the weather was nice this weekend. young and i rode our bikes to dolores park on saturday afternoon and made the mistake of sitting next to a fucking drum circle. what the hell is it with these san francisco drum circles and how come they don’t get tired? luckily i brought some music and speakers to drown it out. we only hung out in the park for about an hour but we got tons of adorable canine entertainment/love in that short period:
i love petting strange dogs.
afterwards we rode to the bike shop where i accidentally called the guy that works at freewheel “Phengren” (his DJ name) and was embarrassed by the slip. it’s really sad that sometimes i can’t remember people’s real names and makes me think that i’m more of a scenester than i care to admit. he was very nice, gave me a discount, and let me and young borrow some tools to get my new bike rack on. after we took off, some clueless chick in a giant tour van cut me off, stopped, and started to back into me. i yelled STOP! all frantic and said “this dumb bitch almost ran me over” to young and the people around us whose attention i caught. it was very ugly. her window was rolled down and she said “uh, fuck you!” all befuddled in a valley-girlish tone. i was so pissed at the obvious recklessness of it all but decided it would be best to just pedal the anger away but young decided to stay back for a minute more to yell at her some more? good. it felt better realizing that i still new someone who has a shorter fuse than me.
later me, young my friend miro and his friend went to the shoreline amphitheater to see bjork. our friend diane hooked us up with free tickets, so nice of her. the shoreline is huge, about 22,000 capacity and the last time i went to a huge concert like that was Prince in 2004 but even that has a smaller capacity i think. we sat in the vast lawn section. ross (my former arch-nemesis) and his wife was there too and young said “we should try to find ross so you two can talk math-rock” which gave me a good chuckle, but it was impossible to find anyone. however young’s friend sarah successfully found us and smoked me out. i checked out for about 10 minutes not saying a word thinking about how badly i wanted some red vines or something deep-fried. then joanna newsom came on. young and i probably said only a few words to each other during her set because we were completely transfixed on the big screen that showed the close-up of all the harp action. me to young “that thing has too many strings.” it was intense. the funniest thing we overheard were these dudes behind us:
“that a harp?”
“i heard she smashes it at the end of every show.”
here’s a photo from the show i didn’t take:
notice the Pete Townshend windmill arm on Newsom.
after newsom finished her set, they had some Verizon shout-out board on the screen where people could text their messages like how when you go to Giants/A’s games and see messages on the scoreboard like “Todd, will you be my life partner?” So bear in mind that this is right after Newsom’s set and amongst those sappy love messages there was one that said “Tori Amos is the best!” God, that was such a painful laugh.
then bjork came on to some song of her new album. she had a full brass ensemble and apparently brian chippendale of lightning bolt/mindflayer and chris corsano (!!) are her new drummers. i’m sorry i think corsano is a bad ass and that is completely unrelated to my oft-disputed drummer fetish. also mark bell is surprisingly still performing with bjork and he played some kind of thing that looked like Lego blocks that made spacey oscillating sounds that reminded me of the first silver apples record but digitalwise. it was also really easy to spot the timbaland songs off her new album and i enjoyed those. when she got into some of the abrasive electronic stuff off of the Post/Homogenic albums, there were laser beams shooting out from the stage synced up with the music that reminded me of Laser Floyd but in a good way. i ignored the people dancing next to our area who seemed to be on ecstasy. i knew if i focused on them too long, it would have taken me to the dark place. (The dark place meaning Misanthropy City.)
when i got home, i was so exhausted. miro said sitting out in the cold uses up a lot of energy so maybe that’s why i felt so spent. i passed out in my bed with all the lights on and had a dream where steve albini wanted to have Movie Night at my house. so all these people were in my living room and then i remembered my problem with the receiver. albini was setting things up and all the audio came out in mono. i remembered that i lost the remote in my last move and that was the only way you could switch it back to stereo was with the remote. he was cool with it but i was so embarrassed like i had a dinner party and ran out of toilet paper. i’m starting to realize that even with all my uninhibited straight-talk recently i still get embarrassed really easily. the dream turned into a nightmare when i caught albini making out with my step-mom. he’s not exactly the kind of guy you can bring home to mom. Or step-mom, as it were.