The new Sleater-Kinney album?
Melts bricks.

Oh, and Grandaddy's old album, Under the Western Freeway is my new favorite for driving around Atalantalala on hallucinatorily (new word!) hot summer afternoons in one's un-air conditioned car. Especially good with no sleep, but if you wanna be a stickler for safety, that's your business.

Revenge of the Glo-Stick Hats
The Festival of Music Midtowniness takes place this weekend, and there are a lot of bands I rilly, rilly like who are playing. But while each new beloved act I find out about provokes in me a quite spirited reaction, the response is actually the complete converse of what you might expect. For Music Midtown is a collection of bands playing music, yes…in Hell.

I hear that before I moved here about five years ago, MM actually took place in a sunny, grassy glen somewhere. But now it happens every year in a giant parking lot. So it’s your favorite bands, yes? Right? Playing music, yes. La, la, la. In Juuuune. In Atlanta, Georgia. In a concrete bunker with glaring humid heat bouncing off every corner and populated, wall-to-wall, with drunken, sweaty/and/or/muddy teenagers! And I know this because I’ve been! I’ve tried! A few years ago, I lived on a street right behind the festival and volunteered for the event and milled around, taking care to step over the vomit, of course, and steer clear of those youths who looked like they were about to create some and send it my way.

And I had, actually not a bad time, which I think was because there weren’t really any bands I cared about. My friend and I stood in the front row and danced as Al Green flicked his holy sweat onto us until it started to skeej us out so we moved back, some. And off in one corner of the giant lot, Victoria Williams turned out to be playing; and there were only about 12 of us there to care, so that was sorta kinda neat.

But it’s different when it’s a band you actually really care about. If there’s a giant hairy shirtless man directly behind you (or as is usually the case, right in Front of you) yelling, “WoooooOOOOOoooooOOO!” during oh, Kool and the Gang, that’s one thing. But not the White Stripes! And not (yes, they make my goofy little heart go pitter-pat) Devo! And I wasn’t gonna mention the Pixies, but god damn it; the Pixies.

I’m not a total stick in the mud. I go to shows that play the rock and the roll. I love the shows that play the rock and the roll. (Why, I’ve even enjoyed a rumble seat or two in my day.) But there’s a difference between an event where people pay money to see a specific band, and an outdoor music festival in a muggy concrete pen with three exits. And to find that difference, ask any given concertgoer: “Why are you here?”

Which doesn’t mean that I won’t be grabbing the lapels of the next person I meet who turns out to have gone to MM, demanding, “The Pixies! How were they?! Tell me now!!!!”

Arse-Wiper to the Stars!
This afternoon I told myself I’d write for real, but instead here I am writing—well, to you, Mr. Imaginary Henshaw .
Two years ago I had a sneaking suspicion that’s now expanded into something somewhere between full-grown theory and full-blown superstition. You let me know which.

At that time, I had a collection of crappy jobs: I worked at a coffee-shop, at a gift-shop, as a runner at a local amphitheater (for which I got to drive around listening to the Shins a lot while going out to buy pancake make-up for Art Garfunkel. No joke. Tell ya later.) I freelanced and wrote clever little things here in this forum and in letters and essays to friends and family members. I also wrote a few short fiction things. (Closer to the truth: short “fiction” things.) I also did lots of arts and crafts, went to see lots of shows of all sizes and shapes. (Shaking fist:)I had my finger on the pulse of Atlanta, dammit! No: I had my finger on my own creative pulse. The things I wrote were livelier, funnier and more thoughtful. Now that I have a job that’s Official, I feel almost as if my stethoscope to the world has a puncture in it somewhere. I get home; I want to sleep; I want to watch Six Feet Under.

Maybe it’s because I was so eager to define myself outside those jobs that I was such a creative superstar. Hell knows (heaven, too) I wasn’t happy in other ways. God, I was freaking miserable.

So the lingering fear of course, is that I have to be off wiping elephants' arses for a living somewhere so I can go home and write snarky things about those damn elephants who think they are so fancy-schmance. And it’s not that I dislike my job AT ALL; I love it. I just don’t want to let it define me. I don’t know. I keep plugging away. The answer? For how to do positively everything I want to do at once? As my cousin M.J. would joke, “Speed.”

Q: Alice, does the nature of the next post signify a move to more Wilford-Brimley-eating-Cream-of-Wheat-style-extemporizing?

A: No.

Another life.
I get up every morning for work at 4:50. I feed my cat, get dressed and go into the kitchen, where I put on water to boil for tea. I scramble two eggs, sometimes adding dill. At this point, Buddy Holly DangerCat is weaving himself around my ankles, purring, trying to lure me back to bed; but once I start sipping my tea I’ve already glanced out the window and seen our neighbor, an elderly gentleman also preparing his breakfast just yards away. It’s then that I no longer feel like a sideshow freak for waking up when it is still dark and the crickets are still chirping, while my friends whose invitation I declined to the drive-in the night before still sleep. I know the truth: that the man next door and I share a secret -- to longevity or maybe just regarding the importance of a good breakfast. Not sure about that one, but by the time I leave the house about ten minutes later, I’m feeling good and right instead of dislocated.

When we pass each other at other times during the day -- getting the mail or when I get back from running with my roommates’ dog -- the man and I nod and smile but we never say anything about our mornings. I don’t know why. It seems like it’s breaking some code that I don’t know all about yet because I’m still young. I’m learning.

It's a recording! It's a show! It's a recording AND a show!
Went to see Spoon the other night at the Variety Playhouse with some friends. A few things surprised me about this show.

First: We arrived around 9:30 and went to stand in one of the two holding pen-type places that the Variety has along both sides of its seating. Almost immediately, the lights went down, the curtain opened and there was Spoon. And I realized I’ve gotten to the point where I expect to stand for hours, waiting through band after opening band, my legs getting tired, drinking more beer than I really want, until finally when the main event comes, I only half-care and half want to sleep.

But there it was: not fifteen minutes at the place and there was the main act: four clean-cut gents playing a song from their newest album, sounding not one note different from the record. (More on this eerie fact in a bit.) Also: the lead singer did not look at all like Joaquin Phoenix, as I’ve always suspected he would for some reason. Instead, he looks like Gary Bussey.

He led all the songs with this sort of innocuous, smiley manner, before a really, really sedate crowd. I felt like we were in a time warp. I have a copy of Led Zeppelin’s BBC Recordings and one thing I always find jarring is that after each song, you get this smattering of polite British applause. Like, “Immigrant Song,” right? Followed by this ~Clap, clap, clap~; “Jolly good, then. Right-o.” Well, maybe no outright “Right-o”’s, but the “Right-o”’s are implied. They’re there. That’s how Wednesday night’s show was.

And yeah, the almost-zero-deviation-from-the-albums thing was weird, too. One of the people I went to the show with saw this as an asset, but gosh darn it, it’s good to see some elasticity, some creativity up there on the stage. Can’t say they weren’t good, though. Yes, they seemed like nice boys.

And yes, I didn’t write this till today because I got home after the show and had a visit from Old Man Insomnia and so was walking around with like, an hour sleep all day yesterday, till I finally crashed at (yes,) five o’clock and slept till morning. So there.