Jolayne and I made the trip up to Lawrence yesterday to catch RJD2 at the Granada. We got there around 5, because I had read online that it started at 7pm (which seemed odd and as we found out later was completely wrong). In the time before the show we walked around Lawrence, got dinner at the Free State Brewing Co., and I bought some cds. Afterwards we walked down to the Granada where we found that the show didn’t actually start until 9. As we were walking away to go find something to do in the meantime, the side door at the Granada opened up and RJ stepped out. At this point, I should mention that 1. RJ is originally from Columbus, OH and 2. Jolayne had met him several times there because he had been dating one of her good friends for a while. So RJ steps out, Jolayne said hi, he remembered her and they chatted briefly. As he was heading back in, he offered to add us to the guest list. That’s right, my fiance’s got the connections going on. That was really awesome for him to do though, and he seemed like a cool guy.
After hanging out in Lawrence a while longer, we went back to the Granada where we found we were on the guest list, as promised. The opening act was Hanger 18, another Def Jux artist that I thought was pretty good but not one of my favorites. On the other hand, RJD2’s set was fantastic. He had 4 turntables, a sampler, and a laptop on stage and he was running around like a madman the whole time, switching records at an insane pace. I have no idea how he does it. Musically, it was an awesome mix of Deadringer and his most recent album. Everything just moved fluidly from one track to another, with familiar samples popping up everywhere. In the background a giant theatre screen was showing a bunch of interesting video sequences, in case you didn’t think it was entertaining enough to watch RJ work the turntables. The film was definitely cool, and it even featured a few quick shots that Jolayne and I were able to recognize as being from around Columbus. It’s good to see the Bus get some love.
In the well-its-about-time department, it looks like Verizon is finally rolling out services that involve bringing fiber optics straight to your home. That seems like a good way to go about using up all that unused bandwiths laying around on the telecom backbones out there. Wow, my very own fiber optic connection is so close I can almost taste it. Its only going to be available in 9 states so far (and Missouri isn’t one of them) but I sure hope it catches on. The amazing part is that you’ll be able to get 15 Mbit/sec down and 2 Mbit/sec up for just a little more than what I pay right now for 3 Mbit/sec down and 300 Kbit/sec up via cable.
I went to go see The Decemberists last night, on a week night and all the way over in Lawrence (about an hour away). It wasn’t fun dragging myself out of bed for work this morning, but it was totally worth it. I ♥ The Decemberists. They played at the Jackpot Saloon, a small new venue which is unfortunately crammed into a storefront on the main “college town” street in Lawrence. It was packed, and if I’d gotten there any later than I did I wouldn’t have been able to see the stage at all. Norfolk and Western opened up, and they were pretty good but I didn’t really get into it that much. Once The Decemberists took the stage though, the place just livened up. They played an awesome set, though unfortunately too short and they didn’t play quite a few of my favorite songs. However, I like so many of their songs that they could have played their entire discography through twice and I still would have been just mostly satisfied. They did come back and do one song for an encore, a cover of The Smith’s “Ask Me” which certainly didn’t lose them any points with me. Smith’s covers may be a little cliche, but I sure never get tired of them. I managed to stay awake while driving home too, which I thought was a nice bonus.
Just got back from seeing Death Cab for Cutie at the Beaumont. It got out pretty early as far as shows go but it wasn’t really too short. It was just one of those odd shows that actually started on time and had a really short setup time between sets. Of course, that was likely due to the fact that apparently on Friday nights the Beaumont switches over to line dancing at 11:00. Welcome to Kansas City, I guess.
Anyway, Travis Morrison opened things up with some of his recent solo stuff. It was pretty good, but after his stuff with the Dismemberment Plan it’d be hard to exceed expectations. Even without the Plan, he knows how to keep things interesting and entertaining. He’s not afraid to drop a Ludacris cover in there, and he pulled it off pretty well. Nice. Death Cab was excellent, definitely the better of the two shows I’ve seen of theirs. Of course since their most recent album is some of their best stuff yet that’s not surprising. It’s crammed full of sing-alongable awesomeness that just comes off great live. The only thing that could have made it better, as Jolayne pointed out later, is if they had slipped in some Postal Service covers here and there.
They should probably make the following required viewing for anyone who gets on, or even thinks about getting on the internet. From the Steam forums: Posting and You.
Published on
October 10, 2004 in
Gaming.
This upcoming holiday season is just going to be crazy with good games coming out. It looks like Halflife 2 is finally almost here, because you can actually buy it now for download from Valve’s novel approach at a content distribution system, Steam. By buy, I really mean preorder although you can download all the content in encrypted form so it will be ready to go as soon as the game is officially released. Steam seems like a pretty cool way to get games, though I’m still a little disturbed by not actually having any cds to hold on to. Its also a little annoying that the Steam client that you have to leave running is something of a memory hog. The upshot is that you can start playing the new version of Counterstrike that uses the new Halflife 2 engine right away. As you can guess, I totally did that. What I learned is that even with fancypants new awesome graphics, I still suck at Counterstrike. I’m out there getting totally 0WN3d by a bunch of 12 year olds no doubt.
Last night started off my month of rock with Yo la Tengo at the Grand Emporium here in KC. It was kind of an unusual show format, but one that I really liked. Instead of having any opening bands they’ve been touring with a rotating line up of members of other bands playing together as one big band. Last night they had Rick Rizzo, Doug McCombs, and David Kilgour. Instead of just playing Yo la Tengo songs, they played a mix of their songs and songs of the people they were touring with plus a healthy dose of covers. I really enjoyed their versions of Devo’s “Gates of Steel” and George Harrison’s “Behind That Locked Door”. The unusual lineup made for a pretty long show too which was great. I’ve always loved how Yo la Tengo mixes their melodic pop with drawn out fuzzy guitar squalls and having more guitars on stage = more noisy guitar freakouts. Can’t really beat that.
They were calling this particular tour the Swing State Tour because they were hitting all of the swing states for the upcoming election in an attempt to get people registered to vote and discuss political issues. That, I thought, was a little odd since on the scale of politically active bands one would generally imagine Yo la Tengo to be just above Steely Dan or something. There’s just not any hint of it in their music. I think its a pretty good indicator of the state of politics in the country that Yo la Tengo is now out there doing some pre-election political stumping. I always get a little uneasy when I hear that a band is trying to spread a political message. I mean, it seems to me like its probably going to be preaching to the choir for one thing. I could be totally wrong, but I get the impression that most crowds at small rock shows are generally pretty politically homogenous, and probably share similar views with the band. So even though I don’t know how effective it was, it was definitely low-key and not at all preachy so it was fine. And besides if a few people registered to vote, hey that’s a good thing.
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