music

I got an assignment for school and checked out Looptroop Rockers website on Tuesday, only to find out that they were playing at the Viper Room yesterday!

The night started at the Royal T in Culver City, they had a Hello Kitty exhibition. I’m not a huge fan of Hello Kitty, but the awesome Martin Hsu had a painting up, so we wanted to check it out.

There were a lot of weird Hello Kitty stuff…

Martin’s painting, the iPhone photo is not really doing it’s justice, but it was cool, and he got it sold!

More Hello Kitty stuff in a different take… this is Sid Vicious, the bass player from Sex Pistols.

Hello Kitty guitars, snow- and surfboards.

After the exhibition, we made our way up to Hollywood to see my friend play at Cranes Tavern.

After the show, we went for dinner down the road from Crane’s. It turned out to the restaurant we picked had a live jazz band, awesome!

The night continued in West Hollywood…

I think it has been about 7 years since the last time I saw Manics, and it’s been 10 years since they toured America.
I thought that after they went to Cuba and shook hands with Castro, they would not be welcome to America again, but I guess Obama is a little more liberal than the previous president.
They played the Avalon in Hollywood tonight, and I was a happy camper!

Quote of the night from Nicky “So we flew British Airways over here, it was weird to see our album in the ‘records they recommend’ section. They had taken out Jackie Collins Existential Question Time though because it was apparently too offensive. But then they had the entire Coldplay album in there, how offensive isn’t that?”

I went to see a friend playing at the Cat Club in West Hollywood last night.

Last night was the last night of free Thursday night concerts at the pier for the summer. Patti Smith was playing and I was really excited about it. Unfortunately, I did not get a lot of sleep the night before, so I pretty much slept through the entire Patti Smith concert.

I went with a friend to see Ween in concert at the Grove in Anaheim last night. I was not very familiar with their music before the show and got a little skeptic when I was told that they were gonna have a 3 hour show. I usually like the shows short and sweet!

But it was not bad at all, and the 3 hours felt like nothing. Ok, maybe they could have shortened the set by 20 minutes or so.

Yesterday, Aug 29, was Michael Jackson’s 51st birthday.
We had made plans to play rockband, but decided to honor MJ instead by doing a flash mob at Universal Studio City Walk instead.
We did a 45 minute practice session where we learned the moves and off we went.
The whole “flash mob” thingy stated by the Swedish dance cooperative BouncE on July 9th when they performed it on the streets of Stockholm as a tribute to the late Michael Jackson.

Here is an unofficial video from last night. I am totally lost and behind in every move, but it was still fun!

On Thursday nights throughout the summer, there is free concerts on Santa Monica Pier. It was the first time we were there so we came a little unprepared, next time we will bring a picnic and camp out on the beach.

Thursday nights are also turtle race night at Brennan’s Pub, it is kind of a college crowd hanging out at the races. It has been going on for many years and I am surprised it hasn’t gotten shut down from animal rights activists yet.

The rules have obviously been set up by guys and it is totally humiliated… you are not allowed to bend your knees when you drop the turtle.

Girls with short skirts are crowd pleasers and even though they drop the turtle the first time perfectly fine without bending the knees, the staff (guys off course) throws in the penalty flag and they have to do it over and over again…

You are allowed to bring your own turtle to the race, so I will catch one from the wild one day and race it!

I used to be able to spend hours and hours in record stores, and I used to spend hundreds and hundreds of $$ on music every month. After moving to LA, I have not been exposed to music the way I used to. I have recently tried to catch up a little though, I was considering not bothering buying cd’s and instead start downloading music from the world wide web. A friend talked me out of it though, and I am gonna continue being old fashioned for a little while.
I went to Amoeba Records today, which is the record store in Los Angeles. As I said, I used to be able to spend hours and hours in record stores, but my attention span have recently turned into zero, and I get bored. I much rather buy the cd’s online and get them shipped to me now.
Anyways, I had to go to the store today to pick up an vinyl for a school project.

But off course, it is a record store, and there is no way I would leave the store empty handed, I found the latest Easy Star All-Stars album that Ive been wanting for a while… They have in the passed released an album called Radiodread which is Radioheads Ok Computer and another album called Dub Side On the Moon which covers Pink Floyds Dark Side On the Moon. The latest album is called Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band, and is yeah, a reggae versions of the Beatles famous album! How can that possible go wrong?