Shows I Missed

I went to college in New York, a fact that I tend to omit from most train-yard burn-barrel conversation. Boxcar dwellers don’t look kindly upon the formally educated, and if your formal education comes from New York City, it’s likely they’ll whittle hobo signs on your forehead with rusty box cutters and leave you bleeding in the dirt. A life of privilege, whether economic or academic, cannot be trusted amongst the no-income set. There are too many rich kids playing poor for sport, and although I’m not one of them (I’m genuinely broke, just look at the scars on my feet from stepping on piggy-bank shards), a degree from NYU lumps me in with the snootiest of the snooty. After all, I did go to school with celebrities and Middle-Eastern nobility. I’ve attended parties where bags of cocaine were handed out as party favors. I’ve skateboarded through the spiraled Guggenheim. I’ve ridden more subways than steam engines.

There are, however, times when I lean on my laurels. At hipster parties pretty much anywhere outside of New York, you mention the letters N-Y-U, and the girl who wouldn’t pass you the warmest Pabst from her messenger bag will suddenly see you as a cool, intellectual way out of her empty, Hot-Topic life. She’ll lead you into the nearest bathroom and let your genitals share stomping grounds with her Bubblicious.

This was one of those nights when it was advantageous to mention my association with the neighborhood where this concert took place. I was at a house party in New Mexico, far from Avenue A, so the Big Apple’s clout worked to my advantage. Some girl named “Andromeda,” hooked on Pop Rocks, actually thought I’d be crafty enough to play Perseus and freight her away from the monster her life had become. For about twelve minutes, I let her believe it.

[via Ryan Walsh and The Stairs]

I’m not interested in solo guitar recitals because they never include the use of feedback or the whammy bar.  I grew up playing percussion and goofing off at the back of band classrooms, honing my dating skills on stringy and off-pitch orchestral ladies. I know my way around a practice room, and I’m quite familiar with the kinds of things you might run through when you’re in one. Recitals are usually overwhelmingly stale. The upper-level ones feature an abundance of pretension and a dearth of death metal. If I didn’t eventually ditch marching band, I might never have known the smash-nose serenity of Slayer.

I was nowhere close to this recital. A freshman in college, crammed into a tiny sweatbox dorm with two other guys in the East Village, I was doing anything I could to get some time alone. I grew up an only child in an Oklahoma suburb, where you come to take hand-romance for granted. In lower Manhattan, you’ve got to wait until the right moment presents itself, then seize it. Both the roommates were out getting drunk somewhere. I lit some candles, found a crumbless spot on my bed, and tuned my guitar until it wept.

[via Visual Culture]

I wish I knew what this handbill meant, other than what is already known: Europe gets all the colorful dik. I hope, in the most mildewed corner of my heart, that this poster was designed by a unicorn that escaped from Buchenwald in 1945.

It was cold as hell outside, so I took cover in a high school gymnasium during a JV basketball game. The players were awkward. The squeaks of their shoes ricocheted off the walls dozens of times before hitting the ears, and the cheerleaders made me dribble doubly. Eventually, the glares I received from parents far outweighed my need to leer, so I grabbed my coat and reintroduced my cheeks to the biting air outside.

Next time, I’ll wear my Chupa Cabra suit and pretend I’m a misplaced mascot. Everyone loves mystical creatures, including cheerleaders. Oh, you thought that a unicorn’s horn is purely there for decoration? It’s for goring Nazis and whoring Nancys, too.

[via perongeluk]

Shadows frighten me. Following the walleyed logic of fear, shadow puppets and puppeteers frighten me, too. The very nature of shadows ensures that mine has to follow me around everywhere I go, like a reanimated puppy. This creeps me out. I figure you can’t trust a shadow puppeteer, or any other iteration of shadow wrangler who dabbles in the dark arts. They toy with the creatures that cling to your soul.

Cloudy days mean I can go about my business without having to watch my back for the darkness stepping on my heels. Five years ago, when I read in some nature book that Portland is blessed with an abundance of clouds, I packed up my possessions and moved there (here), lickety-split. Haven’t bumped into a shadow puppeteer yet.

Instead of attending this exhibition of evil, I microwaved a factory-packed beef stroganoff dinner, threw on some Goblin, and organized my books by color. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, it was the best way to occupy my evening.

[via jayrz]

If only. This event was probably irrefutably influential, like geometry. Because no one from my circle of squares planned to attend, I wanted to go, simply to see if it measured up. Unfortunately, I was in no shape to leave the house. 

I flopped around in my sweat-salted sheets, sick as a snake shedding skin. When I awoke the next morning, acute pain splintered through my neck. By my calculations, I had slept at a strange angle, protracting my illness and making my fever dreams even more obtuse.

[via maths]

No matter how long I ruminate, no matter how many lists I make, no matter how many pages of my roommate’s journal I transcribe, I can’t find a single good excuse for skipping the “Summer Slaughter Tour.” Just look at all that blood. If you’re the kind of person who sits for entire Sunn O))) albums in front of the mirror, practicing your fiercest scowl, I hope you donned your blackest of black robes and your whitest of white corpse paint and attended this group bloodcurdling. I didn’t.

When suddenly afflicted with an overwhelming urge to better my crumbling physique, I went to the gym without remembering that exercise is usually a mistake. There was a woman there on some sort of machine that looked like a cousin of the 18th century Nuremberg iron maiden, and as she grunted I caught her eye. She totally wants me, I thought, so I casually waved at her with the 10-pound dumbbell in my hand, simultaneously pulling a muscle in my armpit I had forgotten was there. Played it off as a nothing and got my clipped wing out of that place. Spent the next two weeks applying deodorant gingerly. Told everyone it was a tickling injury.

[via accident prone]

I couldn’t be bothered to travel to Flagstaff, I was busy writing a mediocre story about a boy who drowns in a wheat field. If I were to have gone anywhere, it would have been Kansas, for research. Also, I would have packed a snorkel. 

Later that night, I got into a nasty row with the girlfriend over whose penis is bigger, mine or hers (mine, obviously). She kicked me out of her house and I skated home and sat on my porch, drinking black coffee and stroking my ego.

[via elten eleven]

It doesn’t take a Mensa inductee to figure out that this show had some of the best-named acts in entertainment’s long legacy. “Ghost: Bitch” seems like some sort of classification in the Library of Sexual Congress. “Some Young Pedro” assumes many of us know multiple guys named Pedro, and this just happens to be another one with that name, and he’s young. Most notably, there’s “ACRNYM.” This might seem like an arbitrary emcee moniker to you, but when I look at that name, the first thing between my ears is, “Where did the ‘O’ go?” Then I realized: It’s around his dick. Oh.

See the cover price? Yeah, that’s not American cash. No matter how perfectly titled the lineup, I can’t shell out seven hundred dollars to Jet Blue my way across the globe. That’s cake and steak money. Rent, honey. 

I wrote a letter to an old friend in a coffee shop and lost it before I made it home. Saddened, I watched YouTube videos of dudes revving mopeds until I fell asleep with my clothes still on.

[via here]

Got out of L.A. long before this show, but just in time to snare the last fibrous remnants of my sanity. Echo Park? Silver Lake? No thank you. I’m surrounded by plenty of unattainable affluence right here in rainy Portland, OR. Los Angeles might have In ‘N Out Burger, but the girls in Portland actually make eye contact with me, which allows me to believe it could lead to the fabled act of in and out. Hold your tongue, friends. My whole life is upheld by such delusions and denial, like rotting stilts holding up a teetering shanty in the swamp. Spare me your gale-force facts. Instead, I went to my friend Noah’s house for a cookout. Ate someone else’s steaks, drank someone else’s beer. Gotta make the most of the upper left coast. Then I was ghost. [via Eagle and Talon]

Had three beers at 5 p.m. and passed out in the park around 7 p.m. Woke up half past midnight, a blade of grass in my nostril. Walked home, wondering if cracks in the pavement happen over years or in a blink. I’m sure it’s a gradual thing, but I want to believe it happens suddenly, like a balloon bursting. I craved spaghetti and meatballs, but not enough to deal with the whole going-to-the-store thing.

Didn’t even think about live music. Not once.

[via these guys]