Smog Report

My internet connection is cranky like a wet cat and it's been refusing to load pages owned by Google. So I've been storing up posts in my cheeks, waiting for the day when the wireless fuckwittage would stop. And lo, dear readers, it was today.

The Friday before last I went to see Bill Callahan play at the Echoplex. The Echoplex is located underneath the Echo and is found by wandering around until a bunch of people halfway up an alley alert you to its location. This is the third time I've gone to see Bill by myself and it's become something of an aesthetic excursion. As I have found in myself a certain kind of glee in underdressing for social occasions, I have also located a satisfaction for going to shows by myself and observing people and talking to no one. Maybe this is not glee/satisfaction at the act itself, but rather my comfort in what used to stress me out when I was a self-conscious teenager. I can recall spending part of my lunch hour in the bathroom stall in middle school because I had no one to hang out with and was too embarrassed to be seen in the hall sitting by myself. Also, there's a certain kind of mystique that you manufacture when you do something socially antagonistic. In any case, it's interesting.

The show was good. Bill was dressed all gentlemanly, and his band was too. For some reason, he always shows up with the most lovable drummers--strange hippie men who look like they could be jovial galley slaves or chubby tantric sex instructors. The guy this year was pretty dear: womanly bum, drummed standing up, had all sorts of weird instruments that he would twist around and start fiddling with, and thanked us for our applause with a little namaste bow. Some idiotic girls in the audience talked during the set, which always makes me want to KILL people, but the serious nerds outnumbered the scenesters and other people told them to shut up so I didn't have to. When Bill played River Guard, as he always does, it because very quiet in the room and we all listened very closely like small children hearing a story they've heard a thousand times before. I liked the show very much, though it didn't move me as much as when he plays all by himself. The genius of Bill Callahan is particularly in the notes he doesn't play, or the spaces he leaves between the ones he does. It's a relevation each time, like that moment in university when my sexist and unbathed professor of philosophy pointed out that what makes a room a room is perhaps more the absence of material that allows for the space, rather than the material that confines it.

Whoa. Then we all smoked a dube in the blackberry bushes and played some frisbee.

In other news, tonight driving home it occurs to me that the opening of Rain On Lens 1 is kind of totally ripped off as score for Babel. Maybe Inarritu liked the film reference?