Sovetskoe Foto >> Seeing you breathing is my inspiration

Sovetskoe Foto - "Cellophane Laughter"

(Rebel Rec. / SPV Recordings, 1991)

I don't really know anything about this band, especially what this song title meant.  That really irritates me.  While looking for their music on eBay, I ascertained that their name was taken from an old Soviet photography magazine called... Sovetskoe Foto.  The members of the band, at least on this album, were Georg S. Huber (bass), Walter Sterr (guitars), Stefan Busch (vocals), and Marc Turiaux (drums).  They hailed from Rosenheim, Germany, but recorded this album, The Humidity, in NYC with esteemed noise rock producer Martin Bisi.  I bought this CD on a whim for a dollar at the Tulane Record Raid in March of last year, drawn in by the cover art and song titles.  To read my overly long review of it, go here and look under the username shockofDAYLIGHT.  The song itself starts off funky and sleazy, and would be pretty memorable if it just continued on that way for its duration.  But it undergoes a sudden Helmet-style breakdown and then a speedy tribal part.  Just amazing, breathtaking musical talent, especially the rhythm section (translation: drummer + bassist).  Though the rest of the album doesn't live up to this song, the jarring, Bare Minimum-esque "Necromancer" and the ultra-funky, The Pop Group-esque "Stay Tonight" are noteworthy.

"Seeing you breathing is my inspiration" is a blithely romantic line upon first listen, and later becomes evident as a great pun when you realize what the medical definition of "inspiration," as part of the system known as respiration, means.  Also buried under the instrumental fireworks is the line "Struck my eyes with a thousand lights."  Jim Thirlwell (a.k.a. Foetus) sings guest vox on the feral "Forget".

Fun Fact: Sovetskoe Foto's publicity company was named Art Rock Mgmt.

CDs in my car on March 8th; top one is Secret Life Of Machines by Doldrums.

Friday: Ate at Clancy's with parents, Em & Damion. Met one of D's brothers, who played hoops at (I think) Swarthmore.  I had the best bread pudding of my life for dessert.

Saturday: Went to Mandeville & took my customary stroll through the Northlake Nature Center, which is sort of a Zenlike ritual that I always do when I'm up there.  The flora really is quite different from that of the south shore of the lake.  A big black snake with yellow spots slithered right in front of me, and I, a former aspiring herpetologist, was sadly unable to identify it.  I semi-accidentally took a root pup of one of my all-time favorite tree species, Vaccinium arboreum (Sparkleberry or Tree Huckleberry).  It has some roots so hopefully it will live.  The pup I took in Dec. 2010 died.
Then went to a great plant nursery called Inwood Gardens in Covington.  They had dozens of unlabeled cacti & succulents, so I volunteered to write their Latin names on the sides of their pots.  So I did this off the top of my head (no books) for about half an hour.  Finally one of my useless talents came in handy... The lady working in that greenhouse seemed pretty bemused.  Bought an Agave guiengola, which I never thought I'd see in person, much less be able to buy.  Just look at this motherfucker reclining in a group of them, living the high life while you sit here on your computer.

Tuesday: Went to Baton Rouge to see School Of Seven Bells and EXITMUSIC at the Spanish Moon.  On the way, I stopped at the Blockbuster Video that's going OOB and scored a bunch more obscure foreign (mostly) flicks for $2 each.  Then I hit up FYE and got lots of kewl cheapo used CDs (The Heart Throbs, Hooverphonic, The Railway Children, Secret Machines, Sunny Day Real Estate, King Missile, Heather Duby + Elemental, Teenage Fanclub).  Passed on a Zapp CD due to its lame song titles.  I made it to the essentially empty club just in time, and saw SVIIB's Ben Curtis shooting pool upstairs.  As befitting their Radiohead-based name, EXITMUSIC were not too exciting, kinda dirgey, like Beach House meets Swans or something.  I think I just heard half of the blogosphere pop a boner after hearing that description.  They opened with "Sea," and closed with a great new song, "Sparks Of Light," from their upcoming LP Passage.  Their guitarist played it using a cello bow, Jimmy Page-style.  They were so loud that all kinds of things were rattling throughout the club, and I hence didn't even try to take a video clip of them.  SVIIB came on like a well-oiled machine and delivered a great performance to a crowd of only 40-50 people.  I saw them open for Interpol last April in front of almost 1000 people, so I was crestfallen that they had to headline for so few people.  The club had only put up a few crude flyers, so I mainly blame the club's management.  This time SVIIB had four members, whereas last year it was two, or maybe three.  Anyway, their new LP Ghostory is the one that I predicted would make them Big, but it seems the public is not paying attention, even though Katy Perry(!) is apparently a fan, according to every recent YouTube commenter.  (E.g. "katy perry sent me here XD")  Their setlist: Intro (sampled chanting of "I am here... I am here..."), Iamundernodisguise, Scavenger, Windstorm, Bye Bye Bye, Love Play, White Elephant Coat, Lafaye, The Night, I L U, White Wind, Low Times, My Cabal.  No encore.  No "Babelonia," which was their first song at the NOLA show last year.  Bought a cool white t-shirt afterwards with the "Kiss Them For Me" 7" cover art on it.

The two logo things were flickering lights of varying colors via MIDI; my flash unfortunately negated it.
Not shown: 1.) The entertaining way that the singer shakes her head from side to side after every line. 2.) The guitarist's SVIIB chest tattoo.

Offensive wallpapers

Planets with similar climates: The Pop Group - "Sense Of Purpose" (~1980), Shudder To Think - "Goat" (1992) & "Gang Of $" (1994), Gang Of Four - "Damaged Goods" (1979), Live Skull - "Machete" (1987), Polvo - "Highwire Moves" (1995), Fugazi - "Sieve-Fisted Find" (1990), Tanner - "Hey Jigsaw" (1995).

Oval >> Meddling machine muzak

Oval - "Shop In Store"

(Thrill Jockey Records, ~1994-96)

I saw, and hated, Oval opening for Tortoise in May of '98.  Since the other dude from the "band" had recently absconded, it was now just a solo project of Markus Popp.  He stood there on the stage while staring dispassionately, and pretty much unblinkingly, at a Mac laptop computer, occasionally clicking it to adjust some algorithm or trigger a sample or what have you.  I exited the Howlin' Wolf shaking my head in disbelief after 4 or 5 songs, then returned about half an hour later to catch Tortoise's triumphant set.

"Shop In Store" is one of two bonus tracks added to the U.S. issue of Oval's influential third album 94Diskont.  For some unknown reason, despite hating Oval live, I bought it on LP in summer '98 from Thrill Jockey mailorder.  This U.S. LP comes with a bonus 12" of remixes by very hip dudes: Jim O'Rourke, Mouse On Mars, Scanner and Christian Vogel.  (To summarize, the German CD came out in 1995 on Mille Plateaux Records, and only has 5 tracks; the U.S. LP+12" came out in 1996 on Thrill Jockey, with a a whopping 11 tracks.)  Few of the tracks on the album have as much vigor as "Shop In Store," with most of them taking on a more aquatic, ambient feel, so you may be disappointed if you go buy the whole album after enjoying "SIS."

This album and Oval's previous one, Systemisch, pretty much invented the whole glitch genre, and "Shop In Store" introduced an undulating rhythmic quality to the genre.  It's a pretty revolutionary track no matter how you slice it.  Read some interesting info on 94Diskont here.  If you hadn't guessed from the music and the name of the genre, Oval made its music by literally flipping over CDs, scratching them up with metal implements, and then playing them and isolating little segments to create longer loops, etc.  At least that's how I've always understood it, though I'm sure I'm omitting some steps.  In any case, this kind of music could be described as both the literal and figurative destruction of music as most people know it.  And I remember reading somewhere back in the day that he actually used mainstream pop n' rock CDs, which makes the end result even cooler.  Alvin Lucier pioneered the concept of making music out of non-music with his piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" decades ago, and others have pushed the envelope further.  Christian Marclay intentionally scratched up vinyl records in the '80s and recorded / looped the skipping and crackling sounds they made upon playback.  Oval found a little niche and exploited it well for a while, but it cannot be denied that they were doing exactly what Marclay did in the '80s, albeit with CDs instead of vinyl.  (One kind of plastic instead of another.)  I think Oval is still around, but I stopped following them a decade-ish ago after buying the album Dok and realizing there wasn't much room for their sound to evolve within its self-imposed straitjacket.  Any chimpanzee or lemur could theoretically scratch up CDs or LPs and play them back and call it music, and I'm sure someday a record label will put out just such an album, garnering an insightful 7.4 review from a greenhorn Pitchfork scribe hopped up on a tall espresso.

The full album version of "Do While" is 24 minutes long; a music video was made for a drastically shortened version of it named "Do While ⌘X":

In 1995, Popp joined with Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars to form the very Oval-esque duo Microstoria.  I believe I got their remix CD Reprovisers in that same Thrill Jockey order in summer '98.  TJ also included a cool promo poster combining album covers by Microstoria (the Init Ding and _Snd album covers), Oval (94Diskont), and I think Mouse On Mars.  I'll have to dig it up and photograph it sometime.

An episode of the show How The States Got Their Shapes ran a fascinating bit last week about a proposed 51st state called Jefferson, which is apparently gaining a lot of momentum.

In addition to a card with an audio clip of the first 15 secs. of this Phil Dunphy quote from the pilot episode of Modern Family, my sister gave me the new issue of GQ for my birthday:

In the article, she mentions that her dad gave her Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground for her 12th birthday.  She then became legally emancipated form her parents at age 15.  Coincidence?  I tried reading that book a decade or so ago but found it too miserable for me to get very far.

On Saturday & Sunday I started putting in an herb garden in my mom's friend's yard.  On Sunday at Lowe's I got a sweet cactus which I believe is a Mammillaria celsiana or M. muehlenpfordtii, but I can't tell yet.  I also finished up a painting, my first one done on the new easel, during the Super Bowl.  The commercials were incredibly bad.  The Saints (boasting arguably the best offense in NFL history) would've throttled the Patriots (with arguably the worst defense in NFL history), let's not kid ourselves.  Pats diehard Maria Menounos lost a Super Bowl bet and had to wear a Giants bikini in Times Square, so thank you, Mario Manningham.

Planets with similar climates: Nobukazu Takemura - "Icefall" (1999), Replikants - "Agent Oranges (Fancy Mix)" (1994), O.S.T. - "Fe" (2001), Kreidler - "Cube" (1998).

To Rococo Rot >> Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

To Rococo Rot - "Prado"

(Mute Records / City Slang Records, 1999)

The palindromically-named To Rococo Rot shared bassist Stefan Schneider with the band from the previous post, Kreidler.  In addition to being based in a differrent German city, Berlin (through which my sister may be wandering at this very moment), TRR were much more electronic, and rarely funky or rock-ish like Kreidler, instead mining a more clinical, laboratory-friendly vein.

This track, from their album The Amateur View, transports me away to some sort of beautiful, near-empty house or art gallery, or any kind of empty, sanitary building with white walls and lots of glass, located in a cold place.  The album cover might have something to do with that, as might the fact that the track is literally named after a famous art museum.

Cassette version, released only in Poland

If you listen closely, it sounds like there's some harp buried low in the mix, or maybe just a simulation of a harp on a synth.  For such a minimalistic song, there's really a lot going on in it, and it rewards repeated close listenings.  The real bass guitar lends a smoky jazz café feel, and some of the drumming sounds real too, though the backing track is clearly digital drums.  Check out these photos of the band (+ guest I-Sound, a.k.a. Craig Willingham, who played on "A Little Asphalt Here And There") from the CD booklet:

Yep, lots of white space... so very Euro.  Even the bars are all called "Bar" over there.

I got into this album in '99, around the time I got into Kreidler, simply because I liked Kreidler and hence had to check out their sister band.  This album is definitely not as great overall as Kreidler's The Amateur View, but has some nice little gems on it, such as "I Am In The World With You" and "This Sandy Piece."  The album is apparently considered a classic amongst those who are experts in the genre, so go figure.  The single "Telema" starts off pretty weak, but becomes decent:

(Warning: Cute cats at the 2-minute mark.)

On Monday, I dropped off some pups from my amazing agave which I've had for about 5 years.  Pups are the little baby plants that some plants, and most desert plants, put off at their bases, as a way of asexual reproduction; they can be removed and stuck into their own pot, and presto, you have a new free plant.  I gave one to Hebert's Nursery in Thibodaux and another to Starke's in Houma.  I also brought the mama plant, as I always do when giving pups from this particular plant, which I believe is either an Agave parryi or an Agave potatorum, or a subspecies of either of those, or a hybrid between the two.  I took a photo of the parent plant that morning:

This plant is really solidly built, even for an agave.  It practically feels like it's made out of concrete, especially the center spear/rosette.  You can see the outlines of the teeth on adjacent leaves, from when they were pressed firmly together for months before opening.  As with all agaves, it will die after flowering, but that should be more than a decade away.  This thing is my baby, so I can't even bear to think about that.  Here are two articles about agaves by an expert in the subject:
Introduction to agaves
Selected large agave species

After visiting the nurseries, I got this 7 oz. little thing of booze called Alcatraz Sour Apple (by some company called Johnny Bootlegger) at a Shell station.  Then I got two little cacti at Lowe's.  They had this nice portable walk-in 8'x6' greenhouse set up, for $200, and I decided to get one in the fall for my exponentially-expanding collection of desert plants, rather than lugging them all inside or into the carport.  Then I haggled down the price on a big Serenoa repens (Saw Palmetto) at the Home Depot across the street (yes, Houma is growing rapidly) which I plan on returning to buy next week, then found a basketball court in Gray that was too covered in rain puddles to play on.  But I was psyched to find it, and will be playing there a lot.  Then I drove back up to Thibodaux and played some hoops on a very puddly court.  This guy ran up to me and asked if I wanted to play him, so I said yeah and he squeezed my hand so hard during the handshake that I thought he might've broken it.  He said he hadn't played basketball in a few years, but had boundless confidence.  We played 21, and I beat him 21-0, then he thanked me and went back to sit with his two female companions under a gazebo, so I shot around some more, then he comes running back and I thought he was going to stab me or something, but he told me that I had to let him redeem himself, so we played again and I won 21-4.  Then I shot around some more and went home, stopping along the way at Chackbay Nursery to right this big juniper that always tips over in the wind.  This nursery has been pretty much abandoned for a year or two, but they left a lot of big trees & plants there.  This being the "country," there's no front gate or anything, yet no one ever steals anything from the place.  Can you imagine any store doing that in New Orleans?  I made a note to bring some bricks down next time to put in the juniper's pot to prevent tippage.  On this trip I listened to The Cure's Wish twice, specifically to a spare copy of it that I got at the Record Raid on Saturday for 50 cents.  I heard a few people talking about Amy Winehouse's bucket-kickage the previous night, but no one exactly seemed surprised.  Some other good or potentially good stuff I got:
Christian Scott - Rewind That CD ($3)
Chet Baker - Career 1952-1988 2xCD compilation in a mini box ($3)
Pharoah Sanders - Love Will Find A Way LP ($4)
Sade - "Never As Good As The First Time" 7" (free)
Psychedelic Furs - All Of This And Nothing compilation CD ($1) (already had it on CD & cassette)
Mats Gustafsson & David Stackenäs - Blues CD ($0.50)
Dayna Kurtz - The Beautiful Yesterday Sessions EP CD ($0.50)
U2 - 18 Singles compilation CD ($3)
Terence Trent D'Arby - Symphony Or Damn CD ($1)
Crowded House - Crowded House CD ($1)
Lous Armstrong - Louis' Love Songs CD ($0.50)
M83 - Before The Dawn Heals Us CD ($3)

I passed on a copy of Faith No More's first album on vinyl for $15, and I kind of regret it.  I was vaguely planing on going to see Jolie Holland at Tipitina's that night (Saturday), but I decided her voice still annoys me like it did the last time I skipped her, ca. 2007, so I passed and drove back home, stopping first to buy a baby Dracaena draco at a Home Depot, even though I swore I would never get one.  Then I stopped at the WalMart in Boutte, which was the first time I'd gone to a WM since deciding to boycott them in '05.  The reason is that I wanted a new pair of the black Brahma boots I'd gotten there, and apparently no other store carries Brahmas.  The desire for a specific product can sometimes win out over idealism.  I was impressed by their gardening section.  I listened to the Christian Scott CD twice in my car that night; look for its first track to be posted on here sometime soon.

Planets with similar climates: Not sure yet; maybe some Autechre, Bark Psychosis or Seefeel

Kreidler >> That's okay, I keep the pictures

Kreidler - "She Woke Up And The World Had Changed"

(Mute Records / Kiff SM Records, 1998)

Kreidler (pronounced "CRIED-lur," not "CREED-lur") was a post-rock group based in Düsseldorf, Germany, which seamlessly combined "real" instruments with electronics to create retro-futuristic music that can appeal to both club kids and serious avant-garde music geeks.  For some unknown reason, the album is called Appearance And The Park.  The strange, glitchy beat/riff of this track always amazes me, with its sort of tropical feel, maybe because it reminds me of steel drumming.  Seriously, why are cutting-edge rappers not sampling beats like this?  Every song on the album is instrumental, except for two versions of "Coldness," which was apparently their jokey attempt at writing a pop hit:

I first heard Kreidler while we were drawing in an art class at Loyola called Foundations 2, in March '99.  (I was a biology major and art minor.)  That probably sounds really pretentious or made-up -- American art student hears obscure German electronic band on college radio while in class -- but it's true.  (The class consisted of me, a gay dude, and 13 females.  The gay dude literally overdosed on GHB that semester during class one day, and had to be taken to the hospital, but that's another story.)  That was the month that this album came out in the U.S., after having been released the previous year in Germany.  We were allowed to play the radio sometimes, and I usually made sure it was tuned to WTUL, the station of the college right next door, Tulane.  The song was the rubbery and strange "Au Pair," whose video I discovered about a decade later:

Kreidler's drummer, Thomas Klein, is one of the best to ever pick up a pair of sticks, period, and is obviously massively influenced by his fellow countryman Jaki Liebezeit of CAN.

It's always hard to come up with a title when I post an instrumental song.  This one comes from the strange bit of writing on the back cover:

Uh, okay.  Richard Brautigan would be proud...  I think the coffee & tea bit might be a reference to CAN's "Bring Me Coffee Or Tea" on their seminal LP Tago Mago.

Yesterday, during some rain I finally joined the local library, which is only a few blocks from me, but not exactly a bastion of modern literature, this being a town of 6,000 people.  It's one of those little country libraries whose parking lot is usually empty except on days when there are a few school buses due to a school scheduling a field trip to it, which always gave me the impression that it was some sort of children's library.
"Hi, I'd like to join."
The chubby, flaxen-haired, somewhat cute, twentysomething girl at the front counter under the fluorescent lights looks at me with a blank, bored expression.  I remember that she was sitting in that very spot the only other time I had come here, 3 or 4 years earlier.
"You mean get a library card?"
"Yeah. [Pause] ...What else would I mean?"
I felt kind of bad about that last part, but I mean, come on.  Do I want to join your swinger's club, or your African safari group, or your fondue workshop?  No, probably not, I mainly just want a library card.

I picked out three books, then drove down 20 miles to Thibodaux, got a little white-spined Mammillaria cactus and some dwarf cattail bulbs at Lowe's, and then shot hoops after the rain had ended there, which had brought the temperature down from about 95 degrees to about 80.  This gangly blond kid of about 13 rode his bike up and started shooting on another goal.  I never watch other people play while I'm playing, because I like to be the center of attention when it comes to basketball, my all-consuming passion; but I couldn't help noticing that he shot the way that most people do before developing enough arm strength to shoot the right way, meaning above one's head rather than off of the shoulder.  So when one of his bricks careened over to my court I said "Can I give you a suggestion?  You should start shooting the ball over your head, because when you shoot it from your shoulder, the ball blocks your vision as it passes in front of your eyes."  He didn't say anything, and went back and kept shooting the same way as before, and bricking as much as before.  I was like: "The fuck?"  So I just went back to draining three after three, hoping that my actions would speak more clearly than my words.  I understand the whole "Don't talk to strangers" thing, and I didn't talk to strangers when I was a kid, but this kind of annoyed me, thought he fact that I was shirtless probably played into his lack of desire to talk to me.  I then went to O'Reilly's auto parts and got some wiper blades, and then went to the Rouses grocery store, and weirdly enough, while I was walking in, he was walking out with his parents.  Probably thought I was stalking him or something...  I wanted to ask his parents, "Didn't you see Scott Loeffelholz play?"  See, the thing is, I used to shoot from the shoulder.  In 8th grade, I practiced with the high school team every day (after my middle school team's practice got out), and started on the JV team.  So on game days, I played the 8th grade game and then the JV game.  After one 8th grade or JV game that season, in which I went 14 of 15 from the line in an overtime win, my best game of that season, I was feeling pretty good about myself.  Joel Loeffelholz, father of the high school team's star player, Scott Loeffelholz (one of my idols), pulled me aside and... you guessed it... solemnly told me that I should start shooting from over my head.  He told me the same damn thing I told this kid 20 years later, the only difference being that I actually realized the importance of his suggestion and actually started shooting from over my head, which changed my life.  Joel was/is a lawyer, and helped get me out of a minor traffic ticket a few years later, so I owe him doubly.  His son Michael, one of my classmates (we moshed together at the aforementioned Tool / Flaming Lips / Failure concert in '94), now apparently works for Atlantic Records.  The weird thing is that Scott is 6'5" and Michael is like 5'7", supposedly due to his bad asthma.  I think he's the one who got me into Quicksand in spring of '93, but that might've been Ryan Massey or Blake Massey.  I know Michael first told us to check out the band Morphine, in early '93.

Sent to me by my sister the other day:

Remember Razr phones?  The rest of it reads "Raveonettes, Church, and...Kele haha)"

Weird novel I checked out from the library

Well, I'm off to the Record Raid at Siberia & the Hi-Ho Lounge now.

Update, 8/14/11: Printed at the bottom of my library receipt:
What did the sheet of paper say to the pencil ?
You've got a good point !

Planets with similar climates: Euphone - "Newscast" (2000), Trans Am - "American Kooter" (1996), Kraftwerk - "Nummern" ("Numbers") (1981), Oval - "Shop In Store" (1994), Stu Phillips - "Knight Rider Theme" (1982), Schema - "We Think We're Sane" (2000), Harald Grosskopf - "So Weit, So Gut" (1980), FCS North - "Things Will Change" (2003).

Karlheinz Stockhausen >> Struktur from silence

∆    Karlheinz Stockhausen - "Struktur X"    ∆

^ (Stockhausen-Verlag Records, 1959/60) ^

I didn't mention in my last post that I had gotten a speeding ticket the previous day, mainly because I've noticed that a lot of people's blogs can come off as a constant litany of complaints, and this one has unintentionally slid into that area before.  I was listening to the tail end of this track when I got the ticket (on a mix CD-R I had burned myself of future Blowtorch Baby songs to transfer from my old computer to my current one), so here you go.  Ignore the very beginning, which is apparently just K.S. turning a pitch-shifting or delay knob.  It's kind of funny to hear Brian Eno called the inventor of ambient music, when K-Stock and Pauline Oliveros were pioneering it years/decades before Eno first laced up his glittery platform boots in the supremely irritating Roxy Music.  I love lots of Eno's stuff, don't get me wrong... but he really didn't invent anything, he just popularized it, which in itself is an admirable feat, I guess.  I rarely care about who did something first; I just care about who did it best.  The name of this post is a nod to the stunning 1984 album Structures From Silence by ambient bigwig Steve Roach.  (The "X" in this track's title is a Roman numeral ten, since it's part of his numbered "Struktur" series, which he recorded from 1959 to 1960.)  This track apparently did not see the light of day until being included on a 1991 compilation CD of rare K.S. recordings called Kontakte.  I have a cool little book called Stockhausen: Life And Work (1976) that I would recommend both to a Stockhausen newbie and to a diehard fan:

I also recommend listening to this track on two different players simultaneously, at different points in the song, of course.

I've only paid for one speeding ticket in my 19 years of driving, since let's just say my dad knows some people who know some people.  For the one last week, I was going 43 in a 30 zone that I thought was a 40.  The cop was the nicest person ever, and he was ridiculously polite and practically apologetic the whole time, probably because this is a pretty blatant speed trap.  My previous interaction with a police officer, in Baton Rouge a year earlier (both officers were black, and I'm white, if that matters) was also as excellent as this one.  I believe I may have gotten out of a ticket in the B.R. incident in part because I was wearing a John Coltrane t-shirt, but this is just conjecture; it was mainly because I was lost late at night in an unfamiliar city.  It's easy for me to remember that date because it was right after I saw Red Sparowes on the night that Duke narrowly beat Butler for the NCAA hoops championship.  Anyway, people who don't think cops are cool and helpful dudes are just people who haven't met these two.

On Monday morning I talked to this girl and was pretty much on cloud nine thinking about her for the rest of the day.  On Tuesday I saw an impressive set by School Of Seven Bells (abrv. SVIIB) opening for Interpol.  I wasn't too thrilled by their two albums, but live they come across much better, with tribal Jaki Liebezeit (CAN)-style drumming and great shoegazey guitarscapes, plus they were very loud.  The singer does this adorably hilarious thing where she shakes her hair from side to side between almost every single song line.  She probably doesn't even realize she's doing it.  Unfortunately, they didn't play the song I most wanted to hear, "Dust Devil".  It was my third time seeing Interpol, and each time they've had a different bassist.  Say what you want about them (Paul's voice / lyrics, the snazzy suits, the coifs), but they have truly great / funky basslines and a top-notch drummer, and every once in a blue moon they can still crank out a great tune, though not like they once did.

Planets with similar climates: Probably some Lustmord (album Heresy), William Basinski, Fetisch Park, Brian Eno


Currently eating or drinking: Chobani Greek yogurt (blueberry); Powerade Play (grape) - new lower-sugar, higher-vitamin Powerade; Stefano Foods four cheese Mini Rip-n'-Dip; G.S. Gelato (coconut) - the best ice cream / gelato I've ever had