Plow United/Iron Chic show review 3/28/13

Imagine that you are a guy, and also a dude. Maybe you're a girl, or a woman. You may not have to stretch your imagination much for this exercise. You were spoken to by some albums a long time ago and now you must return to hear them played live, years later. This may not be outside of your realm of experience, but bear with me.

There you are, at a show. It's thursday night. You're tired, everyone is tired. The air and the light in the room is tired. You are propped up by caffeine and some sort of end-of-week momentum that says Just Make It, just go to this last thing then sleep in your clothes and command your body to awaken tomorrow, because it'll all be over and you'll be dead someday, but you don't wanna die tonight, and besides you bought a ticket for this show and it's there for you at will call, which phrase you've never quite grasped the meaning of. Will Call, Coat Check, Standing Room Only, Capacity Crowd; the promise of an atmosphere of bright light and soft light and crowding in, that are all part of a great, great thing.

You see some people you know, some people you have a lot to say to and some you have nothing to say to, or maybe they just don't have anything to say to you, and the two (or more) of you are caught in a reflexive vortex of speakinglessness. Some animated conversation takes place. Everyone looks at their phone all the time. You look at your phone. Your friend's band is halfway through their set, and you always enjoy watching them, and you do watch. You watch them play through the lens, the literal lens of people taking pictures of them with their phones. I was going to do it, but I was too busy taking pictures of absolutely everything, is what you'll say on your deathbed, and you might not necessarily regret it.

The band takes the stage, you saw this band play for the first time probably eighteen years ago, and they don't look a day over 40. Haha. No but they are remarkably well-preserved, three real-live Jurassic Park insects, and you wonder if you are, or will be, as well-preserved. They play everything, front to back, and you sway, and a small part of you is saying you still have a chance. You think about going to work and how you hate it there but you do it anyway. You think about the people that have gone through your life and you try not to cry, about how you haven't slept in days, you put your arms around yourself, you deal with it, and you realize you'll be just fine. Class dismissed.   

I think the Internet needs another article about "Mashup Culture"

and I'm just the guy to write it. I know all the important and pertinent facts and facets of this youth-oriented movement. From Girl Talk to bacon-wrapped hotdogs, the young youth love to mash things up. I think it all started with rap, as everyone knows.

The most relevant thing to remember when examining Mash-Up Culture is: 2005. and. Older folks don't understand the need to take something old and re-frame it as, juxtapose it with, if you will, Mash it into the middle of, if you will, something contemporary and familiar. Jay-Z.

I like to take food and literally mash it up with other food, sometimes in a blender, sometimes manually (with my hands), and eat it.

I don't really cook, I just cram a bunch of ingredients in my mouth and use my teeth gums and tongue to squish (mash) them all together. The human digestive system was probably the first thing that created a mashup, to a terrific reception. Gross. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. 

harvest 6813

While you're examining your aggregate statistics, or AggStats, while you're flagging down your web traffic, you get sidetracked into surveilling yourself. Unveiling everything about yourself to an uncaring public, an unseen eye, a perceived prevailing wind of interest. You are availing everyone of pictures of yourself eating food. You are writing about being in a place, right now.

You find that you have lost yourself. The significance has been lost on you, you have been lost, insignificant, merged into a giant datastream, geocached. Location services have been turned on. Somewhere in an intelligence agency there is a senior field agent who longs for the days when people didn't just surveil themselves, when an agent would have to actually go out onto the wild Internet and do some real field work. He was preceded by a senior agent who longed to once again sit outside people's homes and occasionally sift through their garbage. Somewhere, there is a middle-school teacher who only accepts bibliographies that cite real books.

You have become hands and eyes, floating hands and luminous eyes. You are not the first to realize this, and the realization is trite. You log out, you live off the grid, you grow a beard. Growing a beard is instrumental to living off the grid. So too is home beer-brewing, the making of fires from wood, the installation of solar panels. Somewhere, a city center bemoans its architecture; it literally IS the grid. You become the grid.