[music | Jim Carroll - People Who Died

Whee I got to see David Johansen and I got the photos to prove it. What an awesome show. The audience didn't move around much at all, and those that did were dragged out by their throats, so that sucked, but it was good to get out, hang with my friend, drink some beers and see the Dolls. Highlights were obviously singles (Trash, Personality Crisis, Looking for a Kiss, Frankenstein - in that order). They also did a cover of Piece of My Heart, which rocked. Here are some of the not-that-shitty pics I took, more are at the Flickr set. I wish I hadn't been buried in the crowd, but the Dise was packed, I didn't want to ditch my friend and assert myself to the front, and the balcony was pretty much out of the question. 90% of the pics I took sucked, but some survived, unfortunately, none of the rest of the band survived (as in reality pretty much). I was supposed to meet one of my work friends, but that wasn't happening. Hopefully she got in since the show was sold out by the time I showed up, which thanks to my sucky weekend karma and our general slowness, meant I missed Opening Band.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and as I was telling Sean. Scrooged is provably full of shit. No way is anyone getting in a cab driven by that guy.

Pics Inside

I am no longer a default bird owner.

Since my exit, stage left from VistaPrint earlier this year, I've been running my site at 1and1, with no real complaints, except that their VMs only offer Fedora Core 4, which is ages and ages old. I've been running UW-IMAP since then, and I've had some complaints. I believe those complaints might be client relate, but they might not, so I decided to try out some different servers. My only real complaint is that when running multiple clients against the same message store, they get out of sync.

[music | Public Image Ltd. - Same Old Story]

I think this machine defines the fine line between "Apple Fan" and "Apple Fanatic", so here are some first thoughts on the Macbook Air in disorganized bullet-point fashion:

[music | Combichrist - Get Your Body Beat (Sergio Mesa Remix)]

In the half dozen or so Dresden Dolls shows we've seen in the last few years, I've never been to a bad show. Often, Amanda's voice is fucked (like last night), once they opened for a band we didn't care about, but their shows are always excellent. Even as an "old timer", it's still easy to be impressed by the stage presence of just two people, and how much music comes out of those two instruments. I think that's because I count Brian as three people, and up to four instruments.

I've seen faster drummers, but no one can show me a more entertaining drummer. Drummers are usually second only to bassists in polls of "who is the most emotionless suckass on any stage". It's his treatment of the drums as an instrument capable of melody as much as his playfulness that makes him so important. That and he's really cute and hilarious to watch. I've never seen him go quite so far back during Coin Operated Boy. One day he's going to try that and discover he's 30, right there in the middle of the show. He'll say "Fuck, I'm 30", and just stay down. I know. And it's only 18 short months away. Get ready man.

I've also never seen Amanda get through an entire performance of Missed Me without cracking up at him at least once.

Her performance was nothing short of stunning. Her voice was as screwed as I've ever heard it from the get go, she couldn't even talk. I was worried we were going to have another Morrissey on our hands, but Amanda proved she could suck it up and not annoy everyone and have to reschedule.

For the love of god watch the video