This past weekend, West Palm Beach’s Lavola (who I’ve written about before) played a show under the Indiantown Road Bridge, in Jupiter, and I headed down with a video camera to grab some footage (I’ll thank you in advance for excusing the less-than-amazing audio quality on this).
While they did get their entire set in without interruption, during their last encore, in the middle of a hyper-speed version of “The Queen Is Dead” (which kills) local police arrived and ended the show.
Note the flashing blue and red lights that go unnoticed by singer/guitarist Julian Cires, followed by the kid bolting across the frame. Which isn’t exactly the lowest profile behavior if you’re trying to avoid the cops. Plus, the kid was heading towards the water, which would have meant a swim for freedom.
Stupidheads don’t accept the Word According to Apple
It turns out that not everyone thinks Steve Jobs’ birthday ought to be celebrated worldwide by getting families together, eating a turkey, exchanging gifts, then either passing out on the sofa or arguing until someone locks themselves in the bathroom.
Take the iPad: While most people understand that of course it’s “magical,” just as Jobs explained, and some lined up days in advance just for the chance to gaze upon iPad’s glory, there are still some pesky iTheists out there that fail to see the truth. But note how their arguments are without merit:
It’s awkward: it is said that without rubber feet, putting it on a kitchen counter, for example, causes it to “slide and twirl” as you try to swipe the screen. Consider, though, that this just makes it easier to slide and twirl into the optimum viewing position for someone standing nearby, so that they may gaze upon iPad’s glory, thus bringing understanding of its greatness and expanding the flock. Plus, you can use it to make spin art, which is cool hippie stuff.
Too much screen glare: Apparently, unless you’re in a dim room the glare gets annoying, outside in the shade it’s bad, and using it in the sun is right out. But that misses the point. iPads aren’t meant to be used just anywhere, they belong in a proper shrine, surrounded by velvet blankets, lit (from behind) by candles (this also debunks the “it’s too heavy” and “it’s too awkward to carry” arguments).
No multitasking: Why do you need to multitask, anyway? When in the presence of an iPad, there’s no reason to want to do anything beyond basking in whatever (one) app the iPad as running.
Limited browser: The big complaint here is the lack of Flash support. But Apple has decreed that HTML5 is better, so it is. You’ll never miss Flash, unless you want to see a site coded with Flash or a Flash plug-in, of course. But there are only something like 18 kabillion of those, so don’t worry about it. Did we mention it’s an iPad and Flash isn’t necessary?
Horrible virtual keyboard: apparently, some people want to do something called “type” on an iPad. No. Typing not only degrades the experience by imposing your personality on the iPad, it leaves horrible fingerprints all over the glass, making it ugly and tough to see. Therefore, typing is wrong.
No USB port: Oh please, why would you want to connect to an iPad using something as ancient as USB? The iPad is magical, so just use that.
No camera: Well of course not. It wasn’t meant to look at you. You were meant to look at it. Learn your place, bitches, and you’ll be much happier.
It overheats: Apparently, if it gets too warm, the iPad shuts itself off for a cool down period during which you can’t use it. So it’s smart too. Plus, this gives you an opportunity to get off your knees and stretch for a minute.
Poor WiFi performance: Apparently, many iPads have poor WiFi performance, with the signal fluctuating from strong to none, while within router range. This is normal behavior, again stemming from the new nature of the iPad. We suggest updating your router firmware to allow it to connect magically.
It doesn’t replace anything: Are you kidding me? It replaces a lazy susan, a mirror, a shelf of comic books, and your need to think for yourself. What else could you want?
If you look closely, you’ll notice something about those people that have negative things to say about the iPad: they aren’t very serene. They think too much, worry too much, spend too much time trying to find things out for themselves. They want to use things as they desire, not as Apple intended, and thus find themselves in a constant struggle for their own identity and the freedom from things meant to protect us, like DRM, App Store oversight.
Those that accept the truth about Jobs, Apple, and the iPad, on the other hand, dwell happily in a beautiful walled garden. Look at their smiles (some call it smugness, but we know better), look at their shiny eyes, look at all their beautiful lifestyle products. These are people that know they’re being taken care of, that there is no need to look beyond what they are offered, that all of their needs are met, for now and for eternity, thank Jobs.
I totally want one of these. Which makes me not only a geek, but also even more self-important that I thought
You’ve seen the scenarios play out in countless movies: someone needs to hack into a storage device to steal information, but if they try to brute force the issue, the damn thing will self destruct. Sometimes, to get around the security, the hacker will cut the finger off of someone that can access it in order to get past the fingerprint verification.
Trim your nose hair, file your nails, store your porn.
Well apparently neither scenario is bullshit, or so Victorinox, the famous Swiss Army Knife manufacturer, would have you believe. So they’ve released a USB Stick that does the former and prevents the latter.
The new Victorinox Secure, launched recently in London, is a Swiss Army Knife with an integrated USB stick available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes. It sells for $75 to $270.
Claimed to be un-hackable, Victorinox even offered a £100,000 prize to anyone that could crack it during their launch event – the money went unclaimed. Victorinox uses a combination of AES256 technology and a fingerprint reader to keep hackers out, and if an attempt is made force it open, the CPU and memory chip burn themselves up.
And that whole “cut off the finger thing?” No worries there either – just explain to the black ops guy holding the bolt cutters over your finger that their plan to take your finger back to their secret lair while they work on the password wont work: the fingerprint scanner has a thermal sensor, so they’re just going to have to keep you alive while they try and hack the encryption.
Of course you could always just avoid the drama and torture all together by just unlocking it for them – after all, you’ve probably only got crappy porn on the thing.
Drew, Ian, and Hoss from Karnivool. Meat-eating Aussies that fucking rock.
I love these guys. Toss a hunk of odd ball meat in front of ‘em, and they’ve got the balls to eat it up. The band kicks ass, their meat eating habits make even me hugely jealous, and they take a great photo. What more could you want?
I’m doing a full profile of them later in the week, but in the meantime, enjoy some excellent stories about meats of the world (and a wacky Outback – the crappy restaurant -experience).
Aaron from Stone Foxes, risking every bone from his foot to his neck for your entertainment. Yes, he jumped. No, he wasn't injured. Click for larger.
At 2:30 in the morning last night, less than 12 hours ago, I was standing around a pit fire in front of a food truck in East Austin. I was there with some friends I made in Austin after bumping into them at a showcase yesterday afternoon and joining their motley crew as we bounced from gig to gig.
Among that group was the fucking maniac shown in the photo at left, Aaron, from The Stone Foxes. Believe it or not, when Aaron isn’t about to jump of a 9 foot stack onto the stage during his band’s set, he’s a very calm, almost shy dude (that gets music, by the way).
And last night, by the time Death had gone on for their 1 AM set at the Mohawk, he was certainly the one among us with the most sense despite what you might infer from the photo. So when he asked if I was coming for chicken and waffles, I didn’t hesitate. And when he told me to order the Miss M (chicken, cheese, bacon – wrapped in waffle), I wasn’t going to argue. Even if I only had a dollar in my wallet and had to beg $10 off of band manager Rob.
Just as catching the Walkmen play in the tiny IFC Crossroads House studio was the perfect way to start SXSW, hanging out with these guys and chowing heart-attack inducing carb-bombs in 35 degree weather was the perfect way to end what was, for me, an incredible week.
A brief, and incomplete recap: I interviewed Kashmir and shared recipes with them (which will be a part of an upcoming Meatist column), talked meat, ice breaking ferries, reindeer steak and the dangers of too much Guinness with Karnivool, and geeked out about about vintage keyboards and talked music with Crash Kings (my pick – you read it hear first - to get bigger, faster than ANY band that played this year).
I stood in the photo pit for the incredible Sharon Jones show, stood on stage while Nneka (haven’t heard of her? you will – trust me) performed a breakfast show, and caught incredibly talented bands I’d never heard of like French Miami and The Stone Foxes (who were totally great and you should see as soon as you can, which I posted via Twitter the night I saw them, which was before I had met and hung out with Aaron, so don’t you fucking accuse me of saying they were great because I like the guy).
Aaron said get the Miss M. I listened. Avi said don't use syrup or your hands will get sticky. I didn't listen. Now I'm sticky.
I hung in the gifting suite sipping rum/vodka (who knew to mix them?) cocktails and watched Adrian Grenier from Entourage collect swag (it was like being in a TV show!), caught an amazing old-school-feeling garage punk rock show from Ty Segall, met musicians of every size, shape, style and skill level, was blown away at some shows, completely underwhelmed at others, and came back to my friend’s house beat to shit every night, but up 5 hours later to do it again.
It was fucking awesome.
I will tell every story (that I can remember) over the next few days (o.k., maybe more than a few, but I’ll get there), and post photos and videos as evidence of both my presence in Austin and my lack of a great camera.
So it’ll be stories, videos, pics, and commentary coming as soon as I sleep for a few days and find myself in front of a proper computer. Oh, and get a Keith Richards-style blood rotation.
Just call me Wonder Woman. I had the magic bracelets and I knew how to use them. Now I'm back with stories.
Reggie Watts lays the shit down. And the fuck. And makes a stack.
I don’t usually like to simply post links to other blog posts or videos – I’ve always felt like that makes the entire blogging thing a big stupid circle jerk – but occasionally I’ll swalllow my pride along with 15 mg of hydrocodone and post something particularly excellent.
Like this video from Reggie Watts, who was totally unknown to me until Joanna sent me a link to this video. It’s yet another one of those things I look at and think “damn, I wish I’d made that.”
Geek jeans from Europe have a place for everything. Yes, everything.
You just can’t stand keeping your iPhone or iPod Touch in that crappy, standard issue jeans pocket, can you? And the memory stick you carry around that has your KeePass password database and a hacked version of Windows Ultimate? You need a safe place for that too, don’t you?
WTFJeans has got you covered, and then some. Their new pair of pants has an iPhone/iPod pocket that’s “easy in, easy out,” and has a micro-fiber liner to protect and serve. Then there’s the hidden memory stick pocket to keep all your critical data and encrypted porn close.
But perhaps the most interesting thing of all doesn’t pad your electronic gizmos, it pads your flesh gizmo. That’s right, for some reason they’ve added extra padding in the crotch to give you a nice wang snuggle, and it works whether you dress right or left.
They’ve even stitched a huge outline down there too, either to imply you’ve got a mammoth unit or to provide targeting assistance for the chick you just insulted after getting wigged out on too much Mountain Dew.
It’s close to midnight, and I’m driving through a deserted commerce park in Jupiter. I’m trying to follow sketchy directions on my phone’s voicemail that end with the phrase, “Call me when you’re lost.” Not an issue: I head towards the wall of sound coming from a unit in back, and I’m at Lavola’s practice space.
Julian Cires, Brian Weinthal, and Matt Hanser (yes, he's out of focus, fuck you) are Lavola.
I tap on the tinted glass when it quiets down a bit, and Julian Cires cautiously open the door. “We never know who’s wandering around out there,” he says. Entry wins me an immediate offer of ear protection from bassist Matt Hanser. ”Do I look that old?” I think, then see singer/guitarist Julian’s Orange amp head and Matt’s Ampeg bass rig and accept, hoping to keep my eardrums from being pushed into my brain.
I’m struck by the distinct lack of beer cans on the floor or pot smoke in the air, and there’s not an enormous saucer-like pupil in the room. These guys are here to play music, not to fuck around like a bunch of high school kids that just discovered how bitchin’ weed is.
I settle onto a crappy Peavy amp someone left over in the corner, the band starts to play, and the room transforms. It’s not that the music is just loud, it’s hella-loud. It’s a hugely physical experience: I’m getting it in the stomach (no brown notes, thankfully), the chest, the head. It’s so immersive that it’s like tripping, which is fun for a while unless the music sucks. But it doesn’t: it’s really, really good.
Cires and Hanser had played in bands together when they were in high school, but that ended when both left for college. Hanser headed to Colorado to study business, “I was a train wreck,” he says of his time there, Cires to Tallahassee to study creative writing. “It was a compromise,” he says of his major, “A great compromise, but a compromise.” During his time at school, though, Cires began pursuing what he really wanted to be doing.
“I didn’t have many friends in Tallahassee, maybe one or two. It was mostly playing guitar, night and day.” And songwriting, he says, which “was the first thing in my life that I can remember actually being proud of.”
Lavola formed after Cires sent Hanser an email one spring that read: “Hey, I got a Vox. Wanna play this summer?” They got together and recorded a four song EP, but weren’t a full band until drummer Brian Weinthal, of “call me when you’re lost” fame, arrived this winter via an ad in Craig’s list. “I called Julian and said there was a kid that was planning on moving to New York, but that he’d stay if we let him join the band,” says Hanser. “And he rocked,” adds Cires.
Adding a second guitarist, though, didn’t go quite as smoothly. No one that they auditioned fit; most sucked out loud. “I shoulda known from the mullet,” Cires mutters after one particularly talentless douche departs.
A moment came during one of those practices that pretty much said it all. Lavola were trying out guitar player number four (or was it five?), who was sitting down noodling with his Telecaster, trying to find something to play. Matt and Julian slowly moved towards Brian’s kit, the group of three closing up together, the fourth outside the circle.
The process had turned out to be positive. It had helped push the core three together, crystallize who Lavola were, build chemistry between band mates. Ultimately they dropped the idea of adding a fourth. And that’s a good thing, because it’s that chemistry, combined with their huge sound and singer Cires’s emotional connection to the material that make Lavola so worth seeing.
I dug out my notes from the first practice I sat in on and I found the following scratched on page one: “British Sea Power, J. Mascais, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Mangum, Pixies,” and also “fucking cool.” I also found: “Rhythm section needs to lock up better. Focus on listening to each other. Build chemistry.”
When I stopped by a practice a couple of nights ago though, things had changed. The three guys playing music in a deserted commerce park in the middle of the night had become a band. And they played like monsters. That night, I even skipped the ear protection.
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FREE MP3:
If you want to hear Lavola for yourself, visit their MySpace page, or make it easy by grabbing this free download of Lavola’s song, “The Philosopher’s Daughter.”
Fair warning: Lavola has grown. If you catch an upcoming show (and you should) be prepared for something much, much bigger. Personally, I’d love to drag their asses into the studio and get some recordings of the new line up…..
Live Show: Lavola play tonight, Friday, Feb 26, at Respectable Street Cafe in West Palm Beach. Doors open at 9 PM, opening act is Now Breathers. And it’s free, so you have no excuse for missing it.
If you enjoy BITF, you can also read my work at Technorati, Blogcritics, and my new site The Meatist, which is the meat blog, I've launched as an expansion of my weekly column that New Times has been running since last year (because meat matters, bitches). - bcs
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