11:30 - Janeane Garofolo

* Saturday morning revision, blah blah blah...see posts below. *

So...there were two comics before Janeane came on. First was Reggie Watts, who did this incredible comedy out of songs that he built on one of those electronic sample looping machines, and also "stories" that he told. He had this very intelligent, dry, somewhat random and bizarre sense of humor, which Heidi and I both completely loved. He was really, really good, and everyone should immediately go watch whatever they can find of him, even if it's just on YouTube, because he's fantastic.


Next was Paul F. Tompkins ("Tompkins, point your rear end in the direction of the principal's office." "Awwwwww...peas!"), who was pretty funny, but had a very hard act to follow (see above), and was pretty distracted by music bleeding through the wall behind him from the place next door to Esther's Follies. His best bits were about the little snatches of conversation that you get living in a city and walking everywhere, he had some pretty good ones.

So, at long last, Garofolo! However, she was really struggling. She seemed to be actually depressed, because she spent the bulk of her time talking about how depressed she was, not in a funny, written comedy sort of way, but in a very scattered way that left everyone kind of uncomfortable. I was trying to figure out if she was doing sort of Andy Kaufmanesque anti-comedy, but it didn't really seem like that either, because she'd dig through her ever present notebook for material and do little bits of it, but that didn't really go over very well either.

So we're both glad we went to see her, but she wasn't on her game. Just as an aside, she is about 4'10" tall, which is visually just kind of a shock when she first comes out.

10:30 band - Paddy Casey

* Saturday morning revision - this entire post was written on Saturday morning, so, in a sense, it is, in itself, a Saturday morning revision. Just to keep things honest and above-board.

Also, in an addendum to the revision to the 9:30 pm post below, I think my suggestion for the new blog name might just be "Typewriter Monkeys", but I'm not at all sure that it's not actually too self-referential and navel-gazey for its own good. *

So, I stayed for Paddy Casey at 10:30, and Heidi met me there at Soho Lounge. Paddy was doing a singer-songwriter with a band kind of thing, and it wasn't immediately gripping, so after about 2 songs we headed over to try to catch Janeane Garofolo's set at Esther's Follies at 11:30.

We got in, no problem, and saw a very uneven mix of comics. The "hosts" (I'm not sure why comedy clubs feel like the people that INTRODUCE the comedians need to do comedy as they do so, I guess that's the only way you could ever get someone to work in a comedy club introducing other people, to throw them a bone and let them do 5 minutes of material themselves) were uniformly terrible, and in one case, actually offensively misogynistic. If you're going to violate social norms for behavior in an aggressive manner for shock value, please have some sort of point you're making, or at least BE FUNNY WHEN YOU DO SO, or else you're just a jackass.

So the first funny routine we saw was from Brian Posehn, whom it would take way too long to explain who he is, so I'll just put his picture up here. He had some funny bits about cats, which is a pretty good way to get started because it's an easy laugh, and he had some good relationship type stuff about him and his wife as well. He was solid, and since he mentioned Halo not ONCE, but TWICE in his 13 minute set, I now have a small altar to him set up in our bedroom.

9:30 band - Channel One

Channel One - electronica with a retro 80s New Wave feel, maybe? Like A Flock of Seagulls covering Radiohead badly.

* Saturday morning revision - I have no revision to this entry, it is as perfect and succinct a description of this band as I could ever write, even if I were an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters, or if I were the Internet. I've never quite gotten, as an aside, why people usually say "an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters", as if it would totally throw off the dynamic if some of the monkeys had to share typewriters...I mean, we're trying to cut down on OPEX here, people, don't you think we could get by with a NEARLY infinite number of typewriters?

In a related aside, I think the first aside may have spoiled the aforementioned succinctness and, dare I say, perfection of this review. *

8:30 band - Driving by Night

Driving by Night - post U2 Irish midtempo earnest vocals power ballad rock. kinda painful actually.

*Saturday morning revision - It was kind of funny, the lead singer said his, "Good night, Cleveland, we love you!!" thing and left the stage while the band kind of rocked out to the end of their last song, and he just made his way through the audience and ended up standing a foot and a half from me where I had been perched in the back corner of the room through the whole set. He seemed like a really nice guy, not nearly as pretentious in person as he had seemed on stage. I think he should take up the guitar, because it may just have been he was struggling with the "what things to do when you're the lead singer but don't play guitar" deal... *

SxSW liveblogging - Friday night

So, tonight is for Irish music for me @ Soho Lounge. Heidi will probably be down later for Janeane Garofolo.

Midnight - The Cliks

So...The Cliks, all girl band from Ontario, Canada...great show! They brought the rock'n'roll, and had interesting songs, lyrically and musically, I thought. Heidi has a girl crush, she's not sure on which member yet, although the early money is on the drummer. We picked up their CD, and Heidi got a t-shirt.

May I just say, as an aside, that 6th street is pretty fucking dingy, even at night. I know it's SxSW and there is tons of foot traffic and all that, but it looks rough down there...seedy, but not in a good way.

SxSW liveblog

So REM ruled last night, I guess we've established that. My fave song o' the nite was either Fall on Me or Electrolite, both rocked.

Tonite, H and I started out by checking out the Texas Burlesque show at Esther's Follies. The part we saw featured Kitty Kitty Bang Bang performing with the No Salvation Army Band backing them with live versions of Tom Waits tunes. Exotic dancing and Tom Waits...does it get any better than that? I think Heidi would have favored a different soundtrack, but she quite liked the show, it was obvious all the womyn were enjoying themselves.

Now we're watching Patti Hurst Shifter, whom I would characterize as an average bar band from NC. We came to see The Cliks, a Canadian chick band....I'll keep you posted.

REM rules

REM rules

11 pm Dead Confederates

11 pm Dead Confederates loud hard str8 ahead post Nirvana rock. they fucking brought the goods.

10 pm Paper Cranes

Paper Cranes at 10, they were cool. Lead singer equal parts Crispin Glover & Elaine from Seinfeld, but she can sing.

9 pm some band

The 9 pm band was pretty good. Seems like things r already getting tighter b4 rem.

SxSW night of live blogging!

I'm in, chumps!

Spencer's Obnoxious SXSW blog, day 3

OK, so let's get a little business out of the way, Heidi and I went on Tuesday night to see Bi the Way, a documentary made by two women who traversed this great nation of ours (without any onion-tear resistant goggles, nonetheless!) asking folks their thoughts about bi-sexuality, and sexuality in general, and the kids these days and their wild ways, and stuff like that. It was pretty interesting, and definitely food for lots of conversation afterward, which is always positive in a movie.

But, now to the BIG news...R.E.M. is playing at this year's SxSW!!!!! At Stubbs BBQ joint on 7th street! And I'm going to try to go!!!!!!!

Seriously, it's one of those cosmic coincidence moments...my favorite band, who will probably never play a smaller venue than this again in the state of Texas in my lifetime, does so in the ONE YEAR that H just happens to get free badges to the event.

So, wish me luck getting in to the show, and hopefully I'll be posting about 7,000 words tomorrow about how cool the show was and all that, and maybe some pics from my cell phone of me at the backstage VIP party! or not.

Spencer's Obnoxious SXSW blog, day 2

So, last night, 2 more movies (with a short film before each of them) for me, Heidi took the night off to get some sleep as well as some time with the kids.
I went to the Dobie and saw, first, The Apology Line, a short documentary about a phone line set up for people to call in and apologize to someone on. Responses ranged from the obvious ("Fuck off! This apology line is stupid!") to the disturbing, like a woman apologizing to an authority figure in her life for being stupid, making it clear that he told her so constantly and harshly. It was very interesting and well done, I thought. There seems to be a longer version in development, so that will probably be very interesting to see.
That preceded Don't Get Me Wrong, a documentary set in a Romanian psychiatric hospital which largely featured two gentlemen who each believed they could influence the weather. Again, really interesting movie, I thought the director did a really good job of staying out of the way throughout the movie, but putting in just a couple of narrative touches that really tied the whole thing together.
The second half of my double feature included the short documentary Ubuntu, which was not in fact about a Linux operating system, but was instead about a guy working with kids in an impoverished area of Johannesburg, South Africa. A very short film, but interesting and enlightening, to some degree.
The last movie I saw was The Ostrich Testimonies, a documentary about D.C. "Rooster" Cogburn, a guy who was instrumental in getting ostrich farming established in the U.S., only to have his growing flock pretty much decimated in 2004 when some balloonists launched from about a half a mile away from his ranch, which (he [and some ballooning experts] claimed) caused his birds to stampede and ended up with him putting down over half his flock (some 800 odd birds) as a result of the injuries they suffered. He sued the balloonists' insurance company for the cost of the birds, his physical infrastructure, and the $3 million contract that he lost out on when he couldn't fulfill it because his birds were mostly dead, but he lost his civil suit and all subsequent appeals.
This one was a little less well made, I thought, because inevitably when you present something like this, people want to judge for themselves by the end of the movie whether the guy got screwed or not, and there wasn't a lot of the hard evidence from the trial presented, it was more just sort of implied, or even stated, that he HAD been screwed over. So even though I left thinking that he probably was, I also sort of felt that the director was definitely trying to make me leave with that thought, so it kind of undermined it.
Anyway, I think Heidi and I are catching one movie tonight, and then tomorrow...well, I'll blog more about that then! ; )

Spencer's Obnoxious SXSW Daily Blog!

Hey kids, Spencer here from rainy, dreary Austin TX, temporarily the center of the entertainment world's attention as we host our annual South by Southwest music, film, video game, and interactive media festival! This festival is otherwise known as "SXSW", or "South by" if you want to feel like an industry insider/dipshit face.
So, why do I mention this fact? Well, someone near and dear to me, VERY near and VERY dear (with the initial "H") managed to score us a couple of badges to this year's event! That means that I am smack dab in the middle of attending my VERY FIRST SXSW events! Yes, I know that I've lived in Austin since the damn thing started, but I've never had quite the right combination of free time, disposable income, and committed interest to take the plunge and buy a wristband. But since these were free, H and I are making the time this year to try to take in as much of the festival as we can.
We got started on Sunday morning, as we went to The Wild Horse Redemption, a cool documentary about prisoners in Colorado doing "horse whispering" to train wild mustangs from Montana that are brought in from the wild to combat over-population. Then I stuck around for a program of animated short films, my favorites were Madame Tulti-Putli and I hate you don't touch me (or, Bat and Hat).
Then, last night at midnight, H and I went together to see Dance of the Dead, which was way better than it needed to be for what it was, a zombie movie set on prom night. It's got that smart, funny kind of writing that it's always a pleasure to find in a movie, because it's pretty unexpected these days, at least for me.
For tonight, I'm planning on checking out a couple of documentaries while Heidi does a little recovering and hangs out with the dogs...I'll put up some more mini-reviews after I get to peep those.
So, wish me luck, hopefully I won't catch some kind of weird show business disease from one of our Hollywood visitors!