In Observance of the Autumnal Equinox

Went to karaoke at the closet again on Thursday. It's turning into a weekly thing, I guess. This week I performed Friday I'm in Love by The Cure, which was a smashing success, as well as Punk Rock Girl by The Dead Milkmen, which was a favorite of many of my compatriots as well.

Here're some pics of the reglar gang:


Dee and Adam did My Humps. It was cute.

Adam and Frank did another duet whose name escapes me. As I told Frank, they've done better, but obviously their hearts were in it.

And then here're some of some newcomers.



And then here are some pics of lesbians singing/playing with a purple dildo.



Oh, also, in celebration/observance of the autumnal equinox, I got a new tattoo and shaved my head. Here're pics sporting both.






The placement came out better than I'd imagined. I'm very pleased.
I'll have more clear pictures of the tat once I take the time to take some.

The 1 year birthday of Chances was this week. It was a fun time. Here're some pics from that as well. I went with my friends Gregg and Michael.





As usual, there're plenty more pics at my flickr account, so go check 'em out if you're interested.

Criteria and Smoking Popes at the Empty Bottle

So, Smoking Popes recently did a show at the Empty Bottle and one of my favorites, Criteria, were opening for them. Honestly, I think that for the Popes it was a reunion show, but I could be wrong. I don't know if they've been split up or not. I guess they have like five albums, but like three of them are live albums or something like that. How lazy.

Before the show started, Stephen Pederson (the lead singer of Criteria) walked up to this guy in the audience who happened to be standing right in front of me.

"Nice moustache," he said.

"I figure it'll be gone in about 16 hours. It reminds me of one of those big machines in the rail yards that take big loads off of railroad cars."

"Wow. Deep. I'm going to be thinking about that one for a while."

The guy he was talking to turned out to be the other guitarist.


Criteria started the set with the song that I think they have always started with every time I've seen them (like, 4 times, now?), which is It Happens. Their set was pretty phenomenal. I've always been a little more of a White Octave fan (Pederson's band before this one), but at this show, I think it was the first time where I wasn't thinking that Criteria was just second-rate White Octave.


My friend Mike totally worships this guy and it was also tonight that I really understood at least part of the attraction. Pederson's just a natural performer. His movements are so precise but never seem forced or contrived. He had no trouble hitting any notes while he sang, either.

I impressed myself with being able to take this picture of the bassist, who was on the other side of the stage from me.

This one's also good.

There're a whole bunch of pictures from the show up at my flickr account. Go check it out.
Smoking Popes were decent. I was only a little bored. I felt a certain nostalgia watching them, so it felt good. But largely songs that really excited me back in the day didn't really seem to move me very much.

I don't know what the deal was with the bassist's outfit. That hat. That vest. A Loop shirt? Ugh.
Dawn thinks that I'm crazy because I think Eli is cuter than Josh.

But she is the one that's crazy.
During the Popes set, we decided to take a picture with Stephen Pederson to make Mike jealous. Mike is the one who's totally gay for Stephen. But then Dawn (Dawn is Mike's fiance) got the idea to have us take photobooth pictures. See, not only does Mike like Stephen Pederson, he also loves photobooths. It was really easy. We just told him we wanted to do it to make our friend in San Francisco jealous and he was like "sure."

I told him, "I actually have a picture of you from way back at Krazyfest when White Octave played. You're hugging my friend Rick, who had a sign that said "Free Hugs."

"No way! You should email that to me." Great. Now I have to find it...

Well, I looked through the archives and couldn't find it. Maybe I imagined taking the picture. Rick really hugged him, though, I remember that. Maybe someone else took the picture? Either way, I did find a couple of old White Octave pictures from Krazyfest. I'll send those to him instead.

After we took pictures I stood next to Stephen and watched the popes from the bar area for a little while and asked him how they'd ended up touring with the Popes and he said it was because they have the same booking agent. They hadn't really met before the tour. I did think it was an odd pairing.

I think he was talking to the singer of the Bollweevils, but I didn't want to say anything cuz if I was wrong it would look like "sure, the only punk rock black guy in the room has to be the singer from the bollweevils, right?

Lastly, there were these two really drunk guys by the bar behind us. They were being really friendly with one another, if you know what I mean. One looked a little like a skinhead, the other just an indie rock guy. I wanted to take a picture, but didn't want to get caught cuz a drunk skin head, gay or not, can probably get pretty angry pretty easily.

Shortly, they walked away. When I went into the pool room later, though, the indie rocker guy was sitting on the couch with another indie-rocker and they were all touchy all over each other. I've never picked up anyone at the bottle. This guy had moves!

OK, that's all.

Some different things

So, I am using a new kind of browser that's based off of Firefox and works in tandem with either flickr or photobucket (or both, but apparently not simultaneously). It is kind of exciting. It shows a little group of your most current photos in your pic hosting site and you can just drag and drop photos into the body of your blog (or a blog comment or whathaveyou). You can select from individual photo sets if you are an organized photo-keeper (which I am). This just made my blogging life a little easier, I think.

Firebird Band at Empty Bottle
I'm just gonna post a couple pictures from this show. It was a good show and all, but there was too much going on this week for me to dwell on it. You can go to my flickr (medallion on the top left) to find a whole photoset of this show.

I'll just say Chris' eye makeup makes him look a little like a freak and I think it's funny that he can't remember lyrics to songs he wrote himself (especially after I saw this crazy Japanese guy at the Bottle the night before play like a 15 minute drum solo-type song with no repeating parts).



I kinda liked this picture:

Oh, Stik came to this show, oddly enough. I tried to take a sly picture, but all I got was the top of his head and crazy light effects:


Dee's Birthday Karaoke!

The next night I met Dee and Frank and Adam out at The Closet for karaoke. I like karaoke pretty well, but I'm pretty bad at it. I don't have a lot of range and this night I don't think I chose the best songs. I opened with Pat Benatar's Love Is a Battlefield and, well, she's a chick and I'm not really in the right key, which makes me get all throaty. But it's a crowd pleaser, so that's good. My other two songs were R.E.M. Radio Free Europe and Sponge Plowed, a song which I played over and over the summer I bought it about, what was it? 8 years ago? More? Ugh, age.

Here're some pics of all of us.
Adam sings sultry:

Dee goes nuts:

Frank and Dee:

Here's me:

And here is this adorable deaf guy. I didn't realize he was deaf! Frank's like, "I think he's sort of deaf," and I laughed because he wasn't singing very well and sort of seemed like he was singing to himself. He was sooo cute though.




Did I mention Dee was crazy drunk?

Voltage at the Empty Bottle

I went to see this band called Voltage tonight at the Empty Bottle. They were pretty rad. I'd seen them once before. Some girl I knew randomly gave me a bunch of records. I don't know why. It was very random. And Voltage was one of the records. That's how I first heard of them.

I went with my friend Gregg, whom I have to thank for agreeing to meet me there, because had he not, I might've not gone, and it was a fun time.

The first band claimed to be called NineteenEightyThousand, but that name wasn't listed and something with the word Lazer was listed, so I don't know who they were. They weren't selling merch, either. Regardless of what they were called, they were pretty fun.






The second band was called The Diminishers and they, literally, made me sick to my stomach. Or so I claimed. I can't say for sure whether it was them or not that did it. It may've been a coincidence, but I was queasy and I felt OK blaming them. They had like all these people on stage including three violinists and a cellist, so I thought maybe they'd be interesting, but they were terribly boring.



The guy who sang, and for whom the whole band seemed to be an ego stroke for him, created the most simplistic melodies that reminded me of children's educational songs, but not in a good way (like that vowels song by The Evens).

When their set was over, this guy by the bar yelled "one more," and I literally had this violent sort of impulse to make him be quiet, but I didn't attack him or anything.

At the last Voltage show I went to, I saw this guy who also happened to be at this one who also happened to know my friend Gregg. Weird coincidence, huh? His name's Kevin. We all took pictures together. Including some in the photobooth. Yay photobooth!






Then Voltage played. Just two guys, but they sound really full. The drummer was really awesome and had a xylephone mounted to his drum kit. And in one song he used a whistle and it was really good. Can you tell I'm tired?







The drummer's high hat stand was really unstable and the drummer of NineteenEightyThousand leaned onto the stage and held it steady for half of a song. While he did, this other guy who we were all pretty sure was high on acid or some other psychedelic put his leg over him. It was kind of humorous and weird.



Later, that same guy came up to me. He said, "I have some words for you." As he said this, he was zipping up his pants. He said, "I'm zipping up my pants, but don't think that's an invitation. It's my body." I was laughing.

Then he said, "I feel like you have a beef with me."

"No, I don't have a beef with you," I said it and I meant it.

"You're not friendly toward me."

"When I saw you today, I thought you looked familiar, but I didn't know from where I met you."

He told me we used to work at the same starbucks together, which you'd think I'd remember that, but then I vaguely remember that he worked there very briefly and then it made sense that I didn't remember him so well.

He said that my name was Jason and when I told him it was Brian, he said, "Well, they have one vowel in common," which is something I often do, so I thought that was funny.

I asked him his name and he said, "Javier....No, Lord, you can call me Lord, I'm a vengeful lord!"

Then he said, "I'm gonna kiss you, but don't take it personally," and then he gave me a peck on the lips, said thank you, and walked away.

He screamed a lot the rest of the night. A constant source of entertainment. Hopefully I'll see him again.