this weekend my ex-roommate called me with an extra ticket to the white stripes show. i was only marginally interested in seeing them. but. there are a few songs of theirs that i really dig. and as i hadn’t hung out with brad for a while and i hadn’t been to any shows since i got back from my trip i decided to check them out. besides. they were bound to have some decent opening acts. damned if i could figure out who they were before the show though. their names weren’t even on the marquee. i only found out the name of the second opener by looking at the stray items of their merchandise that slipped out from under all the white stripes poster for sale.
i still don’t know the name of the first act.
it was a pretty enjoyable show though. i was playing “hotter, colder” with the first act. i have yet to really absorb blues rock. some of the sincerity seems to be too often traded for over emphasizing eliding trailing r’s. colder. but. the other half of their show was surf revival. hotter. way hotter. i have yet to find a surf revival act i didn’t adore. the closest i’ve come to stalking (i think) is searching for old usenet posts from the members of man or astroman?.
the second act, whirlwind heat, certainly did not disappoint… me, at least. the front guy was a maniac. the bottom half of his body would slide around the stage like james brown while the top half flung itself around like iggy pop*. at first i thought they might be german. i guess the story behind these guys is that they started off as a pretty typical rock trio until the front guy got his hands on a moog synthesizer. it was schprockets from then on. i think they lost brad when the front guy alternated between distorting moog feedback and yelling “trash bag helmet”. i was still holding on though. other people were yelling, “you suck!” which i’m betting was sarcasm.
then came the white stripes. jack white can really wail. i dug their performance but unfortunately (for someone, i’m sure) i was unable to really concentrate. i kept thinking about a dream i had last month. i was in this movie theater helping one of the employees fold up a large movie poster. but the more we folded in the larger it got. the movie theater guy started getting pretty visibly nervous. it did not help matters when flames started coming out of the folds of the poster. a crowd had already formed by then. it became apparent to me why the movie guy was so nervous. turns out that the flames coming from the folds were really flames from hell. the devil poked his head out. and started talking to the movie guy. really threatening like. i was holdind him back. the devil looked like this australian scuba guide i met in palau. and he, in turn, looked like freddie mercury. the devil was telling the movie guy about how he was going to go the hell and how hell really sucked for guys like the movie theater guy. i had the devil in a sort of loose headlock and although the devil was totally ignoring me i still felt like i should prolly stay out of the whole affair. but i did end up interrupting the devil. i said, “that’s just like your assessment.”
what a show!
on friday i watched i decided to bike around town with my camera. i mainly took pictures of or near the charles river.
i took some pictures of the blackstone generating facility on memorial drive. reed, my boss, curator of the “largest collection of images of super 8 equipment”, has some weird mini obsession with this place. i thought i would take a couple pictures of it for his site.
last week this other guy i work with made me laugh so hard my stomach hurt. on the way to lunch me and nelson picked up some “cookies & m&m’s” from some guerilla type marketer. getting back to “the office” with our lunches i took the candy bars out of my pocket and threw them on the lunch table.
“whoa! where’d these come from?” - my boss again, who is also always interested in new objects. he is ever refining an estimate of the number of distinct objects in his house. “jim. do you think a box of paper clips counts as one object or should i count each paper clip?”
“there’s someone handing them out up by the copley t stop.”
“oh my god! what the hell is this!?” chris, the other guy, who foiled my plans for a handlebar moustache after my trip by giving himself one first. “i can’t believe guys actually took these!”
“it’s not like we paid for them.”
“unconscionable. who would eat that?”
“what’re you talking about? where i went to junior high you could trade smokes for cookies with m&m’s in them.”
“they look like they have anthrax in them.”
i was teetering on the edge of losing my calm, serious work demeanor at this point. the utter vehemence that had been not so gradually building up in his attitude was poised for the kill. then nelson opened one to eat it.
“jesus! it looks like a 4 year old made that.”
“har har … !”
“excuse me, could you keep it down we’re on a conference call.”
game. set. match.
* i met this guy in new york once who used to tour with iggy pop as his drummer. he told me that iggy made everyone watch the jerk before each performance. wow.