Made it to a secret show at Bowery Ballroom this past Tuesday night thanks to a heads up from tPower. Missed the opener.
Song Selection: Great, spread out well. Plenty of Electric Version, which me likes.
Show Length: Played over an hour and a half (although took really long breaks between songs), tooo much talking. Two encores (I think?, tough to say with all those breaks they took).
Cast: Neko Case was there, Dan Bejar was not. Wish Neko Case would get over Carl’s Niece singing on stage with her. There was some seriously impossible to ignore girl v. girl confusion on stage. Neko didn’t even sing lead on “The Laws Have Changed,” she just glared at the other girl and moaned about her damn earphone monitor setup most of the night. Carl’s niece performed well and made a good impression on the males in the room. Nevertheless, Neko Case (never having seen her before) was very impressive; she was effortlessly powerful.
Crowd: Disappointingly subdued.
Verdict: Like any band, they sounded much better in a relatively small club than outside at a festival. Really great performance, just wish the crowd would have better facilitated our jumping around. Should have brought my a100.
So for the last few months, Lizzie and I have been telling people we’re going abroad to different places, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Peru, and for the last two months Ecuador.
Well its official, Lizzie and I have been accepted by LanguageCorps for their 10-12 month program with a January start date in Ecuador!!!
We are also still going to China for two months this fall, which means all of the plans are falling into place perfectly, now we just have to finance it…
It would have been shameful if after all this time we didn’t end up getting accepted. People started asking me when exactly it was I was going to Ecuador, when I hadn’t even started writing my essays for the application. On the other hand, some people never really took our discussion of plans seriously, and I still don’t think Lizzie’s parents believe we’re actually going away for a year.
So, this means this blog will indeed become a sort of travel log in the relatively near future. I can’t get to it directly from China, but I think Ecuador would be more concerned with getting good broadband infrastructure in place than restricting its content.
“Mr. Murch’s favorite quotation was, ‘Give the world the best you have and the best will come back to you.’ This philosophy has been shared and emphasized with each generation of Murch students.”
“Reading and writing are fundamental at Murch.”
“Murch uses the workshop model in both reading and writing.”
“Murch’s location in the nation’s capital, along with its active parent body, gives students access to knowledgeable guest speakers and extensive field trip opportunities.”
“Murch was one of twenty-four schools selected to participate in Teacher’s Institute’s Writer’s Workshop project.”
“Murch began by implementing two components: the Morning Meeting, and logical consequences.”
“Murch grade levels are divided according to the following groupings…”
And finally, from the “Murch History” pdf:
“In October 1930, Murch was honored by a visit from the First
Lady, Mrs. Herbert Hoover, who came to plant a maple tree in the
Murch playground.”
Good god was this a better show than the first time Lizzie and I saw them. Last summer we saw them at the Great Scott in Boston. It’s a tiny place, essentially a bar with a decently sized stage. Maybe it was because they do a terrible job with publicity, maybe it was because Boston empties itself of its massive college-age population each summer, maybe the Cribs were dramatically less known in the U.S. a year ago, but Lizzie and I were two of maybe 10 or 15 people standing in front of the stage. They were all I could have expected last year, swearing incomprehensibly, yelling at the bar to give them more red bull and vodka and smashing their glasses off to the side of the stage (incidentally also the hallway to the bathroom). They wore tighter jeans than I’d ever seen (or have ever seen since), seemed so brutish on stage, but were absolute sweethearts offstage. They stayed for a long time after the show talking outside with the few attendees. We lumbered behind an older couple talking to the bass player until we got our turn and had a chat with him…
Last night was a bit different. John joined us. The night built up slowly. Dinner (mmm cheap half-duck and Tsingtao) in Chinatown, crappy first opener (Foreign Islands), and then began the notable action. White Rabbits were really good. This six-piece indie-pop band got the whole crowd swaying and bopping around. Unlike the Cribs, they were large, featured sharp harmonies, and were extremely tight. And believe me this is not to insult the Cribs’ sloppy and grinding style. Anyway, I liked the White Rabbits enough to buy the cd. Their front man was extremely nervous-looking until the last two songs, but this was remedied by the fact that half of the songs were sung by the very impressive man on the keys.
The Cribs set was everything it was a year ago, except much louder and more energetic. They had plenty of energy from the crowd to feed on. The poles were reversed from last year’s show. Instead of ten wide-eyed fans with smiles on their faces looking up at a frustrated band, this time there were fights in the audience and the band tried to play the optimists, even coming near the edge of the stage as if they were going to break the people up themselves, saying “We should all be on the same side here.” The crowd really wasn’t thrashing around all that violently, but its a damn good thing it wasn’t a sold out show. While Lizzie did leave the show with a bloody lip, it was a overwhelmingly fun show for all of us.(more…)
So I managed to weed through my 1117 photos I took in Ireland and put only 354 on the interweb. I am going to attempt some better editorial skills in the future when it comes selecting worthwhile shots and which one’s I upload… maybe not… Lizzie says I upload way more than people are actually going to get through. I believe I have been spending enough time on the internet this summer that I don’t even understand what that means.
A note to family members and anyone interested in printing: if you want to print the pictures I uploaded, you have to be a contact of mine on flickr. You can view and download the pictures up to full resolution without being a member, but in order to print them, you have to do two things 1) become a member of flickr (really easy, its actually a really easy website to use) and 2) add me as a contact. If you add me as a contact, I will accept and then designate you as family or a friend, and only people designated as family and friends have permission to print photos. I also just discovered that printing through flickr is incredibly easy and cheap. $.15 per 4×6, $.99 per 5×7, and $1.99 per 8×10. I have done absolutely no post-processing to these pictures, and if you want me to do fix anything in a picture before you order prints, just let me know.
In the interest in keeping posts relatively short, summary posts about the trip will come separate. For now, enjoy the photos.
