wildflowersoul

So my latest project has been diving deep into Irish indie rock (which, thus far, is proving way less interesting than Scottish indie rock). Whilst poking around YouTube tonight, I re-discovered a Scottish indie rock song from the 90s that I had completely forgotten about, but I now remember fondly playing it a lot on my radio show. I must have listened to it a ton because the words are still lodged in a nook in my brain. I'm so excited to have re-found lost music, and it turns out to be Scottish!

What a fantastic weekend!

Friday night my brother took me to see NIN and Godspeed You Black Emperor at the Garden. It was a great show! Though I'm old and I wish I could just watch a show sitting down in my hundred dollar seat. Everyone stands up when the show starts, and sometimes I am still 16 years old at heart, so I stood because I didn't want to look like a poseur. Though given that I haven't really listened to any NIN albums after The Fragile, I am probably now the definition of a poseur anyway. Do people even say poseur any more? Is that a relic of the 90s? Anyway, we put rock music into our ears. I really wanted to catch a glimpse of Trent Reznor in town before the show, mostly because I just want to see him wrangling a toddler or holding a baby. Dude has two kids now!

Saturday West had swimming in the morning, there was a crazy street fair in Salem to check out, and there were bouncy houses on the Common in which he bounced delightedly. That night we went down the street to a neighbor's house for a pumpkin painting party for the kids. I need to get my act together and put more effort into making parent friends in the neighborhood, we have so many kids around West's age on our block.

Sunday I took West to the Franklin Park Zoo to hang out with incandes_flower's family. West had tons of fun (and I did, too, but damn that kid is exhausting!). He has been ENRICHED this weekend. That afternoon we made a second foray to the bouncy houses. This time West beelined to a giant bouncy slide that he totally went down several times on Saturday, but on Sunday he got to the top and just... sat there. For like 15 minutes. While we cajoled him and tried to convince him to come down, other children also tried to get him down, and eventually I had to go up and go down with him. Otherwise he'd probably still be there right now. Sunday night we had one of his daycare teachers come over to babysit, and we went into Boston for a live show of Comedy Bang Bang with starflow and cosmicserpent. It was super funny, Paul F. Tompkins is hilarious.

Yesterday we kept things low-key. tenillypo came up for lunch. I discovered I am seriously lacking in crafting skills and slapped together some Labels for Education collection boxes for daycare that look like a five year old could have done a better job. Whatever, I am not a crafty person. I am a get-it-done person, and that's gonna have to be good enough.

I stayed up too late last night re-reading a book I've read twice already. D'oh. It's Divergent, this book seriously makes me want to write. I am just enamored with the tightness of the plot. I actually had a nerd conversation on the train today- the guy next to me wanted to know about the Kindle I was using, then he showed me he was reading the 3rd Game of Thrones book and we nerded out about GoT, then he was saying that he was going to read Wheel of Time next. I love cultural touchstone books.

West is now tall enough to actually open doorknobs. The other morning I heard him over the baby monitor say "oh, they're gone," I went up to check and he had opened the door between his room and ours and he was standing there clutching his snuggle doggie.

Also, I really need to stop making Youtube playlists. Here is my ridiculous 80s playlist.

Thanks to Pandora on the iPad I am rediscovering the joys of listening to music while mindlessly surfing the interwebs. Nice! Also I apparently really like Tegan and Sara.

Got some new shoes for work to stop looking like a frump with falling apart shoes. They are heels ($20 on amazon!) and people, I have forgotten how to walk in heels! It has been a few years of flat shoes due to baby and I have lost my lady skills.

There was a Metafilter thread a couple of days ago commemorating the 17th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. 17 years. Wow. I realized I had no Nirvana on my iPod, because I got lazy about transferring files onto my iPod when it was new. I rectified that this morning and spent my commute listening to songs that are so burned into my consciousness it seems like they've always been there. How many of us still hear the words "This is off our first record. Most people don't own it." before the first chords of About A Girl?

So it's been about 17 years since I desperately wanted to be Angela Chase, was instead totally Brian Krakow, and now am much closer to being Angela's mom than anything else. When pondering early April, 1994, I think some of us mourn a bit not just for Kurt, but for a time when music mattered with such a fierce intensity in our lives, when it made us feel part of Something Big, when the riptide of the just the right chords could shatter you or make you fly. Now, I have too much in my life that takes time, energy and emotion to sustain, I don't have space for music to matter the way it used to. And I'm ok with that. Just my once a year time to reflect.

Huh. Joanna Newsom sums up my feelings regarding Lady Gaga pretty superbly:

"I'm mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there's a high level of intelligence in the songwriting. Her approach to image is really interesting, but you listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks. Smart outlets for musical journalism give her all this credit, like she's the new Madonna …" She breaks off and laughs. "Although I'm coming from a perspective of also thinking Madonna is not great at all. I'm like, fair enough: she is the new Madonna, but Madonna's a dumb-ass!"

Later, she emails to clarify what she describes as her "late-afternoon dopiness" on this subject: "I may have contradicted myself. My problem isn't actually with Lady Gaga. But there's not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. She just happens to wear slightly weirder outfits than Britney Spears. But they're not that weird – they're mostly just skimpy. She's fully marketing her body/sexuality; she's just doing it while wearing, like, a 'fierce' telephone hair-hat. Her sexuality has no scuzziness, no frank raunchiness, in the way that, say, Peaches, or even Grace Jones, have – she's Arty Spice! And, meanwhile, she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she's Brecht or something. She just makes me miss Cyndi Lauper." And on the subject of Madonna: "I shouldn't have called Madonna a dumb-ass. Her music and she have just gotten so boring to me, this last decade. I think maybe she doesn't hold her money very gracefully, the way some people can't hold their drink. But one thing she is surely not is dumb." Longer article.

I'll admit I've only listened to Gaga's singles, but given how bananas people are for Poker Face and Bad Romance, I'm going out on a limb to assume they are fair representations of the rest of her work. Which just... bores me. These songs don't have magical hooks or moments of awesome pop sensibility. And my standards aren't that high, I think Nelly Furtado's I'm Like a Bird is a remarkable pop song, and I love Britney's Womanizer and even Miley Cyrus' autotuned abomination Party in the USA. None of them have the craft or interesting-ness of, say, Tullycraft, Mates of State, or New Pornographers, but for mainstream pop they at least have something that catches my ear. Anyway, that is my two cents.

WHAT. Billy Corgan is, among so many other things, a chem trail conspiracy theorist? These nuggets come from his twitter: US Media run reports on the negative health effects of volcanic ash, but completely ignore EXISTENCE of chem-trails.yep.Barium=good health! and I love being chem-trailed to death. Love it! Nothing like a bunch of barium for breakfast.

I first learned about chem trail conspiracies thanks to Drew discovering this site, if you are looking for an entertaining afternoon's read. You'll thank me when you get to the orgone generators and chembusters!

Can someone please work on a time machine that will take me back to 1994 and forcefully grab Siamese Dream out of my hands? You may substitute it with Slanted & Enchanted, because I discovered Pavement when I needed to check out the band that had a song dissin' on my Pumpkins.

Holy shit! Pavement! Touring! Pardon me while I flail around in glee for a moment.

I am totally going to attempt to buy some tickets for their first reunion show, in NYC, about a year from now.

You have no idea how very, very happy this news makes me. They're the one band of my all-time favorite bands that I never got a chance to see live.

Because my brother totally rocks, we are going to see Sunny Day Real Estate (!!) at the House of Blues in Sept. Real emo!!!

Went to see Glasvegas last night, and they were totally rockin'. I love a good show. And it was fairly prompt! I love getting out of a show at a reasonable hour on a work night. The drummer didn't have a kick drum and stood the entire time.

So thanks to Netflix we've been discovering comedy that we otherwise might not check out. Our latest discovery is The Whitest Kids U'Know. It is killing me with hilarity. I think about this sketch randomly through the day and get the giggles, though I caution that even though the naughty words in it are bleeped for tv, I don't think it's all that safe for work, depending on your work situation: