I gotta join a band!

I hung out with my old roomy, Dan Paris, in Seattle last night. He's in a band. Here are some clips from our prefunk/jam session last night.

You can hear us all talking a bit before they start playing.



The guy on the keyboard is named James. He's a musician, writer and music blogger. His blog, seattlemusicblog.com, is pretty cool. You should check it out.

The guy in the green shirt is Bill, he was playing with this Casio 606 drum machine.


You know in that song by Outkast, where he goes, "well I know you rocking that 808"? He's talking about an old school drum machine – this machine is that machine's grandpa.

The band rents a studio space in a large building that caters to bands that need a place to practice. The bands decorate their cubicles of sound to their taste and this was the first I noticed when I walked in and met these guys:

It's a painting by the lead singer, Jessie, who I didn't meet. But even though we went to an art house/bar later, this was the most interesting piece I saw all night. It originally struck me as nothing more than a artistic-looking girlie poster, something you might see hanging in a dude's garage.

But as you look deeper you can see there are hidden things in the painting.

The woman's image was taken from a magazine titled, "Finally Legal," which I think fits the theme. It's as if you, the reader, where waiting for years, parked in a station wagon outside this girl's high school – just waiting for her to turn 18. It's creepy as shit.

You can see an animal skeleton on the middle right edge of the painting. Meaning she is nothing more than a carcass, something to be used and discarded. I think it's an interesting commentary on the way that we, as a society, treat women.

We would never systemically rape women, like warlords and despots in Africa, but we have no problem psychologically raping entire generations of women through the deceit and commerce-driven guile of a lifetime of reinforced negative messages.

We put so much pressure on the American woman to conform to an unattainable image of beauty and lust that it is nothing more than mental foot biding. But rather than being able to actually see the gnarled, mutated remains of the damage our advertising, agendas and reinforcement, one can only wonder to the extent of mental damage any given female under the age of 40 has had to endure.

It's criminal. And I never meant to get into a tirade about the way we treat out sisters and mothers but that painting got me brooding on the subject. Hope you like the band!