The Yeah Yeah Yeahs played at the Magic Stick in Detroit last night, and they were stupidly awesome.
The openers were…entertaining. Thunderbirds Are Now! featured some excellent tambourine throwing and spasmatic dancing. The Locust was like the hardcore that always plays in the downstairs apartment, but louder and with a bit more screaming. Pitchfork described them pretty well as “45-second-long blasts of raw plasma” if you substitute “methed-up chipmunks in a wood chipper” for “raw plasma”. Except the screaming wasn’t always that high pitched (throw David Seville in, too) and there was, you know, drums and guitar. And a keyboard that sounded like buddy was playing it with his head. Overheard: “he’s tuning his guitar! Seriously!”
Detroit has atmosphere up to here, and the endlessly smoking manholes are a big part of it. One manhole near the Majestic Theatre has a nice chimney so you can see/breathe while in line outside.
Today I tagged along with Janine and some other English majors to a poetry reading by Darren Wershler-Henry. Some of his material was familiar, and since he spoke about copyright, intellectual property, recombinant ideas, and machine-generated poetry, I assumed I’d read it on Boing Boing. It looks like the familiar bit (a man cursed with an endless flow of ideas) was actually from Sandman. Apostrophe, a machine-generated poem, also rang a bell, but I can’t find where I first read about it.
25 November 2003at mesa luna, of all places. ten bucks, and i think they had two openers (both of which i missed).
they played for about twenty minutes; i felt i got my money’s worth.
michal27 November 2003
the locust is so awesome. i think they’ll be playing van again sometime next year (at the commodore!).
i don’t know how much you paid for tickets, but the locust delivers like eight shows worth of notes for the low-low cost of one show. again: so awesome.
michal26 November 2003