PLEASE GO SEE
BEER IS VEGAN!
http://beerisvegan.blogspot.com
Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
1) Copy this list into your own blog, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Post a comment here once you’ve finished and link your post back to this one.
5) Pass it on!
1. Natto - I am really on the fence
2. Green Smoothie
3. Tofu Scramble
4. Haggis - I have a philosophy– if the original is unappealing, the veganization is probably not going to excite you either. Case in point: all vegan seafood.
5. Mangosteen
6. Creme brulee
7. Fondue - the veganlunchbox.com version is TO DIE with raw cauliflower
8. Marmite/Vegemite
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Nachos
12. Authentic soba noodles
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Taco from a street cart
16. Boba Tea
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Gyoza
20. Vanilla ice cream - better than omni, according to my mom
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Ceviche - the whole foods “tofu ceviche” is VILE.
24. Rice and beans
25. Knish
26. Raw scotch bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche - ooh always wanted to try!
28. Caviar - see above comment re: vegan seafood
29. Baklava
30. Pate - angelica kitchen walnut lentil? the bomb.
31. Wasabi peas
32. Chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Mango lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Mulled cider
37. Scones with buttery spread and jam
38. Vodka jelly - This sounds like something I must make for the next party.
39. Gumbo
40. Fast food french fries
41. Raw Brownies
42. Fresh Garbanzo Beans
43. Dahl
44. Homemade Soymilk
45. Wine from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Stroopwafle
47. Samosas
48. Vegetable Sushi
49. Glazed doughnut - nutrilicious ftw!
50. Seaweed
51. Prickly pear - so tempted to pick these off the side of the road right now. but I know better.
52. Umeboshi
53. Tofurkey - not to be ungrateful to a brave forefather but this stuff is vile.
54. Sheese
55. Cotton candy
56. Gnocchi
57. Piña colada
58. Birch beer
59. Scrapple - savory mush? ew.
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores - before there was sweet & sarah, there was me, matches and smart treats marshmallows.
62. Soy curls
63. Chickpea cutlets
64. Curry
65. Durian
66. Homemade Sausages
67. Churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake - not vegan though.
68. Smoked tofu
69. Fried plantain
70. Mochi
71. Gazpacho
72. Warm chocolate chip cookies
73. Absinthe
74. Corn on the cob
75. Whipped cream, straight from the can
76. Pomegranate
77. Fauxstess Cupcake
78. Mashed potatoes with gravy
79. Jerky - oh ew ew ew
80. Croissants
81. French onion soup
82. Savory crepes
83. Tings
84. A meal at Candle 79
85. Moussaka
86. Sprouted grains or seeds
87. Macaroni and “cheese”
88. Flowers
89. Matzoh ball soup
90. White chocolate
91. Seitan
92. Kimchi
93. Butterscotch chips
94. Yellow watermelon
95. Chili with chocolate
96. Bagel and Tofutti
97. Potato milk
98. Polenta - chickpea polenta > corn polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Raw cookie dough - is it possible to make cookies without eating it?
woo!
Learn about the most obscure of these fab foods at Bittersweet!
So I’m going to try to participate in
The basic description is (from Post Punk Kitchen):
Join us for VeganMofo - the Vegan Month Of Food. The idea is to write as much as you can for the month of October about vegan food. The blog entries can be about anything food related - your love of tongs, your top secret tofu pressing techniques, the first time your mom cooked vegan for you, vegan options in Timbuktu - you get the idea.
Last year we didn’t come up with strict guidelines for how often we wrote, but I think the idea is to shoot for every weekday, or about 20 times in the month. Don’t forget to tag your stuff “veganmofo” and you can use the VeganMoFo banner (^up there) on your mofo posts. If you’d like inspiration or would just like to whine about how hard it is, check out the MoFo forum on the PPK message boards.
As the world catches on that vegan food really is the best choice for animals (suck it, humane meat!), the planet (bite me, melting ice caps!) and people (piss off, heart disease!) let’s show them what vegan eating is all about.
One last thing - you may remember that VeganMoFo was in November last year, well, this year it’s in October because there’s more produce and stuff. Also, I’ll be in NYC this November and not really near a computer.
To be included here, just leave a comment on this blog entry with a link to your URL. I will then include you in the RSS feed, once I remember how to update it. You can also join the VeganMoFo Flicker group. Happy writing everyone! If you’re feeling at a loss for how to start this off, why don’t you make your first entry about that?
So yeah. I think rather than cook/photograph every day (holy fuck, I really need to unpack and find my camera. Good thing my furniture is en route and my room is almost complete!) I’m going to shoot for 12 food posts total this month, with 6 original recipes (even if they’re ghetto) and 6 attempts at “haute” vegan food. Y’know, where it’s like, involved and pretty.
You can accuse the disgraced ex-governor Eliot Spitzer of many things in his decision to flout the law by soliciting the services of a pricey prostitute: hypocrisy, egomania, sophomoric impulsiveness and self-indulgence, delusional ineptitude and boneheadedness. But one trait decidedly not on display in Mr. Spitzer’s splashy act of whole-life catabolism was originality.
“If mother nature intended us to be promiscuous, why did she also invent jealousy?”
Charles Carroll, Toronto
It’s all been done before, every snickering bit of it, and not just by powerful “risk-taking” alpha men who may or may not be enriched for the hormone testosterone. It’s been done by many other creatures, tens of thousands of other species, by male and female representatives of every taxonomic twig on the great tree of life. Sexual promiscuity is rampant throughout nature, and true faithfulness a fond fantasy. Oh, there are plenty of animals in which males and females team up to raise young, as we do, that form “pair bonds” of impressive endurance and apparent mutual affection, spending hours reaffirming their partnership by snuggling together like prairie voles or singing hooty, doo-wop love songs like gibbons, or dancing goofily like blue-footed boobies.
Yet as biologists have discovered through the application of DNA paternity tests to the offspring of these bonded pairs, social monogamy is very rarely accompanied by sexual, or genetic, monogamy. Assay the kids in a given brood, whether of birds, voles, lesser apes, foxes or any other pair-bonding species, and anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.
As David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, put it with Cole Porter flair: Infants have their infancy; adults, adultery. Dr. Barash, who wrote “The Myth of Monogamy” with his psychiatrist-wife, Judith Eve Lipton, cited a scene from the movie “Heartburn” in which a Nora Ephronesque character complains to her father about her husband’s philanderings and the father quips that if she’d wanted fidelity, she should have married a swan. Fat lot of good that would have done her, Dr. Barash said: we now know that swans can cheat, too. Instead, the heroine might have considered union with Diplozoon paradoxum, a flatworm that lives in gills of freshwater fish. “Males and females meet each other as adolescents, and their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain faithful until death,” Dr. Barash said. “That’s the only species I know of in which there seems to be 100 percent monogamy.” And where the only hearts burned belong to the unlucky host fish.
Even the “oldest profession” that figured so prominently in Mr. Spitzer’s demise is old news. Nonhuman beings have been shown to pay for sex, too. Reporting in the journal Animal Behaviour, researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of South Bohemia described transactions among great grey shrikes, elegant raptorlike birds with silver capes, white bellies and black tails that, like 90 percent of bird species, form pair bonds to breed. A male shrike provisions his mate with so-called nuptial gifts: rodents, lizards, small birds or large insects that he impales on sticks. But when the male shrike hankers after extracurricular sex, he will offer a would-be mistress an even bigger kebab than the ones he gives to his wife — for the richer the offering, the researchers found, the greater the chance that the female will agree to a fly-by-night fling.
In another recent report from the lubricious annals of Animal Behaviour entitled “Payment for sex in a macaque mating market,” Michael D. Gumert of Hiram College described his two-year study of a group of longtailed macaques that live near the Rimba ecotourist lodge in the Tanjung Puting National Park of Indonesia. Dr. Gumert determined that male macaques pay for sex with that all-important, multipurpose primate currency, grooming. He saw that, whereas females groomed males and other females for social and political reasons — to affirm a friendship or make nice to a dominant — and mothers groomed their young to soothe and clean them, when an adult male spent time picking parasites from an adult female’s hide, he expected compensation in the form of copulation, or at the very least a close genital inspection. About 89 percent of the male-grooming-female episodes observed, Dr. Gumert said in an interview from Singapore, where he is on the faculty of Nanyang Technological University, “were directed toward sexually active females” with whom the males had a chance of mating.
Significantly, males adjust their grooming behavior in a distinctly economic fashion, paying a higher or lower price depending on the availability and quality of the merchandise and competition from other buyers. “What led me to think of grooming as a form of payment was seeing how it changed across different market conditions,” Dr. Gumert said. “When there were fewer females around, the male would groom longer, and when there were lots of females, the grooming times went down.” Males also groomed females of high rank considerably longer than they did low-status females with nary a diamond to their page.
Commonplace though adultery may be, and as avidly as animals engage in it when given the opportunity, nobody seems to approve of it in others, and humans are hardly the only species that will rise up in outrage against wantonness real or perceived. Most female baboons have lost half an ear here, a swatch of pelt there, to the jealous fury of their much larger and toothier mates. Among scarab beetles, males and females generally pair up to start a family, jointly gathering dung and rolling and patting it into the rich brood balls in which the female deposits her fertilized eggs. The male may on occasion try to attract an extra female or two — but he does so at his peril. In one experiment with postmatrimonial scarabs, the female beetle was kept tethered in the vicinity of her mate, who quickly seized the opportunity to pheromonally broadcast for fresh faces. Upon being released from bondage, the female dashed over and knocked the male flat on his back. “She’d roll him right into the ball of dung,” Dr. Barash said, “which seemed altogether appropriate.”
In the case of the territorial red-backed salamander, males and females alike are inclined to zealous partner policing and will punish partners they believe to have strayed: with threat displays, mouth nips and throat bites, and most coldblooded of all, a withdrawal of affection, a refusal to engage. Be warned, you big lounge lizard: it could happen to you.
I have confided in others things I certainly would not want getting back to the parties mentioned and had information confided in me that was shocking and upsetting. The most frightening part of it is the knowledge that the terrible thoughts we communicate (or fail to communicate) run through everyone’s head in one form or another. And on the other hand, wonderful, uncommunicated thoughts plague me too. Thoughts of envy, of worship, of glee to even know another person. Even so, when this week I was presented with two pieces of “confidential” information, I found myself unable to focus on the positive and crippled by the negative. This might be more a reflection of my personality, but I find this to be the case for most people I know.
So, two sets of information. The first was that a certain person with cultural power had favorably smiled on my project. The second was that another person with cultural power had been saying truly awful things about me and my project. Neither of these sets of information held major specifics (except the identities of the people, which I will keep private), except that one was positive and one was overwhelmingly negative, and yet I found myself more obsessed with divulging information on the negative feedback than the positive.
Is it the fact that we think knowing problems is somehow better than knowing strengths? Are we always just seeking constructive criticism? Or are we trained by our culture to respond only to the things that need attention. if something’s good, wouldn’t you rather be a jack of all trades than a master of one? It could be in part these things, but I think the focus on the negative boils down to something else: discomfort. Praise is much easier to take, and requires little digestion. It strokes us and simmers into our ego. If you find out someone was talking you up, you’d be friendlier to that person. Negativity, however, is a sap. It destroys confidence, it instills doubt in our bones, and most of all, it makes you unsure of how to approach the person who has been saying these things, in confidence. A bond has been broken, and especially when someone is two-faced in their approach to you, it becomes extremely difficult to know how you should act, and more difficult to try not to act at all. Although the positive information made me smile, the negative information made me want to say something. For a moment, I have stepped out of the LAM! LAM! persona and into my own skin. So my statement is as follows:
I have heard you disapprove of me in several ways and have been privately vocal about this to others. I would like to say that I don’t care and mean it, but I can’t. I have worked hard to build my confidence as a person and musician over the years as a person particularly sensitive to negative feedback. What I have learned is that negative feedback is important to help you grow as a person. While I understand that I can’t control people’s preferences and tastes, what I cannot abide is the fact that you have surreptitiously attempted to sabotage me, that you have lied to my face and most of all, that you have closed-mindedly condemned me based on my identity and lifestyle. I would dare you to be direct instead of a passive aggressive child, but that would be pointless, because your actions have already proven that despite what you say, I have more character and class than you ever will.
I will put this out of my mind from now on. I can’t help what you think or why you think it. I can only control how I respond, and I will try to take the high road.
I missed the comic (I read the indy online, and pretty sporadically even then), but local media and “gatekeeping” has become pretty topical of late. The article to which my friend was referring was an Indy article (which I went and read later) that criticized the patchy local music coverage of the N&O. It called those bands something akin to “the saved,” which felt a little bit snarky to me. Of The Great 8 (Red Collar, Small World, Megafaun, I Was Totally Destroying It, Bowerbirds, Bull City, Scene of the Crime Rovers and Alina Simone) there was really only one band in there that I was peeved over, and it was because when we played a show together, that artist demanded to play first and immediately packed up and left, which violated the Unwritten Rules of Band Courtesy (which I know I violated on Saturday but having been in BSC listening to rock for like 6 hours I was about to lose my shit and really wanted to catch the tail end of some of the other 287632 shows happening). Regardless, the N&O prize is not as dubious as it may seem. Besides the schwag (a pro shot and cut video, a photoshoot and neato flash graphics) the bands selected were asked to play a showcase at the 506 where according to Glenn, nearly quadruple the number of new members showed up. That means that the exposure in the N&O is a unique market. I thought it was ironic that at a party for an honor the Indy decried for being elitist, I was once again faced with the So was the Indy upset because its reccomendations don’t command the same sort of response from its readership? And beyond that, are they offering bands not chosen a sour grapes clause?
I remember before the Hearing Aid section, you got really jazzed if your band got an Indy pick. Maybe I’ve got small-time cheer, but I still do get excited about them, even if an Indy pick means pretty much nothing, except that someone at the paper has heard of one of the bands you’re playing with. It certainly doesn’t boost attendance. Now, it seems, you want to be in the Yes Please, or Introducing sections in order to garner any attention at all, and even that can be to no avail. Ross Grady’s Trianglerock.com lists “Good stuff this week.” He has called himself a gatekeeper and the implication of the calendar’s subtitle (that the good stuff is listed, and that if it’s not, it’s probably not good) agrees with him, however he makes a good point about the sheer volume of rock music and outlets for it. Every magazine and website has limited space, and if it doesn’t, it becomes a free-for-all.
With the expansion of music criticism, marketing and recording, it’s hard to know anymore what is worth pursuing. Hammer No More the Fingers was recently featured on Stereogum.com. Kudos to them, I say, and in the same breath I ask, what’s stereogum.com? The answer is some sort of music blog. What separates it from Missing Toof, Ear Farm or Electrorash? I don’t really know. Being in advertising, I have started to think in its terms. Which blogs, sites and outlets for local triangle music have the most responsive behavior, the best reputation, the most unique traffic? Surely the N&O has demonstrated its influence through the great 8 showcase. We all know that most local music oriented folks read the indy (if for no reason than to make sure that their show was listed as promised). Trianglerock.com is a good source of filtered information on shows happening on a given night. Trianglemusic is a cluster fuck. Local music bloggers will review bands from time to time, but more often will talk about shows after the fact, and are more likely to talk about their friends than bands they don’t know (probably as a function of the fact that we always want to go support our friends). There are different mediums with different advantages– print looks better in a presskit, but electronic media gives you a better chance of being included. Fan and hate mail are the most direct feedback you’ll receive on your work, but are pretty much worthless to the outside world, unless that fanmail is distributed through online or print media. So what do you go for, with your limited budget and time? Whatever you would be most likely to trust for reccomendations, I suppose.
Unfortunately, and I hate to put this damper on, there was a thief in our midst. I wanted to hold out hope that they were just misplaced, coincidentally, but as lead after lead was chased down I could deny it no further. My phone and wallet were stolen out of my backpack last night while I was performing. At the beginning of the night, I had slipped my phone and ipod into the front pocket of my bag. After that, I checked my phone to see missed calls from Sandy and Jamie, then pulled out all the equipment, tucked the ipod and wallet into the (now basically empty) main compartment and started setting up. Couldn’t find my phone after the show but figured maybe it had fallen out in the car or something. When I woke up this morning to go meet my team for our trip to NOLA, I discovered my wallet was missing. (Thanks for all the drinks, guys, heh). As a result, I am sitting here, in my bedroom and not in Louisiana enjoying the sights and sounds of New Orleans, because I had to go to the DMV this morning to try and get a new license before my 1:30 flight in Greensboro. As great as last night was and as grateful as I am, I’m really disappointed that someone would go into a musician’s bag and take what didn’t belong to them.
From here on, I challenge you guys to help me be more vigilant; watch your friends’ stuff. Sometimes, since the scene is so tight knit, we forget that you can’t just leave your shit and it’ll be okay. The people who come into shows don’t always realize how hard we work, how much time, effort and money we pour into this “hobby.” I refuse to even consider, as was suggested to me, that whomever took the money knew that it was my bag. I also refuse to consider that it was a fellow musician. But from now on, I will be watching, carefully. I’ll keep an eye on your drink, your kit, your purse, whatever you need. This should never have to happen again, especially in such a wonderful, supportive scene.
That said, I am still holding out the naive hope that whomever stole it will return it when he or she realizes that the phone is worth nothing to them but everything to me– lots of pictures, notes to myself, important phone numbers that will take me weeks to re-compile…What a royal pain in the ass. Seriously, drop it in the mailbox. You have my address, it’s on my driver’s license. You can keep the $46 cash.
<3
Well I was on facebook stalking my ex and noticed he’d added an application called “Fantasy Record Label.” I love the facebook apps because they mean LOTS of free free free music (some of it by amazing bands– soundflavor gave me The Jim-Yoshi Pile Up, The Lunachicks and Half Japanese) so I added that shit. Some of them also give you the opportunity to hawk your own wares, and this was no exception.
Fantasy Record Label is linked to AmieStreet.com, a site which offers to host your music for $5 a song, then pays you based off of the song’s performance/popularity. The songs all start at free and then slowly rise from 9 cents after 12 plays to up to 98 cents. You can reccommend songs, and earn cash along with their climbing power. It’s very clever.
A little shameless plug here
but I happen to like this format better than the usual. Especially because it calculates your worth according to a formula.
I’ve come up with the unwritten rules for concert playing and promoting. We all know those bands who just don’t understand them, but I figure that here’s as good a place as any to lay out (my own personal) law. Most of these commandments were broken the night of that show.
1. If you’re on the bill, you’re at the show.
okay, so if your best friend/husband/lover’s band is playing at 11:30 and you’re on at 10 and you can sneak in and out, sneak in and out. But it is probably the most insulting thing you can do to your fellow performers when you play your set and just peace out, or show up an hour late to PURPOSELY miss the opening act. At the particular show in question, one performer played a set, then actually took most of the audience who had come to see it, piled them into a car and drove off. The number of levels on which that is wrong is astounding. You’re a musician, support your fellow musicians. For many of us, the only time we can see certain other bands is when we actually book with them. So fucking sit around and listen. You don’t have to like it, but you made your bed and you lie in it.
There are extenuating circumstances, obviously. I’ve left one because I had a final paper due the next day and needed to finish writing it, another because I was so intensely sick that I was worried about passing out on the way home. If you’re on tour and the next place you can stay is in Richmond and it’s 11, then yeah, go ahead, take off. But if you live in Durham or Raleigh and you’re playing a show, have the decency to stick it out. Chances are, if you take the early spot on a week night, you might BE the only audience for your billmates, so don’t be an asshole.
2. Take your lumps.
Okay, poll: how many people have played a show to an audience of the bartender, the other band, and a friend or two? EVERYONE’S HAND SHOULD BE UP. Shit happens. People don’t turn up, other shows come up, whatever the case may be, sometimes good bands get stuck with bad shows. Some of us just live in the land of a 5 person draw.
The incorrect response is to throw a hissyfit about how you are “better than this” to the promoter and bail on the show. ESPECIALLY if you’re the headliner. Hey, if you’re such a big band with great draw, aren’t you supposed to have a built in fanbase, and not blame your opening acts for the poor draw?
The correct response is to privately curse and complain, but publicly, chill, listen to the other bands, get onstage, make a joke about the overwhelming turnout, play a short set and promote harder next time.
3. Band Together
One thing that several bands around here are GREAT at is shouting out to shows that are happening on the same night. Which happens ALL the freaking time. And if you’re up against a band like Red Collar you may as well kiss your audience goodbye, cos they ain’t coming to see your trifling ass.
There are certain things that happen that are outside of our control, and things that are within our control. Check the other venues the night you’re booking a show, you can sometimes avoid a bad draw by switching nights (even if it’s switching off that coveted friday night spot). To the same token, you can use that power to help a buddy out (not booking your powerhouse band up against their fledgling ship, or even joining their bill). We need to continue to show swap, but we need to plan accordingly.
Does it totally suck that there are so many shows on a night and only one per town will be really packed? Yeah, kinda. But, it’s the nature of the business. But next time, maybe you’ll be on that bill and the masses will be talking outside during YOUR set before Hammer No More the Fingers plays. So don’t shit talk those bands who are enchanting the masses — embrace them. The best thing you can do, and this goes back to taking your lumps, is be friendly, be open and give other bands a shot. There are some fucked up hodgepodge shows that happen here. Does my brand of electro go particularly well with punk rock? No, not really, but my buddies are in punk and indie rock bands. People have pretty broad taste, and if you do end up with one of those clunker shows, at least you’ll enjoy the company. =)
There are a host of other plagues that we can fix: The proliferation of stupid pay-to-play battle of the bands? We need to chase that out of our town. If promoters see there aren’t suckers here, they’ll move on. We can address the problems in our venues: the ones that are shutting down, the ones that “don’t draw,” because nobody big plays them and big bands won’t play as a result of the fact that they “don’t draw,” the ones that are barely functional. All of these types of venues provide a platform for unestablished bands to forge a name. Demand local bands at the larger local venues and show up when they play.
4. Be Polite/Realistic
If you’re opening a show and the draw isn’t yours, don’t try to bleed it dry. You know who you are, standing onstage midway through song 10 and the last audience member besides the other band leaves. Sets should not exceed an hour when there are more than two bands on the bill, and certainly not when you’re first. I also love the push it back an hour move. Yes rock shows start late. But when it’s due to start at 9 and it starts at 10:30 because you’re waiting for people to show, you’re just making it less likely that people will ever want to book with you again.
5. Be Reliable
There are a lot of bands (and promoters) who are harder to get ahold of than Dick Cheney, and can be just as villaneous. If you’re putting together a show, it’d be nice if you actually showed up for it. If you’re in charge of bringing a bass rig for four bands to share, please don’t fail to mention that you have to be at work until 9 when the show starts at 8. It should go without saying but emailing around a flyer and order considerations should happen before a show.
Is this a little prescriptive and cold? Maybe. Numbers one and two are the closest to home. What do you think? Are there any unwritten rules that clearly need to be written?
In other news, Electrelane, my favorite (and arguably the best) all girl art group in recent memory has gone on indefinite hiatus. Boo fucking hiss.
I’ve also been slightly obsessed today with Slug Song by The Clean. The rest of the album a little less so.
I’m not saying this is true for me; I’ve been performing out for less than 6 months, so if 5 people come to support me, I’m pretty darn pleased. I mean, sure when I’ve booked a show and the entire draw of the evening/my reputation as a reliable promoter is at stake, more than 5 people is sort of a necessity (thank god that on the one show I did book and promote on my own we had a healthy 30 person draw!), but otherwise, it’s not really that big a deal. I like to pinch book– play shows people dropped off, just get my name out and hope to make some friends and connect with other musicians, do benefit shows, festivals, whatever. I know some bands don’t like to do that, don’t like gigs that don’t pay. I’m not one of those.
Of course, there are tons of factors in the draw aside from your actual popularity, like the other shows happening that night, the cost of your show relative to those shows, which town you’re in, what night you’re on, what time you’re playing. You all know this. Then again, there are bands that regardless of price and locale, people will go see them.
A friend of mine recently, while intoxicated, found himself somewhat upset with a fairly prominant local band whose draw is steady, good and ultimately unbeatable. When you’re new like me, you don’t really let it get to you when a bigger better band takes your draw. When you’re a little more established though, when your band has been playing for the same amount of time, has a seemingly loyal following and nobody shows at your gigs, I can see where it can be frustrating. However, I don’t think we can blame those bands who have been established as the “great shows” in the Triangle.
After publishing my paper, I did receive an email from a member of IWTDI, stating that my treatment of his band was unfair. I don’t deny that it was. I’ll state for the record that I wrote the paper
1- before ever having seen them play live
2- actually subbing them out for another local band when I found out that one of their debut shows would be at the cat’s cradle.
Was it fair of me? No. Was it, in the context of an academic thesis, bent and twisted to get me an A? Yeah, probably. So I apologize. James and John have been around forever, and since James and John are both acquainted with national touring acts, they have connections and used them to get a gig. The draw was there, and they proved that they deserved it at their CD release, which packed the cradle pretty solidly. So I send out a public apology to IWDTI. You guys are a good band and good luck.
That said, do I wish I knew people in national touring bands? Yeah. Do I feel like I could support a national act at the cradle? Probably not. You’ve got more balls than I do.
The other thing that I think is hard to admit to yourself as a musician and as a person is that you just don’t have “it,” whatever “it” may be. We’ve all seen some local bands who, within months their first show have generated a fanbase and a buzz, while others have been around for years doing nothing. I was reading Somebody Sam’s blog recently and my heart just went out to them. It was kind of an old blog, August 29: “To me the worst thing about songwriting is that I’m afraid that there’s no one out there who is stirred in any way by what I do.” Who among us has not doubted what he is doing, why he is doing? I mean, most of us work day jobs, drive all over the triangle, stay up until 1 or 2 in the morning at least 3 nights a week to support our friends or our own bands, to scope out our musical compatriots or new venues and for what? When we play and record, pour blood sweat and tears into something that doesn’t pan out for us, it is painful. Despite what we say, what we whisper to ourselves on those nights playing to the bartender and the other band, yes, obviously we are in it because we love it, but we are also in it because one day, we want someone else to love it too.
I had a friend who spent hours a week writing and recording music and wouldn’t play it out, ever, because he said it wasn’t for other people. He said he just wanted to one day give it to his grandkids and say “this is what I used to do when I was your age.” He is the only person like that I’ve ever met. My friend Teresa says that she’s happy just to be allowed to play her guitar onstage for anyone. I can understand that sentiment. Like me, the bar is set to pleasing a select few, to pleasing any, to simply putting it out there. That desire though, can grow, and eventually it’s not just about playing out, it’s about moving people, bringing people in, touching them in some way, affecting them. However, what do we do when that next level doesn’t happen? Obviously, you can’t say anything, you can’t understand why your thoughts, your chord progressions are somehow less enticing than those of others. But it is of the utmost importance, and this is the hard part, that you don’t resent those others for their successes. Sure, some no-talent hack piece of shit performer with $5 million in promotions like that girl from Top Model who just made an awful song with a hoochie video that is on MTV and going to sell at least 10,000 is easy to hate, but someone who is rising up in your neighborhood, who is your friend, who supports you, gives you shout outs, tips, advice? That’s good for the family. And as long as you don’t forget the village that raised you, I got no qualms with venturing out into that world, trying to forge a way, just remember to bring back the spoils, the war stories and share them with your hometown family.
