PriorBlog

If I may, i would like to exhume that horse of mine, and complain about ESPN2 being taken away again. I know that it’s not the greatest of the sports channels, but without it, there are hardly any sports worth watching during the hours when I am allowed to watch (the toddler isn’t allowed to watch “teegee”). Today, I get a little bit of February weekend time and just when I tune in the Georgia Tech and UConn players are walking off the floor. Well, maybe they’ll have a double header… No, they have golf. Great. They keep all of the college basketball on the ESPN and save the most elitist sport for the free channel. Talk about rubbing it in the face of the proletariat.

Bambi rented a Pavement DVD from Netflix the other night. They sent us disc two first, which featured two live shows. I always liked Pavement but felt that there were always a number of throwaway songs on their albums. Like that album with that starts out with Summer Babe, it seemed like if you wanted to enjoy it, you only would listen to every other song.

I was never a huge Pavement head, so by the time their last two albums came out, I was barely into music in general, and kind of passed them up until years later when I discovered them on Bambi’s iPod. Those are the best albums, I think. Anyhow, we were watching some concert from 1999 in Seattle. I don’t think we would have sat through the concert if they had sent both DVDs at the same time, but since that was all we had, we actually watched it, which was kind of weird, seeing as how we were in our living room with our kid sleeping upstairs, whereas in 1999, we would have actually been at a concert. Not to be completely removed from the essense of the idling indie rocker, instead of sitting on the couch, I stood stoically nodding my head in front of the teevee with a beer in hand, until Bambi told me to knock it off because I was being ridiculous.

From watching the concert DVD, it seems like Pavement had a selective sense for their good songs as opposed to their not so good songs (with the exception of them playing Two States during the second concert featured). I would have thought that they would have liked all of their music, and not just the music that I liked, but I guess they had pretty much the same Pavement-sensibility as myself. Kind of weird, but not as weird as virtual concert going.

Even when I do go to shows now (Do I still go?) it is almost always to see some band that was popular in 1993, and consequently, everybody else in the audience is pretty much an old geek. I remember attending a few of these types of shows when I was younger in order to see some band that I was told was seminal. I would look around the room amazed that most of the other people attending used to be cool at one point. The only thing I can compare the feeling to is when I was in Mexico City and for some reason an old abbey’s cemetary inhabitants were dug up and put on display for tourists. Seeing people who were dead for so many years, and yet retaining here and there, on their faces and clothes, trace remnants of their own indiviuality, but at the same time having nothing to do with life anymore.

I don’t always feel like a corpse, only when thinking about ancient history, like when I used to go to Pavement shows and stuff like that.