Monthly Archives: March 2009

New P J Harvey Song

I didn’t really like P J’s previous album “White Chalk”, so I was really looking forward to her new stuff with John Parish. “Black Hearted Love” is the first single from their “A Woman A Man Walked By”. Me likes a lot.

I just thought of the ultimate kickass group: P J Harvey, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss. 

First Day of Spring Rambling

So it is a sunny Friday today, first day of spring (and this is official), and if you forget it’s only 40F out there, you can pretty much convince yourself about it. It’s going to be a half day for me at work and I’m not complaining.

Last night I had my last drawing class. I loved the class, it’s amazing how fast time goes by when you are engrossed in something interesting. I was working with charcoal, and after every class I felt like there were tiny charcoal particles in my mouth and my snot had a grey-ish hue.

Recently I realized that I have a problem talking with women. You see when I talk with men it is like I am assuming a role. I’m trying to be smart and funny and I want men to like me. I want to charm them, regardless of my liking them or not. The role is clear and well defined. When I talk with women that are not friends of mine I have trouble finding the right tone, the right role. Do I want to be their mother? Do I want to be their daughter? Do I want to charm them? Should I be serious, silly, what?  I wonder if this makes any sense at all…

Anyway, I’m not going to talk about the new facebook design and how much I don’t like it because it is all over the place, but it looks like it’s a standard thing these days: whenever a website is redesigned it rarely is it for the better. Take the new pitchfork for example. The text font is way too small, a huge ad occupied half of the page when you first opened the page (looks like they might have got rid of this one), and you have to click on links like at least three times to get to watch a video or listen to a song. The new wers website is better overall, but I hate the fact that the song currently playing is not automatically updated.

Which brings me to another thing: a website that badly needs some work is boston.com. It looks like it was designed by a 5-year old. It looks flashy, cheesy and cheap. Since their paper (The Boston Globe) readership has dwindled anyway and people are migrating to the web they should invest in a serious effort to make it better. It needs to look sleek, it needs to look smart. Got it? Good. Have a weekend.

In Case You Didn’t Know, U2 Was In Davis

As everybody knows U2 played at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square last night. It was an invitation-only show: you could either be in the band’s or the promoter’s network or you could win at contests that radio stations had going on last week. I tried to call to a couple of radio stations, but of course no luck. The venue was held secret up to the last minute, but one day before the show when crews were carrying gear and the road behind the theatre was closed, it wasn’t so secret anymore.

I walked to Davis yesterday afternoon and it was very calm. I had to get back to work, but it was very easy to follow the action on-line. Local reporters were tweetering about everything, and local blogs were instantly uploading photos and video.  Constant updates on facebook and constant tweets made me feel like I was there: “they are here”, “they are shooting a video” etc etc

A little before 9pm I walked to the square again and the scene wasn’t as crazy as I would expect it to be. Joshua Tree and the Burren were very busy. People gathered behind barricades across the street from the theater, as if waiting for Bono to come out of the front door and say hi. I noticed that “U2″ didn’t appear on the theatre marquee, that would have been a cool photo! Anyway, when the buses arrived carrying the lucky ones who would attend, I walked through them, and they were holding their special tickets in a way that I felt the urge to snatch one or two. But the security all around was tough and mean-looking, making me abort my last-resort plan to sneak into the theater by pretending I am a custodian, who does not speak English. Oh, well.

Then I made my way at the back door of the theater. I tried to sneak in in the press area, it worked for 5 minutes, until a security guy noticed. I found a good spot to stand with clear view of the band’s SUVs. The driver of one of the cars was nice enough to tune to a radio station that was broadcasting the show live and blast it, so we could hear what was going on inside. Hey, we were part of it, yay! They played, I don’t know, 5 or 6 songs and then there was a brutal Q&A session, where Adam admitted that it’s cool to sit back and let two people do the work, and that if he wasn’t a musician he would like to be a fashion photographer…

That was done at around 10pm. Excitment was building up, there were going to come out any time now, right? Wrong. Well, it felt like it took them ages to come out; the wind was picking up and my fingers turned numb. I don’t know what time they finally made their exit, a little after 10:30pm, I think. First Bono came out and came towards our area, greeting fans, then Adam and right behind him the Edge. They were all smiling. Larry made it out a little later. It’s funny but these days when you see celebrities the first thing you do is point a camera or cell phone with a camera at their face. It’s like we’re not really seeing and experiencing anymore, we’re instantly documenting. Myself guilty as charged.

Anyway, it was cool to see them from up close, it was cool that they played in my neighborhood. U2 was at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square, Somerville. How cool!

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