Vomit, excrement, pus, and bile

I'm so glad South by Southwest is over. I'll only have to read about it in the Chronicle for another fucking eight weeks, then a few months' reprieve before they start talking about next year's edition. A million shitty bands are back where they belong, toiling in obscurity before they finally wise up and ask for the paper route back. I love music, but there are too many bands. I will never catch up on all the old stuff I want, let alone the five million new bands a week I'll never get a chance to hear. The arteries are clogged. Unless you want to play music so badly it will destroy every fiber of your being if you don't, stop bothering everybody. You can't throw a rock in Austin without hitting a band, but I'd say less than one percent of these motherfuckers are doing anything besides licking scraps off somebody else's plate. Sometimes, I get so fucking tired of rock and roll. It seems like a huge waste of energy and terrible fashion sense. Here I am now, though, sitting in my apartment, listening to rock, loving it. Maybe I'm getting tired of seeing music live, having to sit through shitty opening bands, chatty assholes who always stand behind me, people who pump their fists constantly and shout the name of the band incessantly, people whose hair and clothes and dancing styles were all seemingly chosen specifically to enrage me. I'm too irritable in a crowd. I prefer my people in small groups. I need to just stay home and listen to records. When will I learn? Never leave the house. Never. Never ever. On that note, I attended one SXSW show on Thursday night before flying back to Nebraska the next day to attend my dad's wedding, the Guided by Voices hoot night. If you're unfamiliar with the hoot night format, it consists of lots of bands playing the music of one particular artist. Except this time, members of GBV were there in person, playing a few songs themselves, including Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard. Highlights: Calexico. I don't know how to tell you how good they were without resorting to words like "destroyed," "ruled," "blew minds," etc., but they were the best thing I saw. They did a ridiculously excellent version of "Non-Absorbing." Also, Moonlight Towers did justice to my favorite GBV song of ever, "Smothered in Hugs." Lowlights: The show was too fucking long, with too many fucking bands. I was tired and wanted to sleep. Also, too many people who decided it would be a good idea to pay ten bucks, stand in line for an hour, attend a rock show, and have a loud conversation through the entire thing. I'll never understand this behavior, though it seems these assholes are outnumbering the rest of us with each passing day. Maybe it has something to do with the cellphone culture that has poisoned every available space of our fucking country. Cell phones have done more to destroy the very fabric of our culture than every terrorist combined. We're not long for this world if we keep regressing at our present rate, and I welcome the coming apocalypse if it means every cell phone in the world will be obliterated along with us. I don't want to hear your private conversations any more than I want to watch you take a shit. How would you like it if I carried a toilet with me everywhere I went and constantly shat in public? I imagine it would wear out its novelty factor pretty goddamn fast. I'm not interested in your fucking mouth defecations, either. Use your cell phone in emergencies and when there's no one around who has to listen to your inane conversations. Otherwise, behave like a civilized human being and leave your fucking phone at home or in your car. I hate you. Also, the whole Uncle Bob/beer/drunkfest/audience-as-enabler/it's not a GBV show unless everybody's drunk thing is really annoying. Don't get me wrong. My liver's been on the W.C. Fields diet since I was 16, but my interest in GBV is based on all those great songs written by Robert Pollard and the fact that he didn't get his break until he was in his late thirties. Isn't that more interesting? Also, out of the 12 or 13 times I saw GBV live, the shows where they were trashed (and there's less of those than you might think) were by far the weakest shows they did. Alas, a beer-free GBV show would have probably gone down as well as Kiss without their makeup. But most of Kiss' songs suck, so that's not really an accurate comparison. "Rock and Roll All Night?" Heard it lately? You could put together a supergroup featuring a Capuchin monkey, a retarded child, a leaf blower, and the dug-up remains of General Robert E. Lee, and you'd get a more competent rock band. Kiss needs its makeup. Those guys are businessmen. Businessmen don't belong on the stage. They belong in hell, which is where they'll all end up if the belief system I rejected as a child actually turns out to be true. Of course, if that happens, I'll be in there with them. Business majors. What the fuck's wrong with these people? What a waste of life. Majoring in business. Have fun making that money, asshole. It's more money than I'll make, but your life is an ugly, worthless, morally bankrupt hole. Business. Yuck.
I had a few celebrity sightings last week, though nothing as exciting as Garry Shandling cruising my crotch. While standing in line at the GBV thing, David Johansen walked by. He's a pretty amazing-looking guy, with his exaggerated features and lined, craggy face. And he was in the New York Dolls. Plus. He was also Buster Poindexter. Minus. But the New York Dolls. Hell, yeah. Then, in the airport the next day, I saw Fatboy Slim and Kinky Friedman and a lot of people who were probably in some shitty band that nobody cares about except for a few random British journalists. I wasn't as excited seeing these guys as I was when I spotted David Johansen, but I'm a fan of absurdity, and there's something absurd about Fatboy Slim standing in line behind me buying a turkey sandwich at an airport sports bar. I'm going to go eat a popsicle.

Listening to: Space Needle - The Moray Eels Eat the Space Needle
I bought this for 99 cents in the cutout bin at the record store where I worked in college. I've only listened to it twice since then. I was under the mistaken impression it was mostly forgettable, generic indie rock, and I planned on selling it. I don't know why I remembered it that way. The album pleases me. I will allow it to remain in my chambers.