wildflowersoul

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.

Alright, it's 9:30 am on Yom Kippur, I have the day off, and have already been somewhat productive.

Cleaned up a bit after the very fun Bates Ladies, Etc. get together at our place yesterday. I am still craving apple cider donuts, those things are tasty.

Did some MTV pilates, made up a pot of smoked sausage & beans for lunches for the rest of the week, and have a load of laundry in the washer and the dryer. That's pretty decently productive.

On the list for the rest of the day: do some writing, learn some quantum mechanics, take a nap (this is serious business given the next item on the list), go see Sunny Day Real Estate with my brother tonight at HoB. Boo to there being a Sox game at Fenway tonight, though, I think we'll have to park around Gov't Center.

Also this weekend, enjoyed some amazing drinks at Eastern Standard and had a great time hanging out with folks. Yay, drinks! I do wish I had more money to be able to enjoy that place more often, but I like that for $20, plus tax & tip, it's possible to drag out 2 delicious drinks for quite a while.

I was going to rant about the dismal state of affairs in this country, but... I just don't have a good rant in me. I'm just so disgusted with everything that is going on these days, and would love for the wingnut righters to take just one day off so I can ignore them for a little while.

Instead of depresso ranting, I give you a blog that just made me lose it with giggles Crappy Taxidermy (I have only looked at 1.5 pages, I make no sfw promises and if you're squeamish about taxidermized animals then this is not for you. That said, it's friggin' hilarious.

Finally, I am beyond excited for tonight's live performance of The Nightman Cometh. Supposedly there will also be a showing of a season 5 episode and some other stuff. I just hope it gets out at a reasonable hour (i.e. before the Red Sox game ends).

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:

Oooh, Glasvegas is playing the Paradise in March.

Anyone want to see some Scottish rock with me? Tickets are only $15, but it is on a Tuesday night (March 31), which sucks.

Also, The Main Drag (of Rock Band 2 fame!) is playing on Feb. 12 (a Thursday) at TT's. I would love to go to this, but the band doesn't actually go on until Midnight, which is the lamest thing ever. I like them so much that I'd consider taking the day after off or taking a half day to sleep in.

Another show I'd like to see:

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart- Middle East upstairs, Sunday, Feb. 15

Dear Smashing Pumpkins: You are not Sonic Youth. You never will be. Cut the crap.

And can I have my money back?

That show... sucked. They did play my second favorite song ever (Mayonaise), and it was really good, but holy god, so much pointless noodling. And I have a pretty good tolerance for noodling and noise- I have all the SYR recordings for god's sake, I can handle some well-done noise, but this show was mostly unlistenable crap with some songs thrown in. There is a right way and a wrong way to do meandering instrumental experimentation. Last night = wrong way.

The highlight of the evening was dinner before the show, where Drew & I cracked each other up making up a vampire story. I had such a crappy day yesterday, today has got to be better. Right?

Time to write!

Drew introduced me to the best comic books ever this weekend. Seriously, the best ever. They are called Scott Pilgrim, and they are about an emo-ish guy in Canada who has girl problems, often wears Smashing Pumpkins t-shirts, and has awesome kung fu fights sometimes. It is amazing. And soon to be a motion picture starring Michael Cera.

Speaking of Smashing Pumpkins, I spent waaaaaay too much money this weekend on tickets to one of their shows here in November. I am crossing my fingers that they might play Starla!

So, there are some things that used to be awesome but are now too overplayed to be awesome anymore. These things include: pirates, monkeys, robots, ninjas, zombies, and hobos (hobos' popularity and subsequent overplayedness both due to John Hodgman). What, I ask you, is going to be the next awesome thing?

So much indie rock in one weekend! Saw Dressy Bessy last night at TT's, it was a great show. The Built to Spill Don't Look Back show in NYC was also awesome.

Our New York trip: fun and exhausting.

Thursday we arrived in the city, dropped our bags off at our weird "b&b" (bed, no breakfast, surly owner), and headed over for our long, long wait for The Daily Show. They overbook their reserved tickets, so you're not guaranteed to get in even if you have tickets. We got there wicked early, waited in line for a looooooong time, but it was worth it because we did get in. The actual taping of the show is so fast, it really is just about the time it takes to watch the show without commercials. Jon Stewart is awesome and comes out before the show to take some audience questions. The show was conveniently about five blocks away from the venue for Built to Spill, so we left the taping and went over to the concert. I had been hoping to get there after the Meat Puppets finished their set, but we were early and had to sit through them. Dinosaur Jr. rocked out, and then Built to Spill played Perfect From Now On, and they were amazing, and it was all I hoped for. It's my favorite BtS album. After that we met up with the rest of our traveling group in Times Square, went to a really crappy bar, and headed back to Brooklyn to sleep.

Friday Drew & I went to the Central Park Zoo, it was raining so the giant bunnies were not outside and I felt a little cheated. Yes, the highlight of every zoo experience for me is seeing bunnies, even though I have three perfectly good bunnies at home to see all the time. But the polar bears were adorable. We then hit the Met, which I've been to a couple of times, so I hit my museum tolerance pretty quickly. Since it was raining, I think half the population of the city was hanging out inside the Met, making it kind of claustrophobic. We fled the museum to meet up with friends and commence to drinkin'. Continued drinkin' at Vol de Nuit. Got a tasty late dinner at a place called Acme, and by the time we got to Brooklyn our store of energy was spent. Why does it take so friggin' long to get anywhere in New York?

Saturday we had brunch in Carroll Gardens, waited forever for an F train to take us into Manhattan, scored The Best Cupcakes I Have Ever Had, Ever at Sugar Sweet Sunshine, and went to The Strand for some book action. By the time all this was done, it was pretty much time to catch our bus home. Ok, seriously, those cupcakes? They were divine. They were better than Lyndell's. I would take the 4 hour bus back down to New York just to get those cupcakes and then come right back. Nom nom nom.

So that's that. It was a ton of fun, but involved way too much public transportation. If it hadn't been raining I would have walked much more and probably wouldn't have burnt out so much on getting around town.

The Silver Jews were pretty great. I say "pretty great" because the sound mix could have been better, but then again we could have been sitting in a better place for more optimal sound. I was surprised to hear a handful of songs from American Water- I've been listening to that album for so many years, I figured it was too old for them to play anything from it. But I heard Smith & Jones and Random Rules, and I was happy.

We're currently waiting for Broken Social Scene's annoyingly long sound check to finish, but to be fair, De La Soul's set went about a half hour longer than it was scheduled for. We caught the tail of them, and I was really shocked to see the place completely packed- poor Animal Collective must have been lonely playing at the same time. We spent most of De La Soul's set finding some decent dinner that was not fried (and succeeded).

So this is probably my last ATP post, because I'm already sleepy and kind of drunk, so we'll be done with music after Broken Social Scene. But I have to say, this festival has been immensely enjoyable. Lots of great music, enough day time diversions. I'll be happy to get to London tomorrow to take an actual shower, since our 2-person room here at Butlins only has a bathtub. Washing your hair in a bathtub? It's difficult.

Oh, and yesterday we caught the last two songs from Okkervil River's set, and they were so good. I really wanted to check them out, but couldn't miss what was probably the only chance I would take to see Ghostface Killah. But I will definitely check them out when we get home.