2005.12.12.1516 :: the chronicles of syriana

last week was absolute mayhem. tuesday night was the lady sovereign show at the empty bottle. the show was sold out but somehow the crowd managed to have the least energy of any show i've been to in ages. i know it's cliche to say at this point, but seriously, it's so frustrating going to a show like that and having it be wall to wall chin scratching and head nodding.

sov's set was really good- just her rapping over instrumentals of her tracks and a few other instrumentals (including "hollaback girl," which i got a laugh out of since the first thing i said when i heard "hoodie" was that she sounded like she was trying to remake herself as the gwen stefani of grime). she did a good job keeping the crowd at least a little hyped, which was quite an achievement considering.

oh, and speaking of gwen stefani, my mom went to the billboard music awards last week and said "gwen stefani was a wannabe madonna or cindy lauper!" my mom rules.

anyway, after the show we headed to the afterparty at four (ugh) and it went exactly as expected. they were hassling people at the door and trying not to let people in even though sov was standing there saying "they're with me" and she was literally standing next to a poster with a picture of her on it and her video was playing on the projector. i don't understand what it is with cheesy club bouncers, but i swear half the times they're like dudes with anger issues that couldn't even make it as cops.

i'm not exactly sure what happened after that, but i do know that it involved her breaking glasses in the vip and possibly taking a swing at a bouncer, which is pretty hilarious considering she is like 5'1". after that we somehow ended up at the jerkstore. haha.

deciding that my weekends couldn't be outdone by my weekdays, friday was one of the most absurd nights of my entire life. i watched closer at a friend's house and was heading home, trying to convince myself to take it easy and recover from scared to dance the night before. instead i called my friend brian and he got me to come meet him at y bar. i rolled up around 1:40 and at first they were trying to not let me in because of my pumas. by the time the manager came out to let me in, it was like 1:50, meaning they were only open for 10 more minutes. i sat down and brian handed me a half-full bottle of grey goose and told me to kill it so we could go to soundbar.

we got over to soundbar and mathew johnson was about 2/3 of the way through his set. brian's boss announced that we needed a table and two bottles off the bat, and they tried to put us in the vip room where brian's ex was playing house music. haha. anyway, we told them we definitely needed to be out by the dj booth, so they moved all seven of us out there. while walking through the crowd, we picked up a few friends they decided to just give us the whole section to ourselves.

around this point he handed the waitress his credit card and told her to keep the bottles coming and cut us off before we hit ten grand. then he told us to get all our friends from the crowd and make sure everybody has a good time. i think all told we probably got twenty to thirty people up there and got everybody pretty much completely wrecked. at one point brian's boss asked for strawberries and chocolate to dip them in... they came back with some fresh cut strawberries and said they didn't have any chocolate, so he told them to go get some. like ten minutes later the dude came back with a little tub of chocolate from god knows where. he must've walked to a white hen or something. haha.

right around then is when my memory gets pretty blurry. i remember telling the waitress i love her, making out with a few people, drinking enough grey goose and cristal to kill a large horse and definitely sending a lot of text messages that i probably shouldn't have. i don't remember a single second of losoul's set, but apparently i was sitting five feet away from him for the whole thing. ugh.

one of the few things i remember clearly is stumbling outside at bar time and trying to buy a hot dog from the vendor. the dude in front of me got the last hot dog, so i managed to talk him into selling me a bun with ketchup and mustard on it for a dollar. apparently i went to an afterparty from there, but for all i know i could've spent a night in a mexican prison.

i do kind of remember that marc drove me home and i definitely went to 7-11 (as evidenced by the big gulp and half a rib sandwich sitting on my desk the next morning). it's a good thing i got the big gulp, too, because when i woke up at 4pm one of my roommates was in the shower and the kitchen sink was full of dirty dishes, so i ended up puking into the big gulp cup. it's kind of sweet to throw 7-11 back up into a 7-11 container. it's like the circle of life or something. like a snake eating its tail. ("i don't know what that word means!") it's kind of not sweet to wake up four hours later to a big gulp of puke on your nightstand.

yesterday i went to see syriana with jes and as i was walking back to the train from the movie theater got a call from brian asking if i wanted to see chronicles of narnia at the same theater, so i did.

syriana was amazing. it's one of the best "political" films i've seen in years. i keep seeing people say that it's a liberal film, but i really don't think it us. it didn't seem very moral to me at all, but actually was very balanced in showing the complexities of the situation and showing why exactly things happen like they do. it does a very good job of showing every perspective and establishing each person's motivations. it's hard to explain without just outlining the plot, so i'll just say that i think everybody should see it.

chronicles of narnia, on the other hand, chugged. i'm not sure exactly what they were going for, but it just came off as really boring, not that great for kids (especially considering how creepy a lot of it was) and really not even that pretty to look at. the only thing i really liked about the whole thing was tilda swinton as the white witch. totally meh.

oh, and on the music front, i added three new live shows, two in chicago and one in new york. word.