So Much Like The NBA...
Does anyone r
emember the game "Arch Rivals"? It's essentially a two-on-two basketball video game for Nintendo from many moons ago where you run around, have a mohawk, can totally punch players while playing and you slip on drinks thrown by the crowd. I bought one of those Midway collections for the X-Box, and have been having my fill of that, Rampage, Primal Rage (which answers the question "How in the hell did dinosaurs fight?") and NARC. Good stuff.
So I sent my first copy to Aural Minority in quite a while this week. Updates should be up... um... soon (I have no idea until I check and the stuff is different... usually within the first week of the month). I've got a couple of reviews (Robert Pollard and Beth Orton) and a feature on His Name Is Alive. Good stuff. I'll leave it as a surprise as to what the other cats wrote about (I also have no idea). It's good to be back in the writing mode again.
A lot has gone on since I last wrote in, some of it worth repeating. Saw Night Watch (the first in the Russian horror trilogy that fanboys have been wetting themselves about lately) last weekend. And while it was incredibly
neat to look at and had some really great sequences (a guy fighting a vampire hiding who is invisible with a shard of mirror next to his eye to reflect him was up there), it pretty much ran like any American supernatural horror flick. I mean, congratulations, communism has ended in your country and you are now free to express yourselves in ways that were not acceptable before. This is a positive thing. So to spend that newfound freedom on making films like Underworld and Van Helsing seems a bit wasteful. It did have a lot of things going for it, though, like basing itself on something out of Byzantine myth instead of the usual MGM Transylvania-haunted castle thing. But it mostly felt like most American attempts at the genre: flashy, full of spectacle and somewhat lacking in the story department. Maybe as they move on in the series, it'll seem like it was all for something. As of right now, it's better than the second and third Matrix... but not by much.
Played our first show last Thursday at a slightly out of the way place (to me at least) in University City called the Millcreek Tavern. Not a huge showing (Thursday night, late bill, didn't know we had the show until the Monday of that week), but a great time and it was good to get the whole "first show" out of the way in such a relaxed fashion. I updated the MySpace site with pics from the show and will be adding some live cuts as soon as I can master them in the studio. The sound was good, but James' guitar could have been a bit louder and I could have stuck to four-four time a little more stringently. On the plus side, Lee could hear his keyboard better than he had ever been able to and Ned looked like some kind of hipster used-car salesman.
James and I went to check out some of the Philly bands we've been sharing practice space with last Friday at the North Star. And most of the bands were out of site. Grammar Debate, The FutureTips, Rum Runner and Creeping Weeds; all bands worth checking out (particularly the first two). Grammar Debate is playing some unofficial shows at SXSW this year, check out the dates on their site. It was fun watching other bands of people I know, and feeling like there was some kind of support network going on. Everyone wants to be part of a scene, but no one seems to want to do the things that help make it flourish, such as going to people's shows, buying each other's records, playing with bands from your hometown and all that. That was what kind of bummed me out about our Thursday set. Two bands played before us, and neither stayed to watch our set (we were the last of the night, going on at about 11:45pm). That irked me a bit. I've been band one on a six band bill and stayed for all the acts. It's just something you do, not just to be polite, but to support the people you're sharing a stage with that night.
Bought a new Elmore Leonard novel that I've been plowing through on the subway every morning, and I think I'm going to get back to that.
emember the game "Arch Rivals"? It's essentially a two-on-two basketball video game for Nintendo from many moons ago where you run around, have a mohawk, can totally punch players while playing and you slip on drinks thrown by the crowd. I bought one of those Midway collections for the X-Box, and have been having my fill of that, Rampage, Primal Rage (which answers the question "How in the hell did dinosaurs fight?") and NARC. Good stuff.So I sent my first copy to Aural Minority in quite a while this week. Updates should be up... um... soon (I have no idea until I check and the stuff is different... usually within the first week of the month). I've got a couple of reviews (Robert Pollard and Beth Orton) and a feature on His Name Is Alive. Good stuff. I'll leave it as a surprise as to what the other cats wrote about (I also have no idea). It's good to be back in the writing mode again.
A lot has gone on since I last wrote in, some of it worth repeating. Saw Night Watch (the first in the Russian horror trilogy that fanboys have been wetting themselves about lately) last weekend. And while it was incredibly
neat to look at and had some really great sequences (a guy fighting a vampire hiding who is invisible with a shard of mirror next to his eye to reflect him was up there), it pretty much ran like any American supernatural horror flick. I mean, congratulations, communism has ended in your country and you are now free to express yourselves in ways that were not acceptable before. This is a positive thing. So to spend that newfound freedom on making films like Underworld and Van Helsing seems a bit wasteful. It did have a lot of things going for it, though, like basing itself on something out of Byzantine myth instead of the usual MGM Transylvania-haunted castle thing. But it mostly felt like most American attempts at the genre: flashy, full of spectacle and somewhat lacking in the story department. Maybe as they move on in the series, it'll seem like it was all for something. As of right now, it's better than the second and third Matrix... but not by much.Played our first show last Thursday at a slightly out of the way place (to me at least) in University City called the Millcreek Tavern. Not a huge showing (Thursday night, late bill, didn't know we had the show until the Monday of that week), but a great time and it was good to get the whole "first show" out of the way in such a relaxed fashion. I updated the MySpace site with pics from the show and will be adding some live cuts as soon as I can master them in the studio. The sound was good, but James' guitar could have been a bit louder and I could have stuck to four-four time a little more stringently. On the plus side, Lee could hear his keyboard better than he had ever been able to and Ned looked like some kind of hipster used-car salesman.
James and I went to check out some of the Philly bands we've been sharing practice space with last Friday at the North Star. And most of the bands were out of site. Grammar Debate, The FutureTips, Rum Runner and Creeping Weeds; all bands worth checking out (particularly the first two). Grammar Debate is playing some unofficial shows at SXSW this year, check out the dates on their site. It was fun watching other bands of people I know, and feeling like there was some kind of support network going on. Everyone wants to be part of a scene, but no one seems to want to do the things that help make it flourish, such as going to people's shows, buying each other's records, playing with bands from your hometown and all that. That was what kind of bummed me out about our Thursday set. Two bands played before us, and neither stayed to watch our set (we were the last of the night, going on at about 11:45pm). That irked me a bit. I've been band one on a six band bill and stayed for all the acts. It's just something you do, not just to be polite, but to support the people you're sharing a stage with that night.
Bought a new Elmore Leonard novel that I've been plowing through on the subway every morning, and I think I'm going to get back to that.
posted by Dan Drago at 9:11 PM
1 comments
