magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

so i cut out of the studio at about 930 last night. i had been planning on going to the ida/warn defever show in boston on tuesday, but found out a few weeks ago that there was going to be a show here in providence. and crit or not, there was no way i was going to miss this show.

the show was scheduled to start at ten at this little theatre/performance space at brown. there were a couple couches and benches and a corner full of musical equipment. apparently there had been a scheduling problem though, and there was a rehearsal being held downstairs (rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead) and the show didn't start until about eleven.

i spent the time talking to chris of purple ivy shadows who had set up the show. the last time ida played in providence they had a bad show at a club downtown, and asked him if he could set up something better.

a brown student band called songs from vineland opened. they covered bruce springsteen on dual acoustic guitars. then a guitar/mandolin appalachia sorta song. then two songs as a guitar/bass/drums three piece in the spirit of codeine/low/idaho/gaster del sol. the last song was really good.

warn and co set up and started with a noise rock bit. drums, guitar, and feedback, with warn running around the room screaming into a cordless mic. after about five minutes of this, he sat down and pulled out the acoustic guitar. "that was the es'scorpions." he says. "they're from latin america. we're warn defever and the i want you to live 100 years band. we just put an album called i want you to live 100 years."

they started with "world is not my home" (i would have loved to hear "are we still married"). then a song about whales. and a song about a train. somewhere in there he listed the songs that the es'scorpions had played. one was called "i flip you off and you puke", a song about being a superhero with the power to flip people off and make them puke.

they played a couple more songs. and then warn says "this is our last song. it's called i have to pee and don't know where the bathroom is. no, actually it's called my brother got a ticket for pissing in an alley and i don't want that to happen to me." turned out to be a really beautiful song "written about a girl. for a girl. it didn't work out." sounded like a hnia song more than a 100 years song. i couldn't place it though.

then ida played. they tuned up with their own rendition of "world is not my home". warn repositioned the stage lights (little clip-on dealies) so that there was one under each of their chairs. the beginning of ida's set was fraught with problems. there seemed to be a little tension between dan and liz over something. and the pa system was picking some radio station. it hadn't been a big problem earlier in the night, except between songs, but it started interfering with ida's quieter songs.

it got to the point where it was really becoming a problem, and warn got up and fiddled with the equipment. and the radio went away. then liz noticed that the mics weren't on. but they decided just to keep them that way, and did two-thirds of their set with no mics and their amps turned down.

and the show got so cool after that. it was very intimate, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves more. they decided to just ditch the set-list at this point (i grabbed a copy of it afterwards, and i think they had kept to it up to this point) and ask if anyone wanted to hear anything in particular. someone said "little things" which would have been my request too.

they did a couple more from the set-list as well, "downtown" and "honeyslide". and a handful of other songs. and it was just bliss from that point out.

most of the crowd took off after ida finished, although purple ivy shadows were going to play too. i stuck around, with maybe a dozen other people (ida, warn and the band being most of them). but it was worth it. they are really cool too. i overheard dan offering to set up a reciprocal show for them in nyc as i was leaving.

i picked up ida's you are my flower cd (traditional children's songs that dan and liz originally just recorded for friends and family and have now done a larger pressing off), warn's i want you to live 100 years cd and a super-limited cd of remixes he's done (listening to that one now).

and then i headed back to the studio at two. i left about 430. i had "some semblance" of a model, "some semblance" of a measured drawing, and figured i could use the two hours of sleep.

went to bed at five, got up at seven, and couldn't open my eyes for about an hour. almost fell back asleep in the shower. actually ate a leisurely breakfast, then headed down to the beb.

spent my lunch break in the risd copy center preparing my collection of sketches and working drawings for my crit (second after lunch, although i didn't actually eat lunch). gabriel, the head of the architecture department was one of our guest critics for the middle block. he's notorious for being tough in crits. he only stuck around for three crits, mine being one of them.

he did make a few insightful comments. and pointed out how shoddy my model was, which it was. but he also thought that i had basically wasted my time focusing on the "missing rings", that they weren't really all that important. and i argued with him about it. i think they are clearly the most important part of my project, and treated them as such (at the expense of the rest of it, i grant you, but that wasn't what he was complaining about).

but it wasn't really a bad crit. i don't think anyone in my section had a bad crit. there weren't any really great crits either.

stopped by the library after dinner to confirm the fact that i'm going to be working saturday afternoons now too. i don't exactly have free time burning a hole in my pocket, but i don't exactly have any money doing so either.

and now, if you'll excuse me, it's ten o'clock and i think i'm going to go to bed.