I'm truly awful at this frequent updating thing, aren't I? There are a number of reasons (some of) you'd believe for my lapse, but I'm not going to waste my time (which is so, so indispensable considering what I do all day...) theorizing/lying. What's been going on, you ask. Nothing and everything all at once...or is it everything and nothing? Aside from finding stupid ways to incorporate Green Day lyrics into my first post on this blog in something like three weeks, I've been doing alright.

Since the last time we spoke, I spent another post-hurricane week in Houston painting my parents' house, helping a neighbor putting her blown-over fence back up, and, well, not much else. I had intended to do some major hangouttery with Danny, among others, but when large swaths of a large city are without power sometimes driving halfway across town is more of a nuisance than is worth the trouble. Not to say that I didn't want to hang out, but rather that navigating a network of busy streets when all the stoplights are out poses danger as well as inconvenience. Granted, the rule is to obey the signal as if it were a 4-way stop, but that doesn't always sink into the consciousness of every driver on the road. Lots of screeching tires and tedious waits to get through intersections were mostly to blame for my house-painting hermitry. Oh, and for the better part of the week after Ike there was a 9pm-6am curfew, so it's not like I'd have had anywhere to go other than friends' places. That, and driving at night with no stoplights OR streelights just isn't safe.

I spent quite a while painting the house, and upon completion I came back to Austin for a bunch of concerts and to help my aunt's friend move. Stereolab played at La Zona Rosa last Wednesday, and predictably, they were awesome. For a long time I didn't pay them too much attention but lately they've really converted me to quite the fan. I can listen to them over and over for hours upon hours without getting bored, which is quite a feat given my limited attention span. Anyway, most of their set was Chemical Chords stuff, fine by me. One guy at the bar gave me kind of a hard time about my out-of-state ID since Austin (and College Station) cops/TABC are hardasses about 0-o-s fakes, but he just sent me across the venue to the other bar where the guy had the book he could check to make sure mine wasn't fake (I'm fucking 24 years old...why is this an issue?) but he didn't even check and just gave me a beer. This is the same place that denied my friend a beer when he presented his 22-year old Texas ID a few years ago, and based on principal he's boycotting the venue. I'd take the same stance if I didn't really like the bands that play there. What can I say, I'm a huge whore for bands I like.

The next day Kate came into town for ACL and we settled into a bar called "Cheers" which is a shitty douchebag shot bar, but it has a great patio out back and very cheap drinks and the d-bags don't show up until 10 or 10:30 anyway so it's a decent place to go if you're out on 6th street early. We didn't get utterly shitfaced, which is good because of ACL the next three days.

Speaking of ACL, I'll give a quick run-down since I'm not in the mood for a full report. Bands I saw that I don't have to look in the book to remember: Hot Chip, Spiritualized, Okkervil River, the Old 97's, the Kills, Beck, Stars, Neko Case, Gnarls Barkley, Yeasayer, Vampire Weekend, the Delta Spirit, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, CSS, Conor Oberst, and snippets of the sets of N.E.R.D., Del tha Funky Homosapien, the Swell Season, The Fratellis, Silversun Pickups. Decent festival, but exhausting and expensive with an overall mediocre lineup. I enjoyed both Stereolab preceding and Cut Copy after the festival more than any set in Zilker Park. Oh well, I still had a lot of fun and Beck was really cool.

Post-festival recovery was nice, but finding out it's going to cost $300 to get my car door fixed so that I can lock it again was not. The door lock on the driver's side front door is stuck in the up/unlocked position, and as such I can't really drive anywhere because I don't want my car to get stolen. That's ok since it'll be fixed on monday and I can use the bus if I have to.

That picture above is from the Cut Copy show. More of those are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/keepmusicevil/

So in the next few weeks let's see if I can't land a job or something. Regardless of job situation I'm headed to my cousin's wedding in Huntington Beach later this month, which will be a lot of fun with family in SoCal. Maybe I'll even include another update before then!