Scribbled notes while watching Wednesday night’s episode of Lost. Spoilers, obviously, so only read further if you want to…
Month: October 2005
Voltaire at the Vogue
Voltaire’s show Wednesday night was great, as I’d hoped.
xementio picked me up around 8pm, we drove down to Capitol Hill, found a place to park, and spent a few minutes wandering along Broadway. Since she’s new to town, I got to show her a bit more of Broadway and introduce her to some of the stores along the strip, though it was late enough in the evening that there wasn’t really much time for shopping.
We headed up towards the_vogue around nine, and the place was already full enough that we weren’t able to find a table. Oops! Silly me, thinking that the “doors open at 9pm” bit on the flyer meant that the doors wouldn’t open until 9pm. ;) Still, no biggie, we just found a spot on the floor to say hi to people (I saw Ellen and…gak…her husband, whose name I will remember someday, back by the bar; we chatted with Tricia for a while; and I saw anzu for a moment before losing her in the crowd), wait and watch people dance.
And wait. And wait.
The one downside to the evening was that while everybody (including the staff at the Vogue, apparently) was expecting the show to start between 10 and 10:30pm, Voltaire got caught up in selling CDs, comics, other sundries, and talking to people, and didn’t actually take the stage until about 11:15pm.
Still, once he made it onto the stage, the show was well worth the wait.
He used the same low-key setup as he did last year, no backing band, just him and a guitar. As with last year, one of his first songs was a tongue-in-cheek cover of Rammstein’s “Du Haßt Mich”, and then on to other songs. Lots of fun between-song banter and storytelling also.
Songs I remember from the playlist: The Vampire Club, Ex-Lover’s Lover, When You’re Evil, Goodnight Demonslayer, plus one from a New Wave style band that he’s getting started with called One Semester Lesbian, Fully Functional from his Star Trek tribute/parody album, and a hilariously raunchy (to the point of being obscene) country-style ballad set in the cantina on Tatooine from Star Wars.
In addition to the photos I took over the course of the night, I also took a few minutes of video a few times during the night, and have put together a nine-minute sampler of bits and pieces of the show. Linked to the right is a low-resolution version (QT .mov, 9Mb), here’s a high-rez version (QT .mov, 37.5Mb) for those who have the bandwidth. Be warned — not everything in the video is exactly “family friendly”, though it is quite funny.
The show ended a little after 12:15, and as Danielle had had to bail out a bit earlier, I booked down the hill into downtown to catch a bus home. While I missed the 12:20am bus, there was one last run at 1:20am, so after kicking back with this weeks Stranger and Seattle Weekly for a while, I finally made it home and crawled into bed about 1:45am.
So, a long night, but a lot of fun, and worth the late bedtime.
Playing the race card
On our way home from Charlie’s tonight, Prairie and I got a sudden hankering for ice cream and stopped into the Baskin Robbins just down the street from our apartment. A couple of teenagers were hanging out in the store, chatting with their friends behind the counter.
Sitting at one of the tables, a skinny black kid, decked out in street-standard clothes (sneakers, baggy jeans, oversize t-shirt) said, “I don’t think I could live with you people.”
His friend, a heavyset white guy with longish wavy hair in slacks, shirt and tie laughed and answered, “White?”
“What!?” the black kid said, and all of us started laughing. “I didn’t say that!”
“You said you couldn’t live with ‘you people’…!”
“Party animals!”
The white kid laughed again. “White? Dude, you’re not supposed to be playing the race card….”
“Yo, man, no, party animals….”
“You keep talkin’, all I’m hearin’ is ‘fuck whitey!'”
By this point, all of us were cracking up. Absolutely hilarious, good-natured needling between friends.
Scalzi’s Top 50 Significant Sci-Fi Films
Another list meme: this time, John Scalzi’s top 50 significant sci-fi films (alphabetical, not ranked).
…the part of the book that’s going to get most people’s attention — and raise hackles — is The Canon, which features the 50 science fiction films I have deemed to be the most significant in the history of film. Note that “most significant” does not mean “best” or “most popular” or even “most influential.” Some of the films may be all three of these, but not all of them are — indeed, some films in The Canon aren’t objectively very good, weren’t blockbusters and may not have influenced other filmmakers to any significant degree. Be that as it may, I think they matter — in one way or another, they are uniquely representative of some aspect of the science fiction film experience.
As always, films I’ve seen are in bold.
Time’s Top 100 Novels of All Time
Time Magazine’s list of the top 100 novels of all time (in alphabetical order, not ranked, English-language, 1923-present). As always, items in bold are the ones I’ve read.
Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes
Jakob Nielsen recently published a list of the top ten weblog design mistakes. As I’ve done in the past with similar listings, I took a quick look to see how I feel my site fares against his list.
The Vampire Club
Since I only had one album by Voltaire (The Devil’s Bris), I decided to see if the iTMS had any available, as they’ve been doing a rather remarkable job of expanding their underground/goth/industrial/anything non-mainstream collections. It turns out they had two others in addition to The Devil’s Bris: Boo Hoo and Then And Again, both of which I snagged.
Some of the songs I’d heard already, either at the_vogue (Future Ex-Girlfriend, Caught A Light Sneeze) or at his show last year (Goodnight Demonslayer, a beautiful lullaby to his son). Others I hadn’t heard yet, including a new favorite: The Vampire Club.
Voltaire this Wednesday
His show last year was great, and I’m really looking forward to getting to see him again.
Wal-Mart Sics Secret Service on Student
Need another reason to stay far, far away from Wal-Mart? Or maybe another reason to be disgusted with the culture of fear and repression of political dissent in the country? Be glad you’re not this high school student.
Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.
But that’s what happened on September 20.Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s-down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”
According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent. But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.
An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service. On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.
Is this really the country we want it to be? Sadly, it’s the country the voters asked for.
(via seagoth)
God’s Total Quality Management Questionairre
God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage. In order to better serve your needs, He asks that you take a few moments to answer the following questions.
Please keep in mind that your responses will be kept completely confidential, and that you need not disclose your name or address unless you prefer a direct response to comments or suggestions.