Friends
<--you can skip this stuff if you just want the executive summary-->
Sometimes the idea of a thing can grow, quietly, without you even noticing as it happens. It can slide into the crevices left behind as you struggle to rearrange your picture of the world, which you’re doing because sometimes that picture has gotten burned into the screen and behind that image the world is actually changing, much to your mildly indignant shock. I mean, the nerve of the world. So this idea, let’s say it’s the knowledge that you have to write an email about a show, has been sneaking around getting bigger, all wrapping its tentacles around your insecurities, and eventually you sort of just close the door that leads into that room [this is normal, right, to have rooms in your brain?] and do your best to ignore the weird noises coming from in there, because back when you had the idea in the first place it was maybe manageable, but now, christ, what a mess that room is, the hell with it.
We are playing tomorrow as part of Chaz’s Bull City Records’ Five Year Anniversary, at Fullsteam Brewery, and this will probably be our last show around here for awhile. Andy has gotten a pretty awesome job at a think tank in DC, and he and Elizabeth and Jackson the Béarnaise Mountain Dog [saucy Jack!] will be moving up there in April. It’s probably not a permanent move, but of course this will entail a slightly longer commute to the Old Oxford Ample Storage. We have some tentative plans for how it’s all going to work, but yes. So it means very little, really, to the casual passerby, but it’s basically become a whole thing in my head, writing this email, and I struggled with even mentioning it, because, hell, it’ll probably end up we play some weird show in Raleigh or something next month, and then it’s all hey you said the last show was the last show, and even that show’s not the last one, because really, we’ll be practicing and all and eventually booking shows once schedules get settled, DC isn’t that far away, we’re playing in Brooklyn in March, it’s not that difficult to work these things out, but anyway, it seems worth mentioning, that if you want to see us play in the near future and live here, you should come out tomorrow. We’re going to have Dave Cantwell play with us again, and that, well, that is just pure joy. Sorry to get all Tandy* on you there.
In a hilarious bit of good timing, this move coincides with our starting to get distribution of LP1 in Japan of all places, so, if you live there, um, we’ll send an email soon with details about that? This assumes I can figure out how to send the damn things to Japan, which remains to be seen.
It’s more important, though, now I’ve apparently dealt with my GD personal problems, to tell you that our lives as a band have, pretty much from his arrival in town, been linked in a wonderful way with the presence of both Chaz Martenstein and his record store. We played terrifyingly hot and structurally dubious shows in the empty space across the hall from his place on Perry st, merged an EP release with his first anniversary, and have generally had the quality of our lives improved in concrete and intangible ways by his generosity with his time and effort, his indefatigable devotion to the music community of Durham and the triangle, his enthusiasm for and broad yet deep knowledge of music as an art form and cultural signifier, and the immediately apparent positive energy that inhabits that beard, toboggan, and sweatshirt. Also, Rothko. I mean, come on. Shop dog!
So when I start using phrases like cultural signifier it’s past time to stop. Sorry. I was an anthropology major. Thanks for reading.
Currently the greatest song in the world is We Slept In Rented Rooms by Juno.
=Evan + MPLSTV
Here’s the long-overdue summary:
BULL CITY RECORDS’ FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY!
Saturday, February 26 2010, 7:00PM
Fullsteam Brewery, Durham NC
Brad & Phil Cook
Midtown Dickens
Des Ark [solo]
Maple Stave
Cantwell, Gomez, and Jordan
Last Year’s Men
*AKA Realistic, AKA real, as in “to get real [with someone].” We are working to make this a thing people say. It’s not going well!