The Flaming Lips, The Advantage, and all the rest

Some may have already heard, but I am actually back in the States now. So what's going to happen to this blog? Well, for the time being I'm going to buckle down and post all the remaining shit I either meant to, or didn't have the chance to. In some cases, it might even be new and recent. But mostly not. Today you get a massive photo and video dump of the rest of the shows I went to! Which is cool if you are into shows, and I guess, music. I heard that something like 40% of people like music, so good odds you'll like all this. First up:

The Club Heavy Round Robin!

Which was actually 5 bands, and which I actually mentioned about a year ago. Remember when I woke up in an abandoned apartment, with no recollection of how I got there? That was last November, and this was earlier in the night! Fun! So basically a round robin is where bands set up all around a room, with the audience in the center. Each band plays a song, then the audience turns to watch the next band. And here are the bands:



Korean Kanye West was actually called Yamagata Tweakster, and he did kind of a weird looping synth/vocals act that was not entirely unpleasant, mostly due to his insane stage presence. You can't look at him and not smile. If you can, you are either Yamagata Tweakster himself, or a serial killer.



This was Sssiggghhhborrrggg (and yes this is the proper spelling), who you've probably seen here before. They are excellent, and would put on new masks between songs which was fun.



This guy's act was called Spookfish, and I don't remember it being very excellent at all, mostly because I don't remember him at all. Moving on.



Remember Axcutor? Yeah he played. Hardcore death metal was an interesting contrast to all the quirky experimental indie keyboard acts.



This was Zentaffy, who you can't really see, but I like 'em. The drummer sings and is the frontman. A year later I actually talked to him and I can tell you that he is a good guy.

So that was the Round Robin of November '09. One last thing:

He's so happy to be wearing a bowtie! But now:

Big-Ass Punk/Hardcore Show In Seoul!

This show was in January '10, and when I say it was a big-ass show, that's no lie:

We actually got there late so we missed the crossed-out acts, but still. That's a lot of bands. So let's get started:



Some band I don't remember. And another one:



Yup don't remember them. But look here:



Sssiggghhhborrrggg! You guys are just everywhere, and that's great. And you have a cat mask.



Then there was this band, who I remember being kind of a generic skate-punk band, but in Korea you take what you can get.



And these guys wore suits, and had a pretty good punk/hardcore set if I remember correctly. Which I probably don't, because around this time, despite me already being drunk, the coworker I was with keeps buying new drinks. And when they run out of mixers, he suggests we drink Mokkoli (a Korean rice porridge/wine drink) with grenadine. This is a terrible idea, and I do not remember the rest of the night. Apparently I puked in a cab, and in a karaoke room. Did I mention I also went to this show with an innocent Christian girl who had never been to a show before, ever? Terrible.

Some Korean Emo Band I Don't Remember!

Oh yeah, this one's got video:

So....that is something. Do not remember their name, or when that happened. But my Batman detective skills tell me it was definitely at Club Heavy.

The Advantage!

The Advantage is a rad band that plays covers of old 8-bit video game themes. Maybe 16-bit too. I don't know, I'm not in the band. They wouldn't let me.



But this one actually has video too, and I can tell you not only the band's name, but that they played in October '10. Also, the bassist was the guitarist playing with Zach Hill. Now, video game music:


What's that you say? It was pretty good, but you wished it had a little more shredding, preferably finger-tapped and crazily intricate?

Well, that's a weird list of demands, but luckily I am an Internet Psychic:


Juiceboxxx!



Juiceboxxx was a white rapper who was pretty okay. He was definitely passionate, which helps. He basically said he was from Milwaukee about a million times, climbed the amps, crawled around on the floor a little bit, and finally left the club dramatically at the end of his set.



He also played drums a little bit at the end. He was pretty good.



Alright, and now for the last band. A big one. A goddamn expensive one. For the low, low price of 100 dollars plus transportation to Seoul plus a hostel plus food plus booze:

The Flaming Lips! Whaaaaaaaaaaat



Where to begin. This show was on November 20th 2010, the week before I left, and it was on a Saturday. It was getting pretty iffy there for awhile, but in the end a friend and I got the day off from work so we could get to Seoul on time. This was the only Saturday I didn't have to work the entire time I was there, except for my vacation. So what we did was we went up the Friday before, stayed at a friend's place, and the next day went out bright and early to Everland! The amusement park that all my Korean students told me had the best rollercoasters.

Unfortunately, because Seoul is a terrible, cruel place, it takes a hundred fucking hours to get anywhere in the city, so even though we left Everland around 5 o'clock, we were an hour and a half late to the show, which started at 8. Luckily, The Flaming Lips were starting into their hour-long encore, so getting there at 9:30 turned out to be not so much of a problem. More like, an amazing fucking show.



With equally amazing amounts of confetti flying around. Also bubbles, balloons, all sorts of shit. And this:



That ring of blue lights is a gong that would light up every time Wayne hit it, which was always and awesome.



And sometimes the show would get very intense and eyeball-heavy.

So I missed "She Don't Use Jelly" and "Yoshimi", but I was there for this: their crazy-long super encore version of "Do You Realize??" complete with confetti cannons blowing up:


So that was fantastic, but what's this?! Super secret actual last show I went to?! 2 hours before I had to catch the bus to the airport, and I wasn't even done packing?!

Das Racist!

But I didn't get any pictures or video of them, because I didn't have my camera. But their first song was "Who's That? Broooown" which hit all the perfect notes and beats, and one guy from the band shook my hand for about a minute, which was kind of awkward. Then they ended with the "Combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell" song, which they clearly kind of hated performing. And then I left Korea.

Next giant amalgamation post: Korean amusement parks! Woobang Land! Everland! The steepest wooden rollercoaster in the world! Whoo!

Halloween and Halloween

Well this is embarrassing. Here I was, planning to write about Halloween, and then my internet decides not to work for a week. That whole belief about Korean internet being the tops has been pretty bullshit in the vicinity of my apartment, let me tell youse. So here's something I'm going to pretend is a secret bonus and not me being extra-extra late with posting:

Halloween from last year (2009, that one)!!!

Christ, this was a long time ago. At the time I had only been working for a few weeks and didn't really know anybody, so this night was an important bonding experience with my future friends and colleagues. Or, I drank a million shots and threw up on the couch of someone I barely knew.

This was so long ago and so drunk ago that I hardly remember anything from the night, so I looked for clues in my camera's storage:

This is the only picture I took the whole night. It's...a cylon? A square cylon? I don't know. Maybe he was literally a character in the fever dream that was my night. Luckily, I found some notes I jotted down in a journal concerning the night's events which jogged my memory. So, Halloween 2009:

-Costume-wise I was going to cop out and just be Hunter S. Thompson again, but I couldn't find aviator glasses or the right hat. Thus, I was kind of Gilligan, but most people called me Thompson anyway, so whatever.
-Shotgunned beers in the bathroom with some of the people in that first photo. Also, the guy dressed as a mummy is a dick and later told my boss about me drinking.
-While walking downtown, I saw a girl in a miniskirt in front of me and commented on how much I love Korea's leg culture. Turns out the girl spoke English. So did her boyfriend. Medals for angry, disgusted glares were handed all around.
-Army of Darkness was playing in one bar, and I tried drunkenly talking about it in Russian with some girls who I guess were Russian. Hopefully...
-I peed in a storage alcove in the street.
-There were lots of Army douchebags with no costumes. This was kind of made up for by two black guys in awesome Ghostbuster costumes.

And then the whole million shots and passing out on a coworker's couch. Now I hear stories about me vomiting straight up into the air, which is gross and kind of hilarious. In my defense, I remember being a little sick before even going out that night. That is my story and I am sticking to it. Oh, and it was also the last time I saw that hat ):

And then Halloween this year!!!! (2010, right? Right)!!!!

It was fun but more importantly: VOMIT FREE!!!

YES! JAMIE!


Just a warning: these photos might make you FUCKING SCARED.

How fucking scared? Well how about-OH SHIT SILENT HILL NURSE MONSTER


Still scary even when spilling her drink on herself:


However my costume this year (along with my friend's) was FUCKING AWESOME:

Venture Brothers! DUH DUN NUN NUN.
And yes I did bleach my hair just for the costume. Commitment. That's what Halloween is about.

Not as awesome: ...the gay Chilean miner.


Communes had a bunch of bands playing, including this Korean Smashing Pumpkins cover band:

The littlest bartender is also the littlest bass player!

At one point a coworker asked me to go to dinner with her, basically to act as buffer between her and a girl she had just met who was kind of following her around.

So I had some chicken with my coworker and a man in a Canadian luchador mask. HALLOWEEN: SUCCESS.

Xiu Xiu, Korean Skanking, and Rocky Horror

Next up in the list of shit-I-meant-to-talk-about-months-ago is the Xiu Xiu show, which was way before the Handsome Furs show, but let's pretend I'm going in reverse chronological order on purpose. So first we had our openers:

Here's local favorites Sighborggggg, who do a weird mix of guitar, drums, and looping keyboard tracks. They also always wear masks, because that's a thing you do.


Next was this band who I think was Japanese, but even if they weren't they were definitely performing at Japanese-levels of crazy:


All that opening experimental postmodern music can make a guy thirsty. Good thing this was before Bar Guess discontinued their bucket drinks:

Clearly, some people get jealous.

So then fucking Xiu Xiu played:

And blurry photos were taken.

Then Mr. Xiu Xiu pulled out this little number made for rocking: a goddamn Nintendo DS.


And played I Luv The Valley OH! on it:


And after the show, masturbatory photos were taken with the band:


Basically, a good time. So now we know that you can use a DS to successfully perform artsy indie rock songs, but a bigger question looms: Do Koreans Know How To Skank?

Let's mythbust that shit right now, international style. Meet our team of skanking scientists:

You might remember them as the Korean ska band Kingston Rudieska.

And the experiment begins:

The results? Around the :53 second mark we can see that yes, indeed, Koreans absolutely kind of know how to skank. YOU'RE WELCOME, SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

And that's not even the end of this update! No way Jose! Today's the very rare threefer post, where we're going to end with...Korean Rocky Horror.

Communes, the coolest bar in Daegu, put on a movie night a little before Halloween. The movies playing were The Shining, and of course, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And we were ready for it:


Unfortunately, since this is Korea and everything is backwards, they played Rocky Horror first at 10:30pm or something (instead of midnight, which is when everyone else in the universe would play THE midnight movie), so we got there super late.

Not that it mattered. Here's all four of us (out of, I dunno, 30) who actually dressed up:

P.S. High heels were a cinch. You ladies are all a bunch of whiners. I only bailed about, what, 3 times during the night. And I wasn't exactly sober:

This is right before I asked the bartender for a straw, so as not to smudge my lipstick. Got to keep up class, even in the dark Orient.

So before you go to dirty yourself with pictures of me in tights, I'd like to bring back our fearless ska scientists because they are amazing:


SKA SKA SKA. JAMAICA SKA!

Handsome Furs and Viagra

With 4 weeks left to go in this No Man's Land, I've resolved to step up my game and really crank out the updates. A few posts ago I said I would talk about either the Handsome Furs show or my experiments with Viagra, so let's just knock both of those out right now. Meet one of my little vacation souvenirs:




So what was it like taking the Thai Viagra express to Bonerville? Actually, totally lame. I thought it would be a hilarious priapism-filled adventure ending with a needle in my junk, as so many of my dreams do, but sitcoms and sex comedies had once again set me up for disappointment. Now, to be extra scientific, the night I tried it I also scrawled a list of everything I had drank/consumed prior to taking the pill. Even though everything was working perfectly normal down there (and this is after waiting the recommended 30 minutes or whatever), perhaps it's more impressive I was able to get it up at all after I had apparently 6 drinks, 2 shots, and 2 Xanax. And what did I have to eat that day, to soak up all that poisonous stew? "Cream Puff, 2x granola bar, Spaghetti bowl, B & R Smoothie". So there you go. Science. I eat terribly, drink too much, and Viagra doesn't really do anything for those who don't need it. Or maybe I did need it that night, I don't know. I'm not a doctor. Despite all the evidence you may have read here to the contrary.

And now that I've Mythbusted the shit out of my sex life, let's get to the part that likely will bring a lot of very confused new visitors here - the Handsome Furs show. Once again, the show was at Bar Guess, and this time there were actually enough people to make it feel like a real show, the kind you hear about those music-bands playing. Also, I got video of them doing a new song:

He sings "serve the people" about a squillion times, so I'm gonna go ahead and guess that's the title. PHOTO MONTAGE:





This here is the littlest bartender in all of Korea, and pretty much everyone in Daegu has a crush on her:


And this is one of my friends with Alexei Perry. Both her and Dan Boeckner were super cool to talk to after the show. This photo is after Perry violently kissed her, because my friend wanted to kiss either Perry or her husband, and it was suggested that she should maybe go for the one who looked more like an angry tiger:


And then I eventually talked to Dan, who was really sweaty:

And he apologized for being sweaty because he was really nice. Just so you know.