Concert reviews, kvetching, and dressing to the left.

It’s been one hell of a busy week. I’ve been working so damned much, I haven’t had a chance to post at all – or to read anyone else’s gossip – so I’m going to try to catch up on the days that fell into the vacuum while the office is fairly quiet.

On Monday night I went to see the White Stripes with Brian, Robert and Scott. Robert asked me for tickets while we were at dinner at Cha Cha Cha on the 21st – normally, I’d be more than happy to oblige, but as they sold out three nights, getting last-minute tickets for it was no mean feat, even for management. I wrangled him a good pair, though… actually better than my own… and all was well. I was dead on my feet all day in the office… horrible headache, not enough sleep, combined with the usual barrage of ticketing idiocy. To be honest, due to the impending Lab update looming over my head and the backlash of office stress I’ve had to swim through recently, I had absolutely no desire to see the show at all, but it would be an insult to my boss and to the GM to disregard the comps that he set us up with, so I needed to find a way to motivate. Since I was going to work the shows for the final two nights, I didn’t really have any desire to see the Soledad Brothers or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, so I went home from the office early and passed out for a few hours. I managed to drag my ass out of bed at about 8pm, wiggled into a change of clothes, and wandered into the theatre about twenty minutes into YYY’s set.

They sucked.

I’m usually fairly lenient with my music critiques, and I do acknowledge that every single band can be considered derivative of another older or more prominent performer or group (read: “blah” is a rip off of “blah”), but this was just… horrible. It’s like she watched some vids of Patti Smith and just mimicked her. The contact embarrassment was agony. Horrible, stupid, contrived performance…

… and the “music” sucked, too.

I’m all for the nouveau NYC punk rehash, but c’mon. If you don’t have any talent, please… at least attempt to mask it by being even marginally original. It galled me so much that I gathered up the troops and we spent the rest of the set people-watching and nursing beer in the south concourse. I found out the next day that my cohorts shared my sentiments: they turned off the live feed in the box office after two songs.

The White Stripes were quite good live. I came in expecting a shoe-gazing, bland performance (a la the Babes in Toyland show I endured years ago: all the angst and power of the music vanishing in an instant due to a neurotic, frozen stage presence), and was happily surprised. The sound was comparable to their recordings, and they had far more charisma than I’d anticipated. Meg White’s drumming was charmingly masturbatory, and Jack White was the epitome of Detroit hipster sexy. The latter could have been (in part) due to the fact that his amusingly tight jester pants left absolutely NOTHING to the imagination.

Ladies, he doesn’t wear underwear, he dresses to the left and he’s circumcised.

I shit you not. From my seats, I saw the whole nine years, so to speak. It was near-impossible to look at anything else.

I truly enjoyed the show.

I know that someone is going to slam me for this next comment, but I thought Jack White’s performance was comparable to Peter Frampton in his Humble Pie days.

Onward and upward.

As much as I loved the show, I could have done without working two additional days of it. Nothing sucks quite as much as a 60 hour work week, and it sucks just that much more when the same performer has multiple nights slotted at our venues. I won’t bore you with explaining why, suffice to say that by Wednesday night I was having apoplectic fits of fury and frustration.

Quickie paparazzi alert for those nights:
Beck
Jason Biggs
Jack Black
Peter Bogdonovich
Scott Caan
Danny Masterson

Why is it that nearly everyone that is Someone is a total doll, while all the lackeys, posers and other hangers-on that I have to deal with are complete and utter assholes?

On the third and final night, I caught a bit of the Soledad Brothers. Not too shabby. I enjoyed them quite a bit, actually, and found myself regretting that I slept through their set on Monday.

Thursday should have been spent working on the site update and filling orders. As of yesterday, the site update is officially two bloody days late, and I am up to my ass with undone bookkeeping, half-written copy and half-filled bottles. However, it was pointed out to me that my consort is feeling neglected, and that there are some things more important in life than work.

So we took a day off of everything, and Ted, Brian and I went to the L.A. County Fair.

More about that when the office slows down again.

Random closing thoughts:
I don’t know how I’d survive if they stopped manufacturing Red Bull.
GD lineage discussions (read: wars) irritate the shit out of me.
If I believed in poltergeists, I’d think there was one trolling my office.
gothabillywench, if you’re reading this — I got to pet three baby roos yesterday!