Open Letter to the Eyeball Skeletons

Dear Eyeball Skeletons,
Eyeball Skeletons is my favorite new band name. It beats out Indian Jewelry, which was my favorite before, and the Miles Raymer Progressive Blues Corporation, which is disqualified because I made it up. Plus you guys rock and you have a song that has the same name as your band (which is always a good thing for a band to do) and you guys are like 10, and I bet you guys are really cute making crazy rock with your 10-year-old selves. And I am almost positive that if you guys made tshirts for your band that they are totally amazing. I hope if you made tshirts for your band that they have a picture of an eyeball skeleton, because now that I think about it, I'm really curious to see what an eyeball skeleton is supposed to look like. I'm kind of jealous of you guys because when I was 10 all I did was listen to the Doors and wondered why no one at school liked me (ends up it was because I did things like listen to the Doors, which no one at my school got into until they were older and started wearing drug rugs).
Thank you for bringing the little-kid rock.
PS, please get a website and/or a MySpace profile.

The French and the Germans and the nerds.

I went to both M83 shows last week, too hyped up to not be let down, too much imagining getting high and being swept completely away on their waves of majesty and sorrow, too much actual French-guy bass-humping. Seriously, bass players: humping your bass is not a "move". If any audience member has ever watched a bass player crotch-wrestling their instrument and imagined "What if that was me there instead of a large guitar?", then something is wrong with our society on a whole.
So M83 was a let-down, but nothing wouldn't rock compared to Ulrich Schnauss, who opened. He had a laptop and a keyboard and played the third-loudest parts of the sequenced songs. Sitting at a table with a computer, concentrating through his Germanic haircut, he looked like a zoo exhibit labeled "Nerd".

Photo Pope Op

Yesterday, in front of the Catholic church on State and Chicago, in front of the news vans and next to the flag-waving altar boys and priests holding their hands high, there were groups of laypeople holding signs with words magic-markered on them and pictures of Benedict XVI from the newspapers' front pages pasted to them. Two women's signs caught my attention. One was a picture of the new pope with a message proclaiming how he will "protect women's dignity". Another didn't have a pope photo, but it had a drawing of a collar and read, "We don't need a collar to bring about change". If you don't catch the irony of the first sign, you can read Jack Miles's remberence of how Pope John Paul II's respect for the dignity of women affected his own family (second half of the article), or you can just imagine having the activity and destiny of the sex parts of your body being in the hands of a man hundreds or thousands of miles away from you who is supposed to know nothing of the nature of bodies' sex parts and who has never and will never meet you or probably has no idea what living your life in your home in your country is like, and just feel that dignity was over you. As for the second sign, it has a lot in common with the "MO DRMA" license plate I saw today, both saying in their own stunningly proud ways that, when life presents you a plateful of shit, one should eat it clean and tip generously.

Engineers all over the world.

Hi. I am a zombie who has just applied lip gloss.. That's a joke, actually. I don't really wear lip gloss. What I am doing in this picture is trying to get feeling back into my lips after kissing ass on the Fader dudes all night long. (Hey homies! We still down for that Big Audio Dynamite retrospective? Holla at ya boy!)
Hi. I'm not entirely sure what's going on. Have you seen my panther tshirt? This is actually the exact same face that I'm making in my new Illinois state identification card. It is a look I've patented called "0.5 Seconds From Now I Will Realize That My Picture Is Being Taken".
You can't really tell from the picture, but here I am doing a new dance move called the Cease And Desist, which doubles as an actual legal notice of copyright infringement. I'll let you know when I've finished choreographing my next move, the Notice Of A Restraining Order Limiting Stipulating That You Have To Remain No Less Than 150 Yards From My Person At All Times.
Perfect Panther's at the Fireside "For Real About The Bowling" Bowl tomorrow (April 14). There will be new songs. Maybe a new haircut. Possibly jams that will change your life. Who knows? For about a second I felt a little conflicted about playing the Fireside after them basically putting the shaft on the Chicago punk scene before I remembered that I'm only in this game for the cash.

The metal show that wasn't a metal show.

I went to the Pelican show tonight. I saw, by far, the most high heels I've ever seen at a metal show. Pelican was too quiet, so instead of being snatched from the earth and being taken to the disorienting and pretty place that Pelican usually takes me (Pelican being, like Mogwai, almost entirely dependent on mass volume to succeed in a live setting; both bands are put together by fully mundane, normally-looking guys, and lacking spectacle to enthrall their audience they rely on pure presence to carry the viewer from spectation to transcendent participation with the music in a way that is not only mental, but emotional and even physical. Mogwai opening their set in Detroit 2001 with "Come On Die Young" at a literally staggering volume is one of two instances that a performance has been so overwhelming that it's brought me to tears. The other time was seeing Poison performing "Every Rose Has Its Thorns".) so the only real entertainments I had were looking at pretty girls and watching indie kids reacting to the guy in the Sepultura shirt who was engaging in full-on serious headbanging. You could really just reach out and touch their discomfort and contact embarassment at the spectacle of someone rocking out that unashamedly in public, swinging his perfectly straight, shining head of golden-blonde hair without a second of concern for composure.
Only metalheads and girls who ride horses have that kind of hair.