The female main character was so cool, she had her own college radio program.   And as love often does, it brought music into some-one’s world and made it even better.  Hence the neat Tesla coil laserium show in the secret laboratory.  Thats right I like a bit of romance and dulcet sound with my cheese.

I have not really bought any new music lately, or made a musical discovery that made me do the jump and clap thing, but I have still been living my life to music all the same.  And I still think about it all the time too.  I was reading my friend Scary Larry’s blog today all about his lovely experience at a Black Happy reunion concert.   He said something that sparked my mind:

Black Happy’s music has always stayed with me, much like my most treasured friendships of my youth. I needed this concert to reconnect me with who I was then and with people and a place that I seemingly abandoned. Black Happy gave me the courage as a teen to be me and not what I thought I should be in comparison to others my age. Through them learned it was possible to rock the casbah and maintain my integrity at the same time. I still carry that with me today.

While I have been to at least two Black Happy shows in my life, and loved every bit of them, I am a little bit older than Larry, and so Black Happy was not “that band” for me.  I was already in college when we went to see them.   So….what was that band for me?   After carefully considering my options, I came back to the same band that I thought of right away:  Oingo Boingo.

They were different, a little crazy, and sooo much more than just “Weird Science.”   I don’t even like that song.  I would listen to them, and really experience their music, and have to do it on my own usually since almost nobody that I knew liked them very much, and that was ok.  In a way, that was a good lesson on how being different from your friends was ok, and it didn’t mean that you were worth less or insignificant or less alluring….just not to everyone.   But knowing that Oingo Boingo is awesome, even though not everyone thinks so is a pathway to knowing that you are awesome even if not everyone realizes it.  Or something like that.

Here’s “Grey Matter” from a live show I only wish I could have been at, I don’t even know where that show was, but any of them would have been extraordinary.   One of my musical regrets in life is never getting to see Boingo live.

And Larry, I’m so glad you got to see Black Happy again!  I loved what you wrote about it.

And yes, I’m excited about it!

Now if only The Mummers were doing a show that week, but alas they are not.

Yep, still pretty excited.

As you can see it’s a sweet single track trail that she has all to herself while the kids are in school.

She used to taunt me with pictures like this last fall when she was sneaking in a ride before the weather got too cold and I was at work.

Yeah she was taunting me. She initially asked me to write a post for her but she decided to write her own post. I’m still going to post this one anyway and I may not even tell her about it. In fact while she’s milking all the sympathy she can get out of this bike injury I may be posting here ocasionaly. (I’m a much bigger whiner than she is by the way)

I may decide to tell her about it or I may just surprise her. See there’s really nothing she could do to stop me because I do all the maintenance for her on this blog. Of course I suppose if she really wanted to she could find some way to stop me.

Today I wrecked pretty bad, so I got to find out.  I’m really blessed that I didn’t break my arm, instead I almost broke my arm and hurt it quite badly.  I managed to get home so that was nice, but oooh did it hurt.   I made it a point to enjoy the ride home anyways, I figured it might be my last ride for a little while so might as well have a little fun.

I did run over a snake and that made me very sad.   I coaxed it into my water bottle to take home and try to let it heal (science experiment for the kids) but then I realized that a fast bumpy ride in a hard water bottle would not help the snakes condition, so I let it go.

I hurt.  I am writing this with a sling on my arm trying not to move it much, plus I have plenty of bruises, and scrapes.  So for my daily post I am linking to another blogger’s post on music which I read today and really enjoyed.    Here’s to me getting better quick!

I am reading a book called “X Saves the World; How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking,” by Jeff Gordinier.    I’m only a couple chapters into it, but I’m already pretty sure that it is right on, and I get it on so many fun levels.

I have a 5 year old literally hanging on my arm and begging me to play with him, so this needs to be short, but I have to share one of my favorite parts so far.  He writes about Nirvana and the explosion that Curt Cobain caused in bringing “alternative” music to the spotlight.  Because before that, it was still alternative.

He says: “ By 1993 a bulletin had gone out, which is exactly why anyone with a sense of history knew it couldn’t last.  Scientists had located and identified the X pathogen, and they were doing everything  they could to keep the alternative epidemic under control.  From what I could tell, the experts were employing the same ingenious approach that they’d used on the California fruit flies.”

He goes on to describe this process, and then comes what could be my favorite line of the book so far: “This was the most sensible way to explain the existence of Stone Temple Pilots.”   There have been some much more obviously humorous and witty statements than that in this book, but THIS one speaks clearly to my burning irritation of how mediocre, boring bands continuously make it to the mainstream and the radio (ooh ick).  Seriously people, who is picking this stuff, and why are so many thinking persons allowing it to penetrate their ears?  How did it happen?

I think I offended a really wonderful chiropractor when we lived in Phoenix, because he was a huge fan of Rob Thomas and I just couldn’t leave it alone.   I really liked and respected our chiropractor and I just couldn’t be satisfied that Rob Thomas would be the pinnacle of his music listening experience.

Hopefully I will share more with you as I read more, but if you are a member of Gen X; usually born between the years of 1960-1977, or if you can pass Gordinier’s GXAT (Generation X Aptitude Test) which is only one question long, you will most likely appreciate this book.    By the way, the one question he asks is: “Do you want to change the world?”

Check it out

Actually the real situation is that I am kind of a slacker and haven’t blogged in a wee bit, partly because we moved to the Seattle area this month.  Issaquah to be exact.  The whole moving thing is never fun, but we are starting to get back in our normal life groove and I actually had time to blog.

I am happy to be writing again. 

Our new house

I wrote about Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears 2 years ago, or so (if you followed that link I just made I hope you are listening to “The Zero Light” right now, what a fabulous song!).  Since then they have made another album called “The Flight of the Knife.”  I never wrote anything about it because I had just blogged about them, but we have been listening to that album at least once every day for weeks now.

Our house essentially turns into the stage for a musical when they are playing; singing, dancing and overall cheerfulness.  I don’t think I want to try and describe the music, you can figure it out yourself, and I hope you do because it has several of the best characteristics of different types and ages of music all in one, however it DEMANDS and DESERVES a second listen.

The kids favorite song is “Purple Rocket” because 1) its so awesome 2) we are reading a book called “Georges Cosmic Treasure Hunt” by Stephen Hawkings and his daughter Lucy, that is all about space and rockets n’ stuff.  This book has “blasted” Bryan Scary into our daily music fun.  I very much recommend this book and the one before it to any parent looking for something to read their kids this summer.

I somewhat obsessively check Bryan Scary’s concert dates hoping so very badly to see them live someday, so far they seem to stick to the east coast, but I’m comforted by the fact that Seattle offers me a much better chance than Boise ever did.

If you are interested in either wearing or making a beautiful woman in your life very happy,check out this very uniquely beautiful jewelery at www.jewelsbynature.com, where you can link to her etsy site and see the SteamPunk line, which is where Tac did his shopping for me. ( I’m just linking to it because I like it so much, I am not “advertising” or anything weird like that, I leave the marketing in this family to Tac.)

This roused my curiosity about steampunk in general and I found out some really interesting stuff, like…

“Steampunk is a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction that came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date. Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history-style presentations of “the path not taken” of such technology”
and
“Various modern utilitarian objects have been modded by individual craftpersons into a pseudo-Victorian mechanical “steampunk” style, and a number of visual and musical artists have been described as steampunk.”
(from Wikipedia, follow this link to read more)

I also found a SteamPunk band; Abney Park, have you heard of them?

Well that should give you your daily allowance of semi-music related trivial information.

From this they have inferred that it must be pretty fun to see live music, and they would like to see some for themselves. Taking them to a concert would be dangerous, sometimes illegal, the boys would whine and make us miserable, and it would be embarrassing.

I compromised with them by finally telling the boys they were too young; sorry, and promised Emma that if Seve vs. Evan ever came to town I would take her. I knew they would be at an all ages venue, and figured out of all the bands Emma and I both love they would be the safest (clean, fun, all around good time, etc..)

She made her own t-shirt for the night, it was so very cute. It was brown with a green Seve robot and a red Evan robot. We had a really good time, Tac was in Sun Valley so he couldn’t come, and while he asked me nicely to get him a shirt I totally forgot, so once again “sorry honey.”

We stood up front because Emma couldn’t see past all the overly tall teenagers. This was fun, but proved dangerous as said teenagers started a pit right next to us. One of them fell into me, causing me to fall into Emma, shoving her into the speaker. Luckily we had one of our own overly tall teenagers because my “baby brother” Kyle (he’s at least 1/2 foot taller than me) watched over us after that.

Seve and Evan sounded great, pretty much exactly like they do on their cd’s. Seve had a keyboard and a microphone, and Evan had the drums. I hadn’t noticed until then how much drumming there is in their music, Evan was impressive. Seve sang, played and talked to the audience like he does it all the time, but afterwards he told Emma that he had been a little nervous. He was really nice to the youngest member of their audience.

Emma has now been to a concert, her little brothers have Seve vs Evan pins; one on his backpack, the other on his “Wall-E” hat.

Somehow, S vs E fit perfectly in my music puzzle. Shoved in there somewhere between Muse, The Pumpkins, and Mew, underneath AquaLung, Say Hi, and Silversun Pickups is a little indie band from Utah. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could not like them, especially if you have kids that you want to brainwash into liking cool music…they won’t be able to resist. Play a fun little video game on their site and listen all at once, Seth and I have been playing it lots today.