Just cause you’re crazy doesn’t mean that you’re free

Did anyone else use to use song lyrics in their MSN names to show how deep and insightful they were? That was pretty much my favourite thing in high school. I also enjoyed the liberal use of xs, square brackets, and backslashes. It was very poetic.

non sequitur

Anyways, I’m still not above using a catchy song lyric when I can’t think of a blog post title. This isn’t a very deep post though; I thought I’d dump a bunch of random links here for you to peruse if you’re bored this weekend!

I will never stop loving chukkas and desert boots. Here’s a great-looking pair from Peru!

I’ve never watched the show Girls, but this article made me really like Lena Dunham.

This song has been stuck in my head all week.

We’re going to go see Zero Dark Thirty tonight. Have you seen it?

Oh, just a cool cave on the Dead Sea, nbd.

Have a great weekend, home slices!

damn, you always treat me like a mountain, stranger

After a year-long hiatus from my third coffee, I fell back into the habit earlier this summer. Now I leave early to stop at Bridgehead on my way to work and bike the last kilometre with a coffee sloshing precariously in the cup holder I installed on my handlebars.

Leaving the cafe last week, I was struck by an out-of-place silence, rare for a downtown morning. It only lasted a minute before a light changed and cars flooded the road, but it was strangely exciting to hear the city pause for breath.

I’ve held that silence in me since, contentedly resting somewhere in my inner ear. Today, though, I heard the new Tallest Man on Earth album, and it’s just the thing to fill that space – so melodious it could be silence.

The Stillness is the Move

While perusing the Ottawa Bluesfest lineup for this year (which, let’s be honest, is a. completely lacking in blues and b. reads like a 1990s alt-rock compilation), I came across one day that looks pretty good (minus the Skrillex, of course). I’d been meaning to check out the Dirty Projectors for a while, and instantly fell in love with this ultra-catchy number:

I also bought myself harem pants yesterday, so there’s that, too.

How could I hide those ankles from the world any longer?

Blown Minded

As often happens, I went to see Young Galaxy perform Saturday night and was perplexed when they weren’t the headlining band, but an opening act for someone I had never heard of. I guess the much larger font used for the other band should have tipped me off.

 

Luckily, they were fantastic, and we slipped out after 3 songs of the main act, Austra, once we realised that they were a bit of a decrescendo.

Does being a fan of the opening act make me more or less cool than those there for the main? Do I care, beyond the disappointment of short sets with no encore? Not really. I like getting to go home to bed while everyone else is still nursing their PBR and deciding whether to buy a t-shirt.

Decentralized Dance Party in Ottawa!

Have you guys ever heard of the Decentralized Dance Party?  It’s a big group of people (similar to a flash mob) who carry old-school ghetto blasters all tuned to the same FM frequency, and the DJ transmits the music.  Then they party around a city in crazy costumes – it sounds so fun!

Tom and Gary, DDP founders

I just found out about them on Apartment 613, and there’s going to be one in Ottawa in a few weeks!  I’m definitely going to round up some friends to go – now I just need to keep my eye out at garage sales for a sweet boombox.

Have you ever been to a DDP, or any other kind of crazy street party?

I Won’t Kneel

Wow, having huge traffic today makes me feel obligated to post something.  Unfortunately I’m super tired from the weekend so it’s going to suck.

First of all, listen to this:

Which will hopefully improve your reading experience.  I got tattooed to this album (Groove Armada’s Black Light White Light Remix) on the weekend, and when I bought it off of iTunes last night I was a little confused that it didn’t have a buzzing tattoo machine sound in it anywhere.

We’ve been working on my sleeve for ages (I was a jerk and moved to Ottawa right after we started) and since he was going to be in Toronto for the weekend, it meant that I didn’t have to drive all the way to Kincardine.  We got a solid 5 hours in, which was fabulous.  We might have been able to get more, except that when I got there at 1, Scott met me outside and explained that the keys his friend had given him to the shop didn’t work.  So off we went on a side trip to get the keys, busting into the most adorable little girl’s birthday party to ever be thrown by a tattoo artist and his horror-magazine editing wife – I definitely think that their place should end up on Off Beat Home, since it was so amazing.

Travis the Turkey, in progress

Anyways, we got back and into the shop, and were able to work from about 3 until 8.  After that, I was pretty spent, and Scott wanted to stop because he was running the Toronto Marathon the next morning (how awesome is that, by the way?), so we quit.  I feel obliged to brag extensively about the fact that he praised how well I sit while getting tattooed, which means I have tattoo cred.  I mean, I figure that my only two jobs as a tattoo-ee are to sit still and pay the man, but apparently it’s harder for some people to do that first one (and maybe the second one, who knows?).

After that, I went to Oakville for a few beers with my friends, which was good times.  I felt like a bit of a tool in this pub with my arm wrapped up in saran wrap, but for all I know everyone thought I was really cool.  Our whole group was dressed pretty casually, but we got there just in time to snag a table, so we had fun laughing at all the girls dressed to the nines in high heels that had to stand.  We also tentatively (and less-than-soberly) discussed doing a fun girl’s weekend in San Francisco (my totally random suggestion) so we’ll see about that – it would be super fun, so hopefully I can finish French in time to have some vacances!

Yesterday, I got back during the late afternoon, and although I went to bed nice and early, I ended up waking up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep for almost an hour, and then when I finally did, I started having a nightmare about scary hill people and had to wake myself back up (a very useful skill, by the way – I always dream lucidly enough to pull myself out if the situation gets hairy), so I was exhausted today.

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No. 24 – See a band I’ve never seen before

You guys, I forgot that this was even on my birthday list! In all the hubbub of moving, I nearly didn’t go with my friend Ashley to see the Acorn on December 4th, but I’m glad I did!  For one, because I’ve been trying not to be a flake on people, but also because I’ve loved this band ever since I first heard them.

I remember it vividly.  It was 2009, sometime in January, and I was doing my grad program at Waterloo.  My friend Christie (who is the funniest, and most uproariously offensive, person I know) had come over, and was transferring some music to my computer for me, and she added a bunch of music I hadn’t heard before – New Young Pony Club, Sometime, and the Acorn being among them.  We decided to go get coffee, and then ended up hanging out in her blue Saturn Ion behind a Starbucks for over an hour, listening to the Acorn and pretending to dance through a jungle – because that’s just what some of their songs make you feel like doing.  Here’s an artistic rendition of what that looked like:

The show was fabulous – they played a lot of music off of Glory Hope Mountain, which was the album Christie gave me, as well as their newer one, which was all solid stuff.  My favourite thing, which is unfortunately not visible in these pictures, is that the drummer had a pair of antlers on a stand in front of his drum set the entire show.  He never played them; they seemed to just be some sort of talisman or lucky charm.  Who knows?  The crowd was good, too, probably in large part because the band is local – I’m assuming there were a lot of life-long fans there, and it had this happy camper homecoming kind of vibe.  I’m glad that I finally got to see them, because I’d been hoping for a show here since we moved to Ottawa last fall.

Turn on the bright lights

I just think that everyone should love this band.