Donkey-headed something something

Tomorrow's my last day of real subbing...I'm taking over for a teacher who's having a baby...her classes are 11th Grade AP kids.

Should be sweet. Just transcribed my interview with Alec from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah...it went way better than I thought it would. He was pretty hilarious.

Interviewing Sleepytime Gorilla Museum tomorrow night at their show in L.A. That should be awesome...

news bits out.

big day tuesday

Locust, Modest Mouse, Chinese Stars

few other things here and there....willowz, something else caught my eye.

I'll have to buy The Locust and Modest Mouse, it appears, but that's ok. I already have The Chinese Stars...

Also landed a few CD reviews in Geek magazine and apparently will have at least five in Skyscraper...whee hoo...

Amazon fun

Picked up old copies of Three Mile Pilot's Another Desert, Another Sea, Oxbow's An Evil Heat and the GZA's Liquid Swords for pretty cheap on Amazon the other day and they've started filtering in.

This, as you might expect, is very exciting news.

In other news, it was cool to see the Arcade Fire debut at #2 on the Billboard charts this past week, but totally uncool to see they lost out on the top spot to Notorious B.I.G.

I'm not very chatty today.

Away we go...

Interviewing Clap Your Hands Say Yeah tomorrow, and I'm actually more nervous about it than I have been for any interview I've done in a while. (The last one was probably Ian MacKaye, part deux)

I think my impression of Alec is that of a dick. But in a good way.

Here's hoping....

Dear Journal

I am unsatisfied with what I'm finding new in contemporary "unsigned" art punk (that's what I'm calling it for laziness's sake). I know there are great bands out there, and I'm sick of listening to valid hipster pop stuff like The Shins, Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The new Battles helped, but only a little. It was more of a distraction. It just seems I've hit a brick wall after these bands:

Abe Vigoda
Silver Daggers
Rose For Bohdan
No Age
The Pope
Shearing Pinx
Duchesses
We Quit!

Every other band I check out in this vein seems to be too primitive for my tastes, too loose in terms of "song" structure, or too far out in noise-land for me to really dig. While I might appreciate such music, that doesn't mean I want to listen to it on a consistent basis. And you can only search myspace friends for so long before you become inundated with garbage, or so lost you end up on a friend from high school's page.

I'd like to go more international (New Zealand, Japan, etc.) but that's a pain too. Sometimes I hate not living near anyone with good music taste.

On a positive note, I have recently become enamored with Old Time Relijun and White Mice, and plan on picking up some of their releases ASAP.

Irony

Does anyone else find it somewhat odd that the day after Jean Baudrillard died, news breaks of this:

(If you can't tell from the picture, that's not a real man on the left. It's a cardboard cutout.)

That's right folks. The military is giving families cardboard cutouts of daddy for families to hang with while daddy's butchering folks (or being butchered) over in Iraq.