flying biscuits o' ska

Yesterday was one of those days where it was both temporally and conceptually long enough to be split into several chunks of activity, in my mind.

I got up feeling kinda listless -- I'd meant to get a few errands done in the morning, but only got the most pressing of them handled... which was finding out about the Toasters show at the Masquerade, which was yesterday (Friday) night -- so I got the particulars for that one, and it turned out that we could no longer get "advanced tickets", so we might as well just buy them at the door -- which was what we ended up doing.

Soon thereafter, I popped off to Due West, South Carolina, to pick up the Cimmy (the_glory_girl). She's been sick, and her car's not in top operating order, riding around on the mini-sized spare... so highway driving was not on her agenda for the weekend. So she's been hanging around here, sniffling...

So the evening rolled around, and Marty (samarin) and Corey and myself headed off to the Masquerade to get our skank on. Being the upstanding, show-up-on-time kinda guys that we are, we arrived before 8:30 for a show with "doors open at eight". ... and the Toasters didn't come on until about midnight. Before them went three less-than-stellar punk bands...

... although I noticed a few interesting things going on before that actually happened. It seemed, while the punk bands were doing their thing, that there was a fairly strong distinction 'tween the people who enjoyed, loud, noisy punk music and those who were almost completely nonplussed -- the latter group had a few (slightly older) members who'd come in full rudeboy regalia. I think moshing gets dangerous with the inverse of the moshing density -- individuals get a higher velocity with more room to move. There was a singular young lady in the pit, for the punk bands -- sort of biggish, with long brown hair down her back. And she was the most methodical mosher I've seen -- she would be watching for an opportunity to shove someone, get in position, and then very deliberately push... as if she wanted to make sure she was doing it right, almost self-conscious about it.

So after many trials and tribulations (the last band before the Toasters refused to yield the stage, and the sound guy, very much upset, ended up just cutting off the lights and amps on them) the Toasters came on. And their stage show was super-impressive... they're overweight and aging, no longer their spry selves from the 1980s... but they can still rock out, in a two-tone sort of "second-and-a-half wave" (to quote Marty) way. The guitarist (who sang on a number of songs) was this grizzled possibly-British-possibly-Australian white guy, and the larger of the two Jamaican guys put down more alcohol while on stage than I've ever seen anybody drink... the other one was playing this smallish trumpet (what's a small trumpet called?) and drinking water and Diet Coke. They were really funny -- and sort of less-than-intellectually politically-charged. And as their set progressed, everybody settled in on the idea of skanking away furiously, and it was beautiful :)

*laughs* ... and towards the end of the show, they called up the ladies in the crowd and had a rump-shaking contest... which is just sort of odd, sociologically -- why can a bunch of older musicians get a bunch of 20-someodd young ladies to come up on stage and engage in rump-shaking?

One of life's mysteries, I suppose. But anyway, that was a fun show :)

... and today, we (Cimmy and Marty and myself) hung out in the park and did homework for a bit, and for dinner, we ate at The Flying Biscuit, which was lovely and fabulously veggie-friendly. They have, as you might expect, really good biscuits... and all sorts of interesting things made of beans and/or tofu and/or organic greens. Yaaay! :)

... and tonight, I'm working on that assignment I should put up for 2130 Real Soon Now, and probably doing some grading. So much to do...