The Velvet Lounge schedule is chock full of shows I want to see.  Or maybe it’s chock a block full.  Regardless, I’ve got to find some way to go to these shows:

Thursday, Wise Light Born (mem. of Barkitecture/Meadows/Antlers/Baby Killer Estelle), Adventure (Carpark), EAR PWR (Asheville electro-pop), this show raises my eyebrows of doom and makes me scratch my chin.  And it’s only $7!

Friday, Girl Loves Distortion (CD release!), Relay (shoegaze/psych-pop from Philly, Bubblecore), Timberwolf Division (ex-Ropers/Sounds of Kaleidoscope/Fretblanket/Owls & Crows), Himalaya (ex-Three Four Tens, NYC shoegaze/ psych-rock), how can a guy miss this show?  The sheer number of explanations and genres mentioned would probably rouse even fulsome from his decades-long hibernation.  All this for $8!

Next week, Stella Schindler, Rose, and the Blueheels are playing on the 3rd.  Two women I have been hoping would play a show together have responded to my subconscious wishes.  I hadn’t heard of the Blueheels until tonight, but damn, I like their music.  If I lived in Madison, Wis, I would be going to their show on the Memorial Union Terrace on the 31st of August.  I guess you call the sound alternative country or indie american or some shitty description for music that always seems to fail at describing music I like.

Also up next week, First Monday of the Month at Iota Club and Cafe.

I’m pretty broke, so if people could put Chuckles on the list at the Velvet Lounge, I’ll blog about your show.

All Songs Considered has free downloads of a recent show at the Rock and Roll Hotel in DC by John Vanderslice and Bishop Allen.  If you’re into that sort of thing.

In an attempt to defibrillate this website that hopefully won’t be eaten by an internet tube snake, I present some shitty jokes about even shittier costumes. Don’t expect more than a couple jokes here as these costumes hang even lower than my prodigious gonads.

Halloween Express: I think these are the same people that sold the Dregolas costume last year with the dude that sorta looked like me. I still want to punch him in the nuts for that. I have had some really shitty jobs when I was poor but I have never sunk that fucking low. Modeling must be a tougher gig than I thought. The “Otis House of 1000 Corpses” costume reinforces my firm belief that Rob Zombie should be eaten by his namesake, sucky or sweet zombie, it doesn’t matter to me. “Cain the Vampire Tyrant” looks like it belongs in some goth’s fan fiction wank fest and the model seems to agree with me. These are supposed to be from classic horror movies but is House of 1000 Corpses really on the same level as Frankenstein or The Wolf Man? Is it even on the same level as Chucky? Oh god, I hope there isn’t a Chucky costume in the kid’s section.

The costumes in the Premium section look like they came off the set of the really shitty movies playing on the SciFi channel. The movies they don’t advertise. The lack of imagination in these costumes frightens me more than the “Out of Stock” symbols beneath some of them. What the hell is the difference between these two ghostly gents? They look like they walked off the set of the stupid episodes near the end of the original Battlestar Galactica series.

How about some misogyny? The Sexy Costumes - Fantasy ought to fulfill your yen for mind-numbingly pathetic costume ideas. The “Gold Digger” could have been called the “Bored Stripper”.

The “Cuddly Lion” will allow you to fit in at any anime convention for the next year, so it has versatility, but it will also attract people who want to have sex with you while wearing a giant bunny suit. Unless you enjoy being sodomized by the Easter Bunny, I recommend you avoid this one.

“Slave Princesses” would be better off shopping at Victoria’s Secret or Night Dreams and buying something that might survive your paramour’s grabbing hands. And by paramour, I mean every drunk guy at the party.

“Captain Booty” is probably the best costume idea ever and so clever. Did you know that pirates called their loot ‘booty’? I wonder how much digging it would take to get to her buried treasure? Depends on the size of your shovel. I had another joke about her chest but thought it was a little obvious.

“Princess” seems to have gotten herself confused with Snow White because I doubt she has ever seen the inside of a toadstool or been kidnapped by some sort of giant lizard-inventor-guy.

“Funky Cat” is actually better than Halle Berry’s Catwoman outfit which is no complement to this getup. If you want to be that one woman who wears the same costume as 47 other women in the bar, by all means, spend 45 hard earned dollars on this.

Ladies, unless you want me to hit on you until you punch me in the face, don’t buy “Indian Girl” or any of the other “indian”-themed costumes on that page. I may have said too much there.

“Bad Kitty” really says it all. The designer didn’t give a shit (and may have been forced to sit through that horrible movie) and the model wishes she had never left that job at Starbucks. I wouldn’t smile if I had to wear that either.

“Heidi Ho”, “Manhunter”, “Neverland Elf Chick”: The AG ICBM is being aimed at you as I type. Expect a firestorm of incoherent fury to land on you in approximately 90 seconds. I expect nothing but a large smoking crater after our patented Shenanigan-Class AG Warhead impacts your content factory.

As for the “300″ page under Current Movies, Snyder should fucking sue.

Under TV & Movies - Men, we find a trove of trash, a heaping helping of hellish mediocrity. “Batman” looks more out of shape than Adam West. Joel Schumacher called and wants his dignity back.

“Wolverine” looks about as threatening as a goddam Lolcat.

“Miami Vice - Tubbs” explains where that career went. Compared to the rest of these costumes, this one is spot on. Compared to reality, he looks like a Little Richard impersonator with twice the sleaze and half the style.

“Hulk Muscle Chest”: Don’t forget the frontispiece. The head piece looks like an Original Series Klingon or a really lame Frankenstein painted green.

“Animal House Toga”: Are you fucking kidding me? 35 bucks? Jesus Titty Fucking Chocolate Christ. A quick trip to the Salvation Army or even your building’s laundry room would get you a white sheet and then rip out some English Ivy from some chump’s yard on your way to the party. If I see anybody wearing this costume, I will give my love a chicken with no bones. Or dance with their dates.

“Batman 1997″: This is the costume for flashers. I would expect to see someone wearing this costume when I glance down an alley. The pervert would then show me what his miserable parents gave him. I can already hear him snickering and giggling behind a dumpster while masturbating furiously. Dude, when it is chapped and bleeding, its time to stop.

“Superman Supreme”: If this is their idea of supreme, I’ll take the Burrito Normal, thanks. This costume looks as cheap and ill-fitting as the rest of the drek. It isn’t even bad enough to be supremely awful. Pathetic.

“Aragorn”: You got this one mixed up, morons. Dumbledore is the gay one and he isn’t even in the Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is the last descendant of Isildur and also many generations removed from Elros Tar-Minyatur. He is the bearer of Anduril forged from the shards of Narsil and wears the Ring of Barahir. He is the king of both Arnor and Gondor. He is a ranger and warrior without equal, not some mincing medieval muttonchop. Have some fucking respect.

“Captain America”: You forgot the bullet hole.

“Spongebob Squarepants”: I didn’t think they could top the 1997 Batman costume for sheer creepiness but this one screams pedophile. How can you market this one to adults? The model has taken the ‘Removable Pants’ option to another level and simply left the pants at home. Warning: If you wear this outside and are over the age of six, you will probably be arrested and given lessons in Good Touch/Bad Touch by the other residents of your stay at Hotel Drunk Tank.

Ooooo heynow. What the hell is this? Ummm. I’ll be right back.

Moving on to other websites:

American Apparel: I respect a person that does not take themselves too seriously, but these costumes seems to cheapen a company that I really want to like, even more than their deliciously porny newspaper ads. I mean, I love their ads and can’t wait for them to just give up and start publishing with Flynt Corp or whatever, but these costumes take the fun out of Halloween. When you’re a sexy office worker all year long, does being a sexy office worker on Halloween really count ladies?

Sorry I drifted off into the other shopping areas of the American Apparel site. I was only checking out the ladies clothing because I was gonna get something for someone. Or whatever.

There we have it folks, the Well Rounded Nerds Halloween Costume Roundup.

We have been diligently working on a flood of posts about various nerd shit sepcifically Halloween costumes, but in the meantime check out this creative use of the filth in a highway tunnel and the Man’s response:

Ok, well, I don’t know the fuck I am doing wrong here. I may also not know what the fuck I am doing at all, so the video won’t embed properly. It was a neat video about some dude drawing skulls in the dirt in the walls of a tunnel in Paris or some other European city. I could just make a link to the YouTube page, but I don’t feel like it.

[dontEATnachos adds:]

The WYSIWYG editor hoses up videos. Once you put the video in you have to not edit the post anymore. If you do need to edit it, you’ll have to delete out some junk from the old one and post the code again. I don’t know why WordPress does this.

Anyway, the video:

As I was completing the final leg of my journey in to work this morning, what should magically get chosen by those great KALX dj’s in the sky but Van Halen’s Panama. Ever in my mind since it’s appearance as SotD (ok, maybe not SotD, I can only find it referenced here but maybe somebody can correct me) not too long ago.

As it blared on the car stereo as I made my final approach to work, I felt like I was back in high school and cranked that radio up so everybody knew what kind of music I listen to and can be appropriately impressed. It is nice to have today marked off as a day that will be awesome. What can happen exactly to ruin today that won’t be counteracted by simply leaning back in my chair slightly and then jumping up and hearing those guitar licks race through my brain. Oh sweet, sweet guitar solos how you seduced us all so easily!

As a corollary to that, it has even made me feel slightly guilty for not going to the SF Air Guitar show last night. Not that Chuckles has begged, pleaded, cajoled, and commanded me to go in every way that he can manufacture. He is diligent and I respect that. Because perseverance is not something I always expect from him and so when he does that is usually a sign that there is some underlying quality that should be examined. Nevertheless, I blew it off for a dinner of delicious Chinese food (someday I will share the magical goodness of Hunan Smoked Pork but that will have to wait for teh l4m3 to show up!) and some good old fashioned pie-in-the-sky dream of how I will control the SF Music scene from my computer (bwahahaha). Oh, and then I went and saw the best junkyard blues band I have seen in SF (ok, maybe the only?), The Black Diamond Heavies (go here for an MP3 to saw your face off and they’ve got two songs at MySpace - one loud, one soft) totally blew me away. Hammond Organ and Drums and a growl to make Louie Armstrong swoon. I was wracked with indecision over whether to buy the album and came down on the side of cheap since I had just bought dinner for everyone apparently and gone to see the show.

The headliners, Or, the Whale, were decent. They have an alt-country sound but generally play upbeat songs that make me compare them to The New Pornographers for several reasons:

UPDATE: I need to more completely distance The New Pornographers from Or, The Whale. The New Pornographers are not really country at all while Or, The Whale employs banjos and accordians on occasion. However, I compare them with The New Pornographers for the reasons listed below.

1) Male lead sings/writes most songs
2) Secondary female lead that has a better voice
3) Six person band with one keyboard/multi-instrumentalist
4) Make infectious songs that have all the girls dancing

However, they don’t yet have the the overwhelming musicianship for the process to be effortless and have some musical depth. Their opening number was a nice balance of sounds and they let the female singer do one slightly more soulful song but the rest of their songs tended to sort of blur together in a lightly twangy, generally enjoyable sort of way.

Anyways, that was my night followed by a glorious morning and a day that is so beautiful I may have to play hooky for the afternoon. Rock on summertime! And somebody better fire up the grill!

On May 3rd, I gathered a stalwart crew and blazed a trail over to the Black Cat for the Onion’s DC Launch Party. The bill originally included Zach Galifianikis, (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope, Georgie James and Neil Hamburger. Well, Zach cancelled and Aziz Ansari was brought in for our funny time.

The evening started at the Brickskeller where I ate a fine sandwich, a Lindemans Framboise and three Leinenkugels Berry Weiss and was thoroughly ready to enjoy a fine blend of comedy and music. We few, we happy few, marched over and got in line. The line moved relatively quickly and the weather was grand.

The Black Cat does not have a lot of chairs and standing for a four to five hour show sucks, so we grabbed a table at the back. The Onion staff had tossed swag around the tables, buttons, bracelets and copies of that week’s Onion. We all grabbed some buttons and a bracelet or two and read the fake news while we waited for (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope to start the show.

The first sign of trouble was the Onion editor, Whatsisface, who came out to announce the band and the say hello. He was either terrified or bored out of his skull. He announced the band and shuffled off the stage. (The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope were a band that I think fulsome would label a wall-of-sound band. It might be their thing, but I would have preferred a band that mixed their sound to the point that it wasn’t all a barely coherent mashing of noise with some added yelling. If this was their ideal sound, then I have to say they kick ass at it. If not, then they should beat the sound guy.* They played for a while and we continued to read the Onion and look around at the crowd of people that all seemed intent on not paying attention to the band.

After a twenty minute or so intermission, Aziz Ansari came strolling out onto the stage and immediately started talking about how the drinks were a lot stronger than he expected. This was not a good sign. Neither was the fact that the crowd refused to shut up and pay attention to him. The crowd noise kept getting louder and eventually Aziz was shouting into his microphone to hear himself. Aziz’s jokes were clearly suffering from the drink and the crowd, so it was hard to judge his set on its humor quotient. The jokes fell into three categories: I’m famous now, I have a TV show on MTV, I hate MTV. He had three bits that really could have been funny if his timing hadn’t been ruined by the unexpectedly strong drink and the fucking annoying crowd. His first bit railed against the MTV reality shows and what we could hear of it was pretty funny. His bit about being recognized on the street thanks to his new show and then realizing that half of the people were trying to tell him his fly was open might have been funny. He had a rambling screed against censorship because he wasn’t allowed to make a joke about a dinosaur rapist, but this was really hard to hear and was followed by a series of jokes about some kid on his show, but I have no idea what the point was. The crowd acted like he was an inconvenience in their overly-cool lives. “Hey, it’s only six dollars to go drink upstairs at the Black Cat and look cool while I text my friends about how cool I am!” Fucking yipsters.

Aziz then played a couple of clips from Human Giant, but I couldn’t hear any of the audio and there were some problems with the projector. I admit that by this time I had given up on him which isn’t exactly fair, but it is what it is. Some of my crew had ventured forward to get close enough to hear him, but they reported that it was worse up front because the yelled conversations were much louder closer to the stage.

After a forty minute intermission, Georgie James finally came on to lead us to aural salvation. I first heard of them when they opened for Camera Obscura in July 2006. I liked them and thought that the singer looked remarkably similar to Anna Faris. While, after the sucky experience with Aziz Ansari, I still liked GJ and she still looked like Anna Faris. I got closer and the crowd finally shut up. I was still annoyed about the last three hours of let downs, but stayed long enough to hear four or five of Georgie James songs. It was now after midnight and Neil Hamburger had been scheduled to come on at 11:15. I knew I was going to cab it back home but wasn’t thrilled with the idea of staying for the entire show. A friend offered me a ride home and I accepted.

The music was fine and at least the tickets were only six bucks. If I were Aziz, I doubt I would be willing to do another show at the Black Cat, or even the rest of DC.

(The Sounds of) Kaleidoscope’s myspace page

Georgie James’ myspace page

All of the photos used in this post belong to Liz Gorman, as far as I know.   If she or the Wonkette people don’t like this, I’ll take them off.

*Actually, just have some words with the sound guy/gal, they have enough to worry about without adding the threat of physical violence to their list of anxieties.

In many areas of life, there is a pecking order.  This order is either vigorously enforced or self-enforced or perhaps even ignored.  In the armed forces, this is called the chain of command.  In a professional environment, this is called the blame chute.  Agricultural biologists will tell you that various farm animals are extremely dependent, behaviorally, on a pecking order and thus our supply of chicken fingers is subsequently dependent on it.

In college, there were many orders that I ignored and some that I enjoyed.  Nerd pedigree was one that I particularly enjoyed.  I did not flaunt it a lot, but when I did, I liked to think that I was somehow more nerdy and thus a better nerd than my wannabe peers.*  In this regard, I direct your attention to two old comic strips that previously graced the back pages of Dragon Magazine.

What’s New with Phil and Dixie

Buck Godot: zap gun for hire

*For example, I slipped a Car Wars reference into a rant about movies a couple posts ago.

While performing actual work today, I stumbled across some interesting information on a number of movies that Warner Brothers is either working on or shelving. (more…)

From the horse’s mouth:

n that regard, Martin Heidigger was a German philosopher and a student of Husserl. I was introduced to Heidigger in college in a way that has colored my limited exposure to his philosophy. I will do some research and then present my findings to this forum in one week’s time. I will also present a followup in one month’s time.

I say this because if I don’t, you are all free to mock me mercilessly for being a lazy ass.

If you look at the post preceding this, I think it is easy for us to all agree that a post saying “Research is hard” does not really meet the minimum qualifications for a post relating to the thought of Heidegger. As a result, and combined with the fact that today is Friday and therefore I am less inclined towards real work, I was trying to come up with a contest along the lines of Pinko’s (in)famous examples.

So…allow me to unveil this gem. Chuckles is so half-assed he can’t sit straight. That’s right, another ripped from the 3Bulls! multiverse insult stream. I think there might be some people out there who are playing along at home and don’t even know it!

dontEATnachos fascinating audiovisual exploits have been extremely informatiive, but we have been steadily edging into slimmer definitions of nerds. Our founding charter states that we must provide a font for all aspects of nerdness. dontEATnachos has lately been bringing it to the table in a form and style that can only be described as HARD and I feel that fulsome and I should at least match dEn’s efforts. Since fulsome is still MIA, aside from the music blogging robot that has recently been switched to ON, this task falls to me. In that regard, I am undertaking an assignment that does not include MS Paint.

Recent events in my life have reminded me of the reason why I started taking philosophy in the first place. I wanted to sound smarter than everyone else. I have a lot of questions about life and existence and I thought I would consult some experts, perhaps with the goal of becoming some sort of expert myself. Modern Philosophy has its faith and Socratic dialogues have their interlocutors, but Existentialism has only a certain je’ne c’est…you know?

In that regard, Martin Heidigger was a German philosopher and a student of Husserl. I was introduced to Heidigger in college in a way that has colored my limited exposure to his philosophy. I will do some research and then present my findings to this forum in one week’s time. I will also present a followup in one month’s time.

I say this because if I don’t, you are all free to mock me mercilessly for being a lazy ass.