The Future Is Mine (Part One)

I found a great website today produced by everyone's favorite, NPR. It's a new take on their All Things Considered, this time titled All Songs Considered, and coming from NPR you'd be amazed and the line-up of full live concerts they have ready for download and play: Bright Eyes, Interpol, Decemberists... NPR has even listed the hot tour of the season, Kings of Leon and The Secret Machines, although they blatantly left out a webcast of the reason this tour was so hot this season: the opening act for both bands was none other than the indefatigable Shout Out Louds.

It just so happens that these very same Shout Out Louds were in New York last night as well as were Gil and Debra. While Debra checked her email I dragged Gil to the Mercury Lounge in the Lower East Side to drink and partake of the show.

In my opinion they were pretty damn great - but this mind you coming from someone who proudly displays several full-length Mariah Carey albums in his collection(click on her name and be swept off to the one and only Honey B.Fly fan site...). The show was so great I'm dragging Michelle, who is here now, back with me tonight! So excited, and still madly hungover from last night.

Gil and I have had little time, actually in the past couple years, to hang out and catch up, especially while drinking and especially now that he's an engaged man... By the time he met me at the bar I was already sloshed and I'm just realizing now that in my stupor I rather blatantly ripped one of the concert posters of the bar wall (yes I'm that cheap) and then demanded the bartender give me rubber bands to tie it up, then of course coming home on the subway trashed at 3am on a Sunday, I conveniently left it on the L train while still maintaining a firm grip on my King Size bag of peanut M&Ms.

After the show let out at near midnight, Gil and I wandered down Avenue A (not to be confused with Avenue D (great website by the way) who will be performing their hits "Orgasmitron" and "Do you think I'm a slut?" next Wednesday, that I might head to, but unfortunately lies on the same night of The Exit show at CBGBs and there's a chance that CBs may close come month's end so it's a fleeting opportunity hard to pass up).

Gil recalled some bar he had been to previously called Lava Gina (which I still think he completely made up or heard on an old episode of that tragic sitcom Get A Life - I hope for your sake Gil that bar actually does exist, cause it's otherwise a god awful joke...).

We went searching for a few blocks and not coming up with any Lava Gina we asked a spanish bar staffer smoking on the sidewalk. He found it pretty damn amusing when we asked him for La Vagina.

I was pretty damn amused as well, and even more so later in the evening when we stopped at what in a drunken blur seems like our third or fourth bar of the evening, where we encoutered a East Side punk rock riot girl bartender with a voice that made you think Baby Spice might have been a suitable Gorgeous Lady of Wrestling (Does anyone remember Mt. Fuji? ((The poor girl was probably raised on more helium than breast milk)). She was kind enough though to offer me a piece of her penne with goat cheese skewered neatly across a bar straw.


Everything in NY has goat cheese mind you - I heard Popeye's even uses it on their biscuits, and you know I love this - well maybe if it was cheaper and I could eat as much as I wanted, but then I'd be obese and obsessively treading away on some elipticycle hiding my tears of agony beneath the sweat of my brow as I elipted for hours and visualized the small grams of goat cheese I burned off as I watched the calorie meter tick painfully slow.

I also have to give a great shout out to the opening act of the Shout Out Louds performance the past couple nights: The Redwalls. Michelle, magically enough called it that she would know somebody at this max occupancy of 150 people club/bar - and she certainly did, the Capitol Records rep who was handling both The Redwalls and the Shout Out Louds.

Rep guy said that just six months ago The Redwalls had been simply a Beatles cover band, but had exploded musically and performance wise, (perhaps as they hit puberty, Michelle swears that the one in the white shirt was still in braces) and they certainly had. They had the excited enthusiasm of a young band that saw the Mercury Lounge as a huge occassion and really came to life with a stage presence that made the already mopey Shout Out Louds seem like they needed a little more aerobic exercise. You could tell instantly they were having a great time of it, and the audience easily did with them.