DIY Viking

I like this guy.

In other news, for enquiring minds, PDXPOP went off phenomenally well up here in PDX August 5-7. We were over capacity every night and had to hold people at the door. Audience members were incredibly open-minded, staying to listen, sequentially, to laptop experimentalists, beatboxers, postpunkers and americana nostalgists. Bands I've only ever seen play in basements to crowds, well, like ours, played to 800 people. Just a very heartening, gratifying event. Lots of people who can't usually make it out to shows - kids, disabled folks...And Meri worked the merch booth with Greg and our two youngest volunteers all weekend!

Meanwhile, all's going well up here in Portland. The weather's beautiful in these late summer days. It's a 95% sure deal that my awesome boss and school are agreeing to cut my equally awesome ELL job down to 20 hrs a week this semester so that I can really focus in on recording the upcoming At Dusk masterpiece. We're playing what is undoubtedly our biggest show in Portland in just over a week on my birthday, so that ought to be fun. Plus I'm trying to talk the surviving Portlanders into coming with me and Meri to the 6 Flags theme park up near Seattle earlier in the week.

I highly recommend the Kusturica movie Black Cat/White Cat to you all.

I continue to wait patiently for someone, ANYONE to put out a truly awesome record this year. Sept. and Oct. are promosing based on the mp3s I've gleaned: Broken Social Scene, Animal Collective, Constantines, Deerhoof, Joggers, Devendra Banhart...At Dusk. The new 311 record, at least upon first listen, was pretty damn unremarkable.

As always, it'd be great to see any of you folks, should you get the hankering for a visit.

Also, I think I posted about it before, but I have a blog.