El Diario de Esteban Mauricio Orgullo

Must be flyer time again!



Let me just state for the record that our rehearsal Sunday night was A+.

Sorry, here I am again, posting for the first time in a while, and it's because I have a flyer:



I know neutron_x and elle_innuendo won't be there, but any of the rest of you's who can make it, this would be a great one for you to attend.

And FYI, I'm totally chipping away at my 2008-in-review thingy. It's a lot of work!

Come on out!



WE HAND-PRINTED THE CD COVERS OURSELVES!!!

YOU HAVE TO COME!!!

- It's all ages

- Collisionville is playing first, and we will seriously be starting on time, 9PM at the latest

- Vitamin Party is 2nd, then Bwuh

As advertised, this will be an acoustic show, where I will be playing a lot of banjo.

I'm supposed to tell you about this link, in case you want to buy your ticket in advance, and pay two extra dollars for the convenience!

Oh, and I apologize for the $10 cover, but bottles of beer are sold there for $1, and glasses of wine for $2, if that helps.

Other thoughts:

1. I don't recall any other evening in all my years owning a cell phone where I received so many text messages as I did the night of 11/4. And to answer your question, firebreath, yes, we did hear the party going on in the streets outside our downtown Berkeley apartment, but we didn't join in because I had a cold. I took some nyquil and slept through it.

2. Among Conor's several texts was "For the first time in my life, I can chant 'USA! USA!' without being ironic." You hear a lot of that around here in the last week. And yeah, I can tell you, when Shifra and I went to Europe back in February, we took some flack for being Americans, and it's nice to hope that won't happen next time we travel. I'm glad so many people are coming around to loving America again, but I was wondering if you'd all get with me on this idea: Alaska, you're free to go now. Go ahead. Secede. Please. Just go.

3. All the Prop 8 bullshit really reminds me of the '92 election, when I was living in Colorado. There was this odious thing on the ballot called "Amendment 2," put there by a Colorado Springs car dealership owner named Will Perkins. For several years up to that point, there had been protections for gays against discrimination written in the books in Denver, Boulder, and Aspen. Amendment 2's purpose was to overturn them. The campaign in favor of this despicable amendment focused on the idea that gays didn't deserve "special rights," that they were not an oppressed minority.

In the months leading up to the election, polls showed the measure losing by as much as 10 points. It ended up seeming like some variation of the Bradley Effect, where people were not honest with pollsters, not wishing to express their bigotry anywhere but in the privacy of the voting booth. The measure passed, I think by something like 54-46. (Voters in the city of Denver rejected it by about 66-34.)

I was living in a suburb called Lakewood at the time, and I will never forget what I found on the doorstep the morning of election day -- a big advertisement, in the form of a newspaper, endorsing Amendment 2, which nakedly appealed to people's bigotry. There was a list on one page: "Homosexuals claim that they're just like the rest of us, but in reality..." One of the bullet points said that they like to eat feces.

A legal challenge was mounted right away, and I still have the issue of the Denver Post from many years later when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it. It was "born of animus towards gays," said the majority opinion (Justice Scalia, that most detestable 2-legged creature in the Western Hemisphere, was part of the minority opinion, of course).

If anyone ever tries to tell you that opposition to gay rights has nothing to do with bigotry, you should never believe them, ever. Will Perkins repeated over and over during the campaign that he was not motivated by bigotry, but after the election, as the legal challenges were going through their processes, he admitted something to a newspaper reporter. I wish I'd saved that newspaper, too, but let me reconstruct from memory as best I can: "Forget all this talk about 'special rights.' We do want the right to discriminate. Because either there is freedom of association, or there is not."

In other words, if an employer or a landlord doesn't want to associate with homosexuals in any way, they shouldn't be required to. He felt that it should be perfectly legal to fire someone from a job for being gay.

Anyway, there I was on election night in 1992, so relieved that the Reagan-Bush years were coming to an end (little did I know), but the sweetness of that was pretty much ruined by the passage of Amendment 2, which I'd worked hard against. I remember talking the next day to my boss, a lesbian about 10 years older than me, and her saying that her prevailing emotion that day was just that she felt hurt, like she'd been beaten up or something.

So I kind of saw it coming with Prop 8. As the polls tightened in the week before the election, I predicted to Shifra that it would pass, because I felt like I had to get used to the idea. The religious right-wingers were appealing to people's bigotry, and it was working.

There's a lot of work left to do, obviously. But I read somewhere the other day that voters under the age of 30 in CA rejected Prop 8 by something like 39-61. That's the direction we're heading in. I really do believe that we'll see legal gay marriage all across the country in my lifetime. Right now, all there is to do is fight for it.

Here's hoping at least a couple of you don't already have a million other plans. This will be our first full-volume, electric show since December of '06, and our first show with Conor (from Vitamin Party) on bass.

Okay, since stupid myspace's stupid bulletin-posting function is screwed up for the 2nd day in a row right at the moment that I intended to post this, I'm going to post it here instead:



I know you're all probably going to see Mount Vicious at the Parkside, but you might want to ask neutron_x what order they're playing in. We're supposed to be done with our show by midnight, so who knows, you might be able to catch at least some of each show, if you're the bar-hopping type.

elle_innuendo will hug you.

Are you on my friends list, but not on benadrian's?

Then here, lookit this!



If you are on his friends list, lookit it again, anyway.

(I'm playing bass now for GvsG. We found a drummer who's better than me, so now I'm doing a worse job of playing bass than the previous bass player.)

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ, or not, as you see fit.

( My list )

Hey, my band made it into the music blog at Wired.com!

Listening Post, June 5th, 2008.

WOO-HOO! Nice feather in the cap there. Comes along at a great, great time.

On an unrelated note, yesterday I was shopping with Shifra at Whole Foods and they had some sample cheese out. There's little I enjoy more than plates full of free sample cheese, cut into tasty little cubes that you spear with a toothpick. And yesterday's featured cheese had a truly great name. Are you ready? Sit down.

SPANISH DRUNKEN GOAT.

Awesome.

It was tasty.

So the new Collisionville album is all done. Cover art, liner notes, the whole thing. I haven't figured out any big plan for a release yet, but since you're reading this, you can have it:

I Spied a Spider (zip file).

We're looking for a bass player now. And the direction of the band is changing some. The old drummer was pretty averse to the honky-tonk stuff. Now that he's gone, we're bringing that in, to go along with the Pixies-ish/Replacements-ish/Neil Young-ish stuff we've been doing.

So the ideal candidate would be someone who can switch to an upright bass for an acoustic set:



Failing that, the ability to play some acoustic guitar would be good. Basically, it comes down to this: I'm going to be playing more banjo, and the combination of electric bass and banjo is very foul. So we need someone who can do something else that sounds better when I'm on banjo.

So could you help me out and spread the word? If you know someone good, send them here. Here are some mp3's if they want to hear a bit:

"Old Ladies Reading the Bible"

"Please Spare the Life of Your Cocaine Dealer"

"Sleeping in a Tree"

If you'd like, comment on this entry, and I will honestly answer the questions below.

1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a colour, a photo, etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your LJ.

We're back. It was awesome. More pics & descriptions to follow, as soon as I get over the cold I brought home, and adjust to Pacific time. Slow going so far.

Saturday night Shifra came with me to see "About a Son." A few people asked me to let them know how it was, so I'll share what I can here.

Firstly, I had my eyebrow raised when I first heard about it: a Kurt Cobain documentary with no film of Kurt, and no Nirvana music in the soundtrack? But it got a lot of good reviews, and I was interested in hearing the tape recordings of his interviews with Azzerad, so we decided to go. And I would say that it works as a film, despite the lack of Nirvana footage & music. The music they did choose works pretty well. (elle_innuendo: I don't know the name of the Queen song, but I think it started with the line "You say you love me...")

Other than that, I don't know what else to say about it. There was some stuff that really affected me, but this subject is deeply personal to me and so I can't really be objective about it.

Oh, here's one thing I can be objective about, though -- they finally released "Nirvana Unplugged" on DVD, but it seems like they've done a horrible remix of the audio. The cello is the loudest thing in the mix! WTF?!?

Sunday, I saw a few of you's at the Stork, namely the afore-mentioned elle_innuendo, and also firebreath, and of course mrpelvis, whose band Choad of Adam Ghost to Atom was playing last on the bill, after Bwuh and Vitamin Party.

Vitamin Party put on a good show, really jumping quickly from one song to the next. And I liked the new tunes a lot. But I won't say anymore because I don't think any of them even know that I keep a LiveJournal.

Instead I want to wax rhapsodic about Ghost to Atom's set. Due to some ridiculous blundering on my part, I think it's been the better part of a year since I saw those guys. They were terrific then, but man they were even more awesome yesterday! My favorite aspects of the band are Charles's guitar playing and mrpelvis's drumming, which is not to short-change Matt's bass playing at all, he does just the right thing for the sound. Anyway, it was really furious and (forgive me, but I can't think of a better word) "tight." And the songs are good. And they had an encore demanded of them, because they kicked so much ass, and they had a technical problem in the middle of it, and they just sort of played through it, let things fall apart a bit, then came back together and it was quite impressive.

Then I gave mrpelvis a reacharound.

Oh look at this poor, neglected journal.

( 'The Future is Unwritten' film review )

I had this dream last week that I was going to tell you about, but I forgot everything except that I woke up with an idea for a band name on my lips:

MINT CHICKEN PANTS.