Hellboy, Zerostars at Schuba's, CHIRPlogging, and gardening.

The week was pretty mellow for me. Without the CHIRP record fair approaching, and without my radio show, I had a kind of welcome respite. (Yesterday I slept in a bit.)

So I went to see Hellboy on Tuesday, which was great fun. Visually, magnificent, and very imaginative. The plot, on the other hand, was a bit predictable. Plot devices signaled their approach from miles away. The writing was also not always up to par. Generally, though, I enjoyed it anyway. There were only a couple of scenes that bothered me, and the rest, I enjoyed. The predictability of the plot is I think comparable to Calendar Girls: it didn't make it not a good movie.

Then on Wednesday I went to see a show at Schuba's: Zerostars, The Summer Salts, and Essex Chanel. My reason for going was to see Zerostars, and they sounded great; they really rocked up there and seemed to be enjoying themselves. The Summer Salts didn't impress me all that much, though they had a few good songs, while I really enjoyed Essex Chanel, especially the second half of the show, a non-stop back-to-back set of dance tunes. (The odd thing about these two bands is that they are some of the same people; The Summer Salts is a trio led by Travis Lee Wiggins, but all the members write the songs together, whereas Essex Chanel is purely a Travis Lee Wiggins project, but has a larger stage band. In spite of crossover, they were pretty different.)

Meanwhile, I've been blogging on the CHIRPlog. I posted a short list of sad songs and an analysis of a Kate Bush cove by the J Davis Trio.

And of course there's gardening to be done. Though there's a lot planted, and most of it doing well (on creeping juniper just went belly-up), there's still a lot of empty space. Oh well. (By "empty" I mean crawling with weeds. So I have my work cut out for me this afternoon.)

Labels: journal, music, personal

posted by Tony at 11:33 AM