Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been boring and sick with this cold that makes it feel like andre the giant is lifting you by the head and squeezing it between his palms. Anyway, I’ve been aware of the inactivity i guess cause last night i had a dream that i finally had something to post about and then woke up only to realize it wasn’t real. I was going to praise Wu-Tang’s Taxi/Car Service because they arrive within 5 minutes of a pick-up call and charge a cheap flat-rate of $15 from SF all the way to the peninsula and they get you to your destination super fast. The best thing about it was that you could end up with any of the Wu-dudes as your driver and they would tell you stories that you knew were bullshit but were entertaining. Thera-Flu gives me weird dreams. I know this had something to do with me thinking about the Wu-Tang Financial Dave Chapelle skit earlier yesterday and also because Ghostface has been coming up in conversation a lot in recent days.

please be real, lawyer dog.

he looks like richard gere to me.

i hope to meet you in my dreams one day, preferably over pizza at zachary’s. there you can bestow your infinite wisdom upon me and share your educated predictions for the future such as possible hair styles for phil spector, who will be our next president, and what new musical instrument my objectifying eye will behold in the year 2030

i had another dream about steve albini last night. this is kinda out of the blue and the repeat subject is a little unsettling to me. the only thing i can think of is that i’ve had this stubborn cold since friday and have been waking up with headaches and having odd but vivid dreams that i can actually remember. the other thing that probably contributed is that yesterday i remembered the new shellac album comes out next week.

so in my dream i was going to another bjork concert for some reason but in millbrae (??) and decided to get a bite to eat at the local diner before going to this small club to see her perform. i go sit at the counter and it’s obviously albini working behind there. he’s in an apron and says what can i get you? in my dream i vaguely remembered meeting him once before when i was in chicago and him being in the same disguise at an eatery of some sort. i tell him i want a BLT and ask him if anyone has ever told him that he looked like steve albini. he says “all the time” but doesn’t admit anything. it was very obvious that it was him. so i tried to bait him by asking him what he thought of travis bean guitars and how he felt about ampex filing for bankruptcy. all he does is laugh and then shows me how i can hide a spork in the heel of my shoe and how to use it as a formidable weapon if i were ever to be attacked. he was giving me this sort of warped prison advice saying how the spork wouldn’t be picked up by metal detectors. and then i woke up.

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.

so after the phil spector post last nite, i went to sleep and dreamt that george bush was giving a presidential address on my tv and he had phil spector’s new hair style. it was on the 4 year anniversary of the war and he looked decrepit and cadaver-like just like phil. i remember being surprised and thinking something like “this guy can not handle stress.” i didn’t feel sorry for him though. i was reminded in my dream of that time he developed a huge boil on his face during the couple days of the recount in 2000 and put a small band aid over it that only partly obscured it. i remember feeling sorry for him then.

it’s amusing to me that your subconscious retains stuff you saw or read about from the day and come up with these strange mash-ups (sorry for using that phrase).

i had a dream that one of my friends ordered some shit from musician’s friend and put my address as the shipping address to throw the man off who was after him. i didn’t know he did that so when i got the mail, there was a monstrous tube amp and a guitar case in front of my door. the mailman left my gate open some someone could steal that shit. i took the guitar upstairs and when i came back down the amp was gone! i saw some kids walking off with it down the block so i ran after them and started fake crying asking them to give it back cause it was a gift for my sick nephew. they felt sorry for me so one of the kids threw it down the hill so they could run the other way while i chased the amp. when i finally caught up, it was too heavy so i added wheels to the bottom and started riding the amp like a bike, but using my body weight to shift and steer back home. when i got back home i called my friend up and told him that he could have the guitar but i am keeping the amp.

i just remembered that i had the funniest nightmare. i lived in some swanky beverly hills neighborhood with all these actors on my block and i was walking home from god knows where all spent, looking like death and crazy hungover. i tried to sneak through backyards so no one would see me and ended up crashing some huge black tie gala event at one of my neighbor’s house where all these celebrities were. so all eyez were on me and i walked past Jack Nicholson in a tux who was on his cell phone talking shit about me, mumbling something like “Audrey needs a makeover.” Then I was like “I CAN HEAR YOU, JACK.” really pissed off, and then he said “Yeah yeah, I want my camaro back that you borrowed.” i guess i borrowed it like a neighbor borrows a cup of sugar?

then I woke up. i think i hate jack nicholson now.

ok, pt 2 of Scorsese’s “No Direction Home” documentary seemed way more engrossing than the 1st part, wayyyyyy more. those press conferences he had to do were intense - it made me really feel for dude. also i loved seeing the concert footage of the band as his backup band. this shit is my favorite - i love the interviews with his other band members too, they were funny. it would scar me if i went on tour and was booed at every night and had shit thrown at me. very neat. that scene with johnny cash was unreal. he seemed like he was on sleeping pills plus he looked really gaunt. i’m excited to rent the dvd for the live concerts on the extras

i also had a cool ass dream last night because of this…. i dreamt that i had the ability to produce any bootleg video/cd just by thinking about it before i went to sleep and then i’d wake up the next morning, and it’d be next to my side on the bed. in the dream, i’d think up “bob dylan circa blah blah at the fiji islands”, would wake up and there would be a pile of dvds next to me. it was awesome. i could make up any fake concert and i’d have the recording of it the next morning. i told my boyfriend and he was like “how did you produce it? like a kidney stone?” it wasn’t that specific, it would just appear under the blanket in the morning. i think i dreamt this not only because i got to SEE the manchester concert for the first time where people shouted “Judas” at him after listening to the bootlegged audio of it many a time, but i had also made plans to go over my friend’s house tonight to burn a dvd copy of this beach boys bootleg video after planning to do so for over a month now.