to the universe i don't mean a thing

i went to the drugstore today and felt really bad for a girl in the checkout line. she was trying to pay with her debit card, and apparently the cashier's computer screen said "declined due to insufficient funds," a fact which she repeated loudly to pretty much the entire front half of the store. the poor girl looked like she was about to start crying, and ran out of the store while the cashier shook her head and said in a really annoyed voice, "now i'm going to have to void all of this stuff out. idiot." nice. people rock.

since i don't have much to say (except that woo-hoo i'm going to see mark lanegan and greg dulli feb. 15 at the showbox!), here are a FEW pictures from christmas:


my parent's dog, annamae
my mom cooking lobster for christmas eve dinner

hey, let's cross the sea and get some culture

to the person that took my ring from the bathroom at the university village on friday: you suck. you could have turned it into lost and found, but i guess you decided to keep something that didn't belong to you. not that you'll ever read this. but still.

here's a cool video:


and this completes the trifecta of awesomest bands that megan saw at bumbershoot. it is the whigs performing on letterman. i had heard a few things about this band, but had never listened to their music and so decided to check them out. i found a spot down near the front of the stage. one of the guys in the band brought someone a cup of beer before the show and the stage manager (i don't know what you call those people. roadies? person who stands around pretending they're important?) took her beer and poured it into a starbucks cup and handed it back to her with the lid on it. so i spent the first song or two contemplating the nastiness of drinking beer through the hole on the top of that lid. yuck.

once i was able to get into the music, i really enjoyed myself. the whigs are, i suppose, nothing terribly original, although i am no longer sure that's a bad thing to say about a band. after their performance, i walked over to the cd-buying tent, and i noticed that rolling stone had apparently written that they are "a band to watch." whatever that means. i got their record, mission control, the other weekend at easy street (in a particularly good shopping trip - i found a used copy of the gutter twins, a used copy of no code to replace the one that was eaten by my pearl jam eating monster, blitzen trapper, and two minus the bear cd's) and i have since listened to it over 5 times. which is a lot for me, because, although i adore music, i rarely have the attention span these days to sit through an entire record.




i love the way the singer (whose name, by the way, is parker. i love when singers in rock bands have preppy-sounding names. hamilton from the walkmen is another one) jumps around while he's playing. i was telling someone the other day about my new fascination with watching singer's feet. i think that it started with glen hansard, because his foot stomping is such an integral part of the frames/swell season (i give up.. i'm just going to call them the frames season from now on).

speaking of the frames season (ha! it has a ring to it), i will be seeing them in 20 days! yippee! some lady emailed me today to ask if i thought the swell season would be appropriate for a 10 year old. first of all, i love it when someone emails me because it means that someone, somewhere is reading what i write. second of all, her email got me excited about my upcoming concert adventure. third of all, i think she's a very cool mother for taking her child to see glen and marketa.

2010, watch it go to fire

all in all, i had a great weekend at the subpop anniversary festival (pictures and highlights tomorrow), but right now i am going to vent. what good is your blog if you can't complain on it?

as much as i love seattle, i hate the fact that buses are the only form of public transportation (well, and monorails and streetcars that go basically nowhere). having said that, i take the bus practically everywhere - not because it's always convenient, but because i hate driving and think that supporting mass transit is really important (as is not giving my hard-earned money to greedy oil or parking companies). i left the show tonight right after green river (and they are the reason for my next complaint.. hold on a sec) and just missed the 545 to seattle. instead of waiting an hour for the next one, i decided to take a bus to the bellevue transit center, which means that i got a wonderful tour of pretty much all the bus stops between redmond and bellevue. it was almost as fun as ride the ducks. every time i go to another city- boston, portland, san francisco, even LA - i am amazed by how relatively easy it is to get around with just a map and a rudimentary knowledge of the transit system. you go to a train stop and one is there within 5-10 minutes. that must be too simple for seattle. it's not even the city's fault entirely, the blame also lies with a short-sighted public that would rather fund roads than mass transit.

(if you're reading this and you live in seattle, please don't stop riding the bus. but keep making noise for better transportation options)

ok, so on to number two. stupid me somehow thought that it would be a good idea to get a spot towards the front for green river. about ten minutes before they started, it suddenly dawned on me that i probably really didn't want to be that close, but by that time there was a crush of people at the front and no way to get out. i don't think i've ever actually seen a mosh pit up close before. or touched crowd surfers before either. both are things i'm looking forward to never experiencing again. why grown people think that it's fun to smash into each other like idiots is beyond me. i was so focused on trying to stay upright and away from that craziness that i couldn't even enjoy the band at all. it's like a whole crowd of preschoolers gone mad. does anyone actually enjoy that? why??

but the worst part was at the end of the show. honestly, i thought to myself, "thank god, i'm still alive and now i can get out of here." but, no. someone from the stage started throwing shirts at the audience and people went insane diving for them. i had almost gotten through the crowd when a bunch of shirts came sailing over my head and a lot of people went for them at once causing everyone around me to fall down on the ground. i know it sounds stupid now, but i can't remember the last time i was that scared. for a split second, i thought that if i fell, people would step on me and i would die.

i have often wondered why, as a musician, you would continue playing when you see people basically trying to kill each other in your audience. i don't get it. does acting like an idiot somehow heighten your enjoyment of the music? and then to egg that behavior on by throwing things into the crowd for people to fight over... the whole thing just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. thank goodness people don't do that dumb stuff at pearl jam shows any more.

so that i can go to bed on a lighter note, i think the funniest moment for me was on saturday when the guy from iron and wine (who i only knew from his cover of such great heights, but who i really loved) actually started playing free bird when someone requested it.