Maroon 5 Is Responsible For All That Is Bad In The World

Bah.

I am dead tired.

Why? Because of the most dreadful band ever, Maroon 5!

I will get to this later.

First things first - I had my first impulse-buy class night and it was awesome. We watched Swimming Upstream, with Geoffrey Rush. I wouldn't recommend the movie. I had many issues with it, mainly that the characters were all one-dimensional, which were voiced by other members of the class. This class is awesome because

(1) Nobody has seen the movie before, so you avoid that film student nonsense where people have seen the movie a million times before and already know everything - this format selects for an immediate and therefore visceral response to a film, and makes for interesting discussion

(2) You don't know who the guest is going to be while you are watching the movie -
after the movie, there's a 15 minute discussion, after which they say "And I am pleased to introduce blah blah blah..."

(3) Last night, Blah Blah Blah was the writer of the film, Tony Fingelton. The film is actually his life story - he was a famous swimmer in Australia, but the movie focuses more on his family.

(4) It was super cool, because everyone was talking about how the characters were so one-dimensional and then the character himself appears!

(5) It's great, because you can have any question about a movie answered. For
example, the professor had asked "By a show of hands, do you guys think that his father loved him?" We then got to actually ask the dude if he thought his father loved him. People asked all sorts of cool questions such as "Did you get to decide who would play you?"

(6) It was interesting to hear about the trippiness of having your autobiography
made while you are still alive. And I imagine it must be interesting for the filmmaker to hear a film class talk about his/her movie. I am loving this class, and can't wait to see who is there next week!

What I don't love, however, is Maroon 5. No sir. I've hated them since day 1. The dude's voice = nails on the chalkboard. The video where he is making out with that chick is unsettling. Hate hate hate. Sorry if you like them. It's just that every now and then a song will come out that makes you want to have a seizure, and that song, whatever it's called I don't even know - the one that goes "this love has taken its toll on me... blah blah goodbye... so many times befo-o-ore...." is my seizure-inducer.

After class last night I went to see The Arcade Fire at Webster Hall. The Arcade Fire is the band du jour amongst hipsters.

I hadn't been to Webster Hall since my other life. I went there with The Sandwich and Certain Someone years and years ago to go dancing. For only $30 you get to dance in the biggest meatmarket on the planet! Yipee! Luckily Certain Someone paid for all of us.

(Digression: The Webster Hall Scene From Another Lifetime is actually, with hindsight, a very pivotal night of my life. If I hadn't gone to NYC with Sandwich way back when, I'd never have witnessed the weird fight that broke out between Sandwich and Certain Someone at Webster Hall. The fight made me feel very bad about our visit and prompted me to ask Sandwich for Certain Someone's email in order to apologize. If I hadn't had Certain Someone's email address, I'd never have contacted him and offered to buy him a drink the next time I was in NY in order to apologize for Sandwich's inappropriate behavior. Had I not seen Certain Someone the following year, I'd probably not have contacted him when R and I went to NYC this summer. Had I not seen him this summer, I'd never have spent so much time in NYC and would never have fallen in love with it. I wouldn't have looked for a job here and I wouldn't live here now, and I'd never have met D. So, moral of the story, Webster Hall isn't completely evil, nor are ex-es.)

The venu is cool. I was dead tired after class and dead tired from the night before (open mic, stayed up all night, blah blah) and famished because I only had a bagel for dinner. We got there at about 10:45 and figured Arcade Fire would be going on shortly, but no! Their crazy violin-playing friend from Canada played three songs.

They didn't go on until about 11:45. Why? Because freaking Maroon 5 was supposed to play Conan but cancelled, so The Arcade Fire got to play instead, thus messing up their entire show and creating an irritable audience that The Arcade Fire kept berating for being so quiet.

Sorry, Arcade Fire, but it's hard to be enthusiastic at 1 am on a Tuesday, especially when some people have been there since 8:00!

Oh adult-rock-show, where are thou? Start at 6:00 pm, everyone has a seat, there is no painful opening band, and everyone is home and in bed by 10:00.

I am too old for this.

Irritability aside, I didn't like the show. I've actually been lukewarm about them. I really liked the CD upon first listen, but the more and more I listened to it, the less and less I liked it. I almost sold my ticket, but at the last minute thought "Well, maybe a live show will make me less lukewarm about them." No such luck.

My issues:

(1) The reason the Arcade Fire is at all good is the production. The production is elegant and bizarre and unique and, well, a bit subtle. Live its all crescendo and each element is screaming at you, which makes it hard to listen to.

(2) The music was too big for the venu. Very hard on the ears.

(3) All the songs are far too long. Like 8 minutes. And the set order was flawed. It didn't have a good flow.

(4) The performance-art-ness of it was unexpected, and unnecessary.

(5) I was tired. I really don't know how much of my opinion is influenced by fatigue. I was unimpressed, but then again, class was so awesome that anything that followed was almost guaranteed to be anticlimatic.

6) There were tons of rude people at the show. Freaking New York. I didn't check my coat because I am cheap now. We were on the upper level and there are couches there, and a bunch of girls were kind of lying on one. They had a pile of coats on the back of the couch. I said "Do you guys mind if I throw my coat here?" and they looked at me like I had 14 heads. They were mortified that I could be asking such a thing! They looked at me as though I'd just asked if I could sit on them. They looked at me bitchily and didn't say anything for like 30 seconds while they looked at each other and rolled their eyes, taken aback by my audacity, and finally they were like "Yeah, well, I guess." I was like "You know what? Don't worry about it. I'll just put my coat on the floor behind the couch" and they were annoyed by that as well! I put my coat down and D grabbed it and stomped away and was like "Those girls suck," which is funny, because my feeling was that I should put my coat there because they suck whereas his feeling was that I should not so as not to have to deal with them. Other people were angry at D for being tall. Maybe everyone was just overtired.

So there it is. A good Tuesday. Tonight I am going to bed at 9:00 and I can't wait. It's all about the little things, folks. Like reading Sandman before going to bed. Sweet.

Alright. I'm putting my blot in primary and I am out of here!