Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.
Something I never realized before — apparently, the person in this iconic ad for Maxell audiocassettes…
…is none other than then-Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy. Nifty!
(trivia via Cult of Mac, image from Stangbangers, clumsily Photoshopped together by me — sorry, my Photoshop-fu isn’t good enough to remove the horrid moiré pattern from the original scan)
“Sister of Night” by Depeche Mode from the album Ultra (1997, 6:04).
So U2’s “digital box set” hit iTunes this morning. I can’t take a close look at it at the moment (no iTunes at work), but I’ll poke around later on. Mostly, I’m just posting this as an excuse to toss the little advertising banner up on the site in the desperate, misguided hope that one of my readers will have the money for the set, feel like buying it, and do so after clicking through from my site. Hey, I can dream, right?
Fifteen albums, 25 rare tracks, and a “digital booklet” (ahem….pdf file). I’ve gotta admit, if I had the money to blow, I wouldn’t mind picking it up.
Of course, I don’t have the money to blow, so it’s kind of a moot point (grin). Those silly little details keep tripping me up.
Update: Having had some time to take a look at the set…well, if some kind (rich) soul were to suddenly drop a \$150 iTunes gift certificate![][1] my way I wouldn’t be complaning. Nope, no complaints at all. ;)
[1]: http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/show?id=xLsJkztrnNY&bids=78941.10000058&type=3&subid=0 {width=”1″ height=”1″}
laurachandae was kind enough to send me a copy of her recording of Jason Webley‘s Halloween show, so I’ve converted it to .mp3 and have ~~posted it on my webserver~~. It’s only the first half of the show (apparently a mic cable got unplugged during intermission), but what there is is pretty good quality, and very listenable.
I’m still hoping that I might eventually run across someone who has the rest of the show recorded, but until then, this is what there is.
Enjoy!
“I’ll Fly Away (Live)” by Webley, Jason from the album Halloween Deathday 2004 (2004, 3:59).
Just a few quick impressions, because it’s way past my bedtime on a weeknight (and having to say that before it’s even 1am is so depressing…).
Excellent show.
Wandered up to the Vogue at just a tad after 9pm and headed in. Got to say hello to some of the few people I know — Ogre, Mickey, and Kayo — and then ran into Richard just a few moments later. Ended up getting a table right up by the side of the stage, with a perfect view.
The Arid Sea opened, who I knew pretty much nothing about. Not bad at all, though admittedly, not so good that I’m going to be rushing out to pick up an album. A good opening show.
Voltaire came up shortly afterwards. While on his albums he has backing musicians, his performance was simply him and an acoustic guitar. He started by walking up to the mic and saying, “Hi! I’m…Rammstein!” and then proceeded to do a tongue-in-cheek cover of “Du Haßt Mich” (“You / You love / You love this / Even though you don’t know what I’m saying.”)
The next song was “Ex-Lover’s Lover”, and then he went through a good number of songs that I didn’t know (as The Devil’s Bris is the only album I own — something that will have to change), but were all very entertaining.
He prefaced a song about being eaten by cannibals by talking about how he’d just done a show in Japan the week before, and while he was able to do his between-song chatter in Japanese, the songs themselves were in English, so the Japanese audience didn’t pick up on all of the puns in his songs. He did say that the show in Japan went really well, though, and so he’d decided to do the exact same performance, since it went over so sucessfully — and then proceeded to speak in Japanese.
Between two of the songs he took a moment to read a few short passages from a small book he’s just put out, What is Goth?, commenting that “the surest way to a girls…(long pause)…heart…is suck-ass Goth poetry.”
There was actually a lot of fun between-song banter, and since much of the music I was hearing for the first time, that’s much of what I’m remembering. He told a story about going to the PTA meeting for his six-year old’s school, a fancy private school in New York, and realizing that both Dave Gahan (the lead singer of Depeche Mode) and David Bowie also had children in the same school (“The parent choir is going to rock!”).
Also, just before a very sweet (if disturbing) lullabye “written to scare my son to death, apparently,” he told another short story about his son. Apparently he came home and heard one of his son’s friends talking to the nanny, and declaring that, “that coat smells like his dad.” At his point, Voltaire paused, hiding around the corner to find out just how bad he smelled.
“What does his dad smell like?” asked the nanny.
“Evil.” (Much laughter here from the audience.)
Then the nanny followed up on this. “And what does evil smell like?”
And then, very matter-of-factly, the friend just said, “Pretty good, actually.”
He ended up finishing his show with “When You’re Evil,” only with a slight twist to the final lyrics:
It gets so lonely being evil.
What I’d do to see a smile,
Even for a little while,
And no one loves you when you’re DJ Eternal Darkness…
All in all, much fun, and well worth staying up past my bedtime for.
“Anniversary” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:35).
Just a heads-up for anyone who might be in the area and interested: Voltaire (who I’ve mentioned here before) will be playing at the Vogue tomorrow night, along with The Arid Sea.
Doors open at 9pm, \$10 at the door.
I’ll be there.
“Ex Lover’s Lover” by Voltaire from the album Devil’s Bris, The (1998, 4:51).
Prairie and I went to Jason Webley’s Halloween/Deathday show last night.
The show, of course (and as always), was incredible, and I’ll try to get a better writeup later on today. For now, though, I’ve uploaded a photoset from last night to Flickr.
The pictures don’t have full descriptions yet (another as-soon-as-possible project), but they start with the gathering of fans outside Town Hall, go through the entire show, and then follow us all out through Freeway Park until Jason left us yet again.
Enjoy!
I’ve never been a fan of Eminem. I tend to find his music boring, and his lyrics violent, misogynistic, homophobic, and offensive.
That said…
Hot damn this video is a powerful piece of work.
From Salon’s writeup:
With his history of homophobia and his long-running beef with MoveOn supporter Moby, Eminem is an even less likely lefty hero than Howard Stern. But the just-released video for his new anti-Bush song “Mosh,” makes “Fahrenheit 9/11” look like a GOP campaign spot, and it will almost certainly reach an audience that wouldn’t think of shelling out for a documentary.
The beautifully animated video, which is directed by Ian Inaba, opens with a classroom. At the front is a man in a blue suit, his face buried in an upside down children’s book that says “My Pet,” with a picture of a bush. Just as the man is revealed to be Eminem, the scene changes, and we see the singer taping up newspaper stories to a wall — “Sick Wounded Troops Held in Squalor,” says one. “Civil Liberties at Stake,” says another. “Bush Knew,” says a third.
In five minutes, Eminem manages a furious indictment of the administration that will likely resonate among many troops in Iraq as well as disaffected kids here at home.
After watching the video, I’m still no fan of the music. But wow.
This is good.
Pity it didn’t come out a few months ago.
“Closer (Further Away)” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Closer to God (1994, 5:45).
Continuing in my little bout of nostalgia for my days running around at Gig’s, tonight I get to present a set of shots from the club, taken roughly between 1997 and 1998 or so.
There are actually a lot more pictures than just these in the pile that I just discovered, however, I’m holding off on posting them just yet, as they’re a lot of old pictures of my group of friends from back then. Possibly eventually, but for now, this will do.
Some shots of the building, and some shots of a few of the bands that played there from time to time. Most of these shots were given to me by clubgoers at a point when I was working on the Gig’s website.
Anyway, feel free to browse and enjoy — some of you might even be able to join me in my nostalgia! ;)
I’ve mentioned before that back in Anchorage, I was resident DJ for Gig’s Music Theatre, a non-alcoholic all-ages alternative club.
While I was DJ’ing there, I also ended up producing most of the club’s promotional flyers. I posted these a while ago as a TypePad photo album, but now that I’ve moved off of TypePad, I’ve just moved them all over into a Flickr photo set.
While I’m no great graphic designer, every so often I’d come up with something I like, so the collection ranges the gamut from butt-ugly to pretty decent. Enjoy (or snicker, whatever the case may be…)!
“Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, who turned personal tragedy into a public crusade and from his wheelchair became the nation’s most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research, has died. He was 52.
Reeve went into cardiac arrest Saturday while at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. He was 52.
Rest in peace, Chris.