for these state of the art web-logging tools, but 3 times as much disk space for 1/3 the cost. Multiple weblogs on one page. Mmm.

Of course, that all meant that I now had to administer the web-log, which got real old real fast. With this latest crash and all the advances Blogger had made in the past few years I just decided it's easier to come back to Blogger and publish here. When I first started on the sickoffood domain, I commented to Joshua from Crabwalk that in continuing naming websites after American Music Club songs from Everclear, my next one would be:

The Dead Part of You. And so it is - just with a 'blogspot' instead of a dot-com.

I'm keeping sickoffood.com for now - files, podcasts, whatever. Playing around to try and get back into the old database. I'll probably turn the redirect off at the end of this month, so update your bookmarks now [as "The Dead Part of You", please]. This has seriously been the worst week ever.

Download American Music Club's Everclear, free 'n' legal.