Posts tagged cat
A Plethora of Concert Lovin’
Sep 27th
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Portofino by Frank Schaeffer. This book is so great. It’s a coming-of-age story about this kid, Calvin, who is vacationing with his fundamentalist christian missionary parents in Portofino, Italy. The seminal quote is “Most kids told lies to be special. I told lies to be normal.” It’s funny and poignant…I love it.
MOVIE I’VE RECENTLY SEEN: Shaun of the Dead. Oh my God, hilarious! I love British humor and this had the added benefit of some truly jump-worthy scares as well.
CD I HAVE BEEN SPINNING: Marc Broussard. http://www.marcbroussard.com Marc Broussard is pure sex. Pure. Sex. I think that straight guys should not even be allowed to listen to Carencro because the pure sex in their ears when those sounds start pouring out of their battery-deficient ipods just might turn them. And that would mean less boys for me. And that’s not OK. Because it’s all about me. (I know, I know…they solved the battery issue in the 5th generation. Whatever.)
GUILTY PLEASURE: Ashlee Simpson. Damn. I hate to even admit that.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, her songs are catchy. Whatever. But she did not, in point of fact, write them. Sure she has a writing credit on every song, but hell, the songwriting team Geffen hired to spruce her shit up could probably turn my blog into a hit song. It doesn’t mean I wrote said song!
She doesn’t play any instruments. That’s a problem for me in her genre of music, even if maybe it shouldn’t be. But while I don’t EXPECT pop airheads to be musicians, I DO expect rockers to be actual musicians, dammit! Is that so wrong????
She never had to pay any dues…she never had to convince a club to book her. She never had to do load in/load out. She never had to stand in front of a hostile audience that’s just waiting for the next guy and try to win them over. She never had to do any of a hundred things that people who have fought through and become seasoned have had to do, and therefore I will never admire her the way I admire the musicians I *DO* respect.
But, hell…was I playing my sister’s copy of “Autobiography” on the way to work this morning and guiltily enjoying it? Fuck me, yes I was! I hate myself a little right now. LOL
WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON LATELY: Well, one major event was the David Ryan Harris show at Little Temple here in LA. Oh, man, what a night. http://www.davidryanharris.com or http://www.ifihadadime.com (lots of good downloads at that last one)
First off, I got to meet a bunch of MSMers that I’ve never met in person before. Brandy, Trudy, Cy, Pearl, Michelle, Chandler, and Richard Young (the founder of MSM, also http://www.ifihadadime.com and http://www.firstlisten.org). It was such a small, intimate show. Maybe 50 or 60 people there. The club is incredible! I thought of Cat, because I felt as if I were in the movie Love Jones. It felt, also, like being inside a Genie’s bottle. A very cool Genie who has a Vern-influenced decorating sensibility. 
Also, on the celebrity front, Scotty Crowe (Mayer’s merch manager…er…tour journal writer…er…ok, let’s just call it like it is. Mayer’s bitch. was there. God, I used to have such the crush on him. He was standing about 5 feet from where I was sitting. It made it someowhat difficult to concentrate on the show. Haha. Apparently DRH is his next big project. He’s propelled Mayer to stardom and next DRH. Awesome. Randy Jackson was there. Or should I say, Randy Jackson was there, dawg. Last, but SO not least…Adrian Zmed was there. Oh, yeah, baby. TJ Hooker 4 lyfe!!!!!
I concert-called Shawna for Pretty Girl. I figured since that song is about her (in our minds, anyway! haha) she should get to hear it. The show was just great. My favorite number was “Good Thing” at the end, because it was audience participation…we got to sing and clap and sway and I felt like I was back in Tongues of Fire!
“We had a gggooooodddd thing, don’t get me wrong…” FUN!!!!!!
Last Thursday, I drove down to San Diego (well, Solana Beach, technically) to see Tristan Prettyman http://www.tristanprettyman.com and OH MY GOD she is even more beautiful in person than in her photos, which I would not have thought humanly possible. Opening for her were Pete Thurston http://www.petethurston.com and Saba http://www.sabamusic.com. They were great as well. But Mizz Trizzy blew me the fuck away. She was incredible. Between everyone’s sets, it was about 3 1/2 hours in by the time she finished and I did NOT want it to be over, even though I was tired. I wanted it to keep going on and on and on and on. WOW!
Last thing to talk about, roomie Evelyn http://www.angelfire.com/va/downeasteralexa and I had a housewarming ‘do. Well…mainly Evelyn, let’s be real. haha. Evie cooked Chicken Cacciatore with Polenta and made a fabulous Mocha Almond Torte for desert. MMMMM….. I got to see some people I hadn’t seen in a while. Amy Crego was there, she is about to leave for bootcamp in a month, she joined the MARINES if you can believe it! WOW! My summer 2002 roomie Tessa was there, and I haven’t seen her for two years. I love, love, LOVE that girl. She is an incredible human. Evie’s friend Carrie came, as well as Cliff and Cerene. Chris bailed, and you can BELIEVE there is going to be hell to pay the next time EVT sees him. She denies it, but…come on. Stacie and Pat (friends of Evelyn) dropped by after the party and we did not end up getting to bed until 4.
All in all….it’s been a GREAT week, y’all!!!!!
Garlic Girls
Jul 27th
Welcome to my new resolution of updating my web journal every week!
Yah…we’ll see how the hell that goes.
WHAT I’M READING: I’m re-reading “Good in Bed” by Jennifer Weiner…it’s such a fabulous book! I feel like it explains what it’s like to be me…not an easy task LOL.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Just discovered Lucy Kaplansky…God, this lady is amazing! She has a PhD in psych and left her practice and professorship to tour with her guitar. Neato! Her music is bomb, too. So far, I particularly love “Guinevere” and “Broken Things”…but I’m just getting started. She’s playing at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz this September, so I need to order all her CD’s immediately so I can be fully prepared come Sept. Also, I’ve never been to the KJC, but one of my friends said that it is a REALLY cool venue, so I’m pretty psyched about that, as well.
I think the coolest venue I’ve ever been to was McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA. (Shout out to SoCal!) They have this cool room in the back that seats about 40 or 50, and it’s painted all black…guitars are hanging by their necks from the walls…great venue. Saw the Bobs there, and DaVinci’s Notebook made a surprise appearance. Great night, eh Evie!
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Carole King lately, by virtue of the fact that I am teaching my Second Grade class “Alligators All Around”, “Chicken Soup with Rice” and “Beautiful” right now. So those songs are terminally running through my head!
(MELANIE’S CREATIVE TEACHING IDEA NUMBER 67: Singing is an excellent choral reading activity! Repitition of text is what moves words from decodable text to sight words, and singing makes the repitition fun! You can also expose kids to cool music they might not otherwise hear…blues, jazz, etc. I have a cool lesson I like to do where I read them the story “Lookin’ for Bird in the Big City” and then we learn about and listen to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker music…screw Barney and crap! Kids are never too young for quality tunes!
WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: So, today Cat and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. IT WAS SO FREAKING HOT!!!!! And I don’t mean in the sense that it was a hip and happenin’ place…it was HOT…as in, heatstroke hot.
We are Food Network freaks, and Cat said that the Garlic Festival is a big deal on the Food Network. Last year, hottie Tyler Florence was there. He’s so cute! Evie has a jones for him, too. I have this fantasy where I pretend I have a Food 911 emergency and once I have hottie Tyler Florence in my kitchen….well, that’s a story for another time.
At any rate, the big culinary deal at the Garlic Festival is Garlic Ice Cream. Sounds disgusting, right? Well…it’s interesting. For some reason which made sense to me at the time, I ordered Garlic-Chocolate ice cream served in a half-cantaloupe. I believe it had something to do with the cantaloupe only costing 50 cents more. And for some other reason which has at this point escaped me, I continued to eat it even after I started feeling nauseous. I think that reason had to do with a “I paid for it, damn it, I’m eating it!” philosophy which has been proved unwise.
So, all in all, we spent about 35 minutes inside the gates of the Garlic Festival (there was 10 bucks well spent!), but the good thing is that now we can say that we have been to the thing…and that we consumed the famous (should be infamous!) Garlic Ice Cream.
STORY FROM THE JOHN MAYER CONCERT I FORGOT TO TELL: So, okay, the one bummer about the John Mayer concert was that I was sitting in the designated fuddie duddie section, apparently. All the people were sitting down, quietly listening…no one was singing along…damn it, I can do that at home! I wanna dance! But I was too self-conscious to stand up (I was in the front row of my section).
So, then, the three girls next to me stand up and start dancing…YIPPEE! Just as I am about to join them, this old guy from about six rows back yells, “Hey, sweetheart, I didn’t pay a hundred and sixty bucks for these seats to look at your ass!” and she turns around and yells at him, “You paid a hundred and sixty? I usually charge twice that to look at my ass, you got off cheap,” and continues to dance her heart out.
In the spirit of sisterhood (and because I had already wanted to anyway , I had to join them. Now there were four of us dancing in the front row of the fuddie duddie section!
Well, I would love to say that this began a wave of concert enthusiasm which spread throughout our section and inspired a lot more standing and boogie-ing like would happen in the movies, but actually, it just remained the four of us dancing throughout the concert and getting popcorn and crap thrown in our hair.
BUT…the moral of the story is this: I had a much better time because I did what I wanted to without worrying about what other people thought, AND I met three really cool chicks. So, shout out to the sassy chicks I met last Saturday, should they by some miracle end up reading this!
Ciao, ragazzi! Ci vediamo.
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