Weekend Wrap Up section 02.18
Live Music Capitol of the World. That’s what they call Austin.I think they should change that to Live Music CrapHole of the World.
I suppose that if you are from Kabul or Phnom Phen, it might seem like there is a lot of great live music here.
I agree that there is a LOT of LIVE music.
Or rather there are a lot of venues that feature as their entertainment a group of guys or gals that are holding in their hands, instruments intended for musical productions, and said instruments or noisemakers are indeed plugged into power supplies and then fed through amplification devices, and said group of humans are usually operating their respective instruments within some conceivable limits of the possibility of functions of said instruments, producing what could definitely be called sounds and most likely be called noise and in some cases ~ music.
If that’s what you mean by “live music” then yes we might could be called Live Music Capitol of ,..something or other.
I went to Beerland on Friday night in the Red River district of towne. I won’t mention the name of the band that was headlining the evening, but between this featured band and the two that preceded it I heard very little music. Now let me add this caveat, I don’t really like Rock and Roll. I do however love good music and sometimes that includes the genre of Rock. My personal preference when it comes to music is only partly clouding my opinion on this subject. The other primary factor in being so harsh on the Austin music scene is that the cross section of all music that I have “checked out “ around this town is crap.
Not like, “I don’t like country, so I hate this song” kinda crap.
Its more like, “Between the overwhelming feedback and the screaming singer, this hardly resembles music” kinda crap.
Most of the acts that you go to see at most venues just need more practice, I just don’t want to pay a cover to hear a band practice.
If you are in a band in Austin and you are getting your feeling hurt, well don’t
Just get better
And we’ll be straight.
A Scanner Darkly is gonna be a great flick.
My buddy Beans is working on the animation part of the film.
The technique is called rotoscoping, and its super-bad.
If you saw Waking Life, then you have seen rotoscoping before but you have never really seen anything like this.
The style is both loose and tight at the same time
We went to see Constantine on Saturday afternoon cause the Scanner preview was playing before it. Constantine was a horrible move but Scanner looks super cool. I am so proud that my buddy is working on a major motion picture. That’s tight.
Constantine was another one of these flicks that has all the elements of a good movie but it can’t hold together because of the complexity of the story and so it just kind of falls apart. There were too many elements of the story, for even the most skilled of filmmakers, to unify for the silver screen. Besides, the Jon Constantine character is just a derivative of the Neo character from The Matrix films. It’s a part that Keanu does well, in fact I think that’s just the real Keanu but that’s what most Hollywood actors do. They play themselves, ad nauseum.
The best part of Constantine was the Hell imagery. Since Heaven and Hell are right here in this space but on different planes then Hell looks just like the world around you except it is engulfed in a firestorm. That was pretty cool and might make you look differently at your surroundings. And also I liked the Angel Gabriel. He was played by a British actress who made him seem androgynous and sweet and wicked all at the some time.
Oh yeah, and horrible editintg.
One and one half stars for Constantine, and I can’t tell if I’m being harsh or generous.
Sunday was hella relaxing. I slept late and went for a rainy round of disc golf at Pease Park with Beans. He won and I was OK with that. I got all this minutiae taken care of in the afternoon, which included but was not limited to grocery shopping and laundry and cleaning my bathroom and cooking myself a nutritious meal. I like getting stuff like that done cause it makes me feel all sorted out even though I might be far from it. Then I settled in with a spliff and some FOX Sunday nite programming. The Simpsons was excellent and it took on the subject of gay marriage with the gentle handling of a Army Instructional Video and the comic timing of Andy Kaufman, genius as always. And Carnivale is still bending my noodle.
Then this morning on the way to work I found out that Hunter S Thompson died and so I died a little myself.
He is one of the greatest influences when I think about “Why do I write?”
We will all miss you Doctor Gonzo.
May the lord God give me the strength to smite those who framed your death as a suicide
and avenge your murder.
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