Some time early during Om’s set, Al Cisneros stepped on an effects pedal for his bass, and the sky cracked open, showering slabs of cosmic concrete from the vaults of space on the headbanging masses below, momentarily revealing the yawning black hole of consciousness with blind mutant creatures gibbering in the Ur-language. Om’s recipe for its resinated rock is simple: take the thickest, mud-encrusted Sabbath bass riff imaginable; pair it with relentless, exhausting drumming from Chris Hakius; repeat the serpentine riff for 20-odd minutes (make it about 60, for the length of the set); deliver the fractured poetry of your vision-afflicted lyrics in a bizarre chanting monotone (think of Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” only less tunefully); and channel the entire steaming sonic sludge through a wall of Green amps set up so loud to make your teeth chatter. On record, Om is intense, but necessarily muted; heard live, the Om experience — the annoying distraction of couples making out and the constant flicker of lighters as flame is touched to weed notwithstanding — is absolute, both within you and without you.

The opening band, Asunder, was worrisome at first: despite the fantastic gut-quivering bass rumble that preceded the musicians, the ultra-slow drum beat and chanting for the first couple of minutes just wasn’t what I wanted to hear. But then the pace picked up, the deathgrowl vocals (from the drummer) began, the downtuned guitar chords crashed in, and what you had was doom metal, distilled to a simple purity.

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So I’m a little jealous that my brother Bulletproof Vest met and chatted with David Sedaris. David Sedaris!

However, I did get to meet some celebs of my own over the weekend; I’ll skip the best for last.

The risk one runs when watching a one-hit wonder band — in this case, When In Rome — is that you spend the entire set waiting for that song to be played, and of course it comes at the very end. (Yes, “Heaven Knows” wasn’t a terrible song, and “Wide Wide Sea” could have been a follow-up single, but still…) That was, of course, “The Promise” (one of the hands-down best singles of the late ’80s), but it doesn’t bode well when your last song — a cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” — gets the quarter-full club more excited than it had been for the previous seven songs.

Animotion, however, was a different story (why they played first I’m not sure), as they had a long string of great songs: “I Engineer” (which I was yelling for), “Let Him Go” (a fantastic version of which opened the set), “I Want You,” and of course, “Obsession” (surely one of the era’s defining moments, period). The band simply rocked, despite a misbehaving Mac; by the end of the concert, I (and the band) was grinning from ear to ear, particularly after creative use of the big pole almost in the middle of the stage.

And then I met two of the band members! (Full disclosure: I wouldn’t have been able to meet Bill Wadhams if it weren’t for the mindblowing fact that the V-Monster‘s SO is his brother.) Plus Astrid Plane came and signed stuff at our table upstairs!

Pictures of the concert are at my Flickr “concerts” set.

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From Manohla Dargis’s review of M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, in the New York Times:

Apparently those who live in the water now roam the earth trying to make us listen, though initially it’s rather foggy as to what precisely we are supposed to hear — the crash of the waves, the songs of the sirens, the voice of God — until we realize that of course we’re meant to cup our ear to an even higher power: Mr. Shyamalan.

I still want to see the film — I always subscribe to the motto that I’d probably enjoy a film I’ve been wanting to see despite colossally bad reviews — but Ms. Dargis! I wrote it first! =)

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Why I can’t seem to successfully drag anyone with me to see the coolest band in America in concert I can’t understand. Either people are about to pass out, or watching Pearl Jam instead, or, as J-Lu once said after seeing an excerpt of the “Sni Bong” video, “That made my ears bleed.”

Anyhow, Dengue Fever was fantastic, with a set that began with — er, one of the slower songs — and ended with “I’m Sixteen” in the encore (complete with an extended sax solo from David Ralicke in the coda that was just perfect). In between, they played “Sni Bong,” “Lost in Laos,” “Flowers,” “Tip My Canoe,” “Hold My Hips” (this might have been when they pulled up audience members onto stage to dance), an awesome “One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula,” “A Go Go,” “Doo Wop” (both of which they should really record in the studio at some point), and what sounded like three other new songs (though they may have been covers, I don’t know).

The band was in excellent form: one song had a show-stopping a cappella introduction by Chhom Nimol — a reminder, as if it was necessary, of her classical training. Senon Williams and Zac Holtzman were totally goofing around all night — jumping in unison, falling on the ground, messing with Ethan Holtzman’s Farfisa solos. (I should also mention that Dengue Fever not only sound cool, they also look great on stage.)

Openers Elephone and Scrabbel were well worth seeing too — lots of downloadable mp3s from the latter’s website.

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Back in my grad student days when we used to have house parties at 103 Spring Lane, Madonna was always on the dance mix tapes — that’s right, tapes — that my housemate Big J would make. (We had generally sedate parties back then; one of the few times the cops came to bust us was when the Comp Lit folks came with their own mix tape — a party no-no, if you ask me — and cranked up Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” really loud.) Madonna remained a party staple even after the house changed from its early halcyon life as a predominantly interdisciplinary Southeast Asianist pad (two historians, an anthropologist (that’s me), and the lone Comp Lit person) to a full-blown German Studies house. (At that point I was the only holdout, my German limited to the kind spoken in Jim Abrahams and David Zucker’s Top Secret!)

During one of our dance parties, “Into the Groove” came on. People rushed to the floor (mostly the Government people — they always crashed parties). My German Studies housemate, not necessarily in between vogueing moves, came up to me while we were dancing. “The great thing about Madonna,” he confided, “is that you can dance to her with a sense of irony.” I laughed, told him that I genuinely enjoyed the song, and repeated it to my anthropologist classmate at my side, who was quite offended at the suggestion. “I love Madonna!” she said.

“Even the Erotica album?” I asked skeptically.

“I love the Erotica album!” she said, in between vogueing moves now that “Vogue” had come on.

Thinking about it now, I’m interpreting my housemate’s words about dancing to Madonna with a sense of irony to be a particularly early-’90s statement — back when Seinfeld and Letterman were at the height of their ironic powers — about cultural production in the ’80s. But back then I crudely concluded that our exchange represented the difference between anthropology and comparative literature: praxis versus theory, gratification versus deferment, a joyful participation in sweaty physicality versus a constipated detachment.

Anyhow, I digress — all this was merely an unconnected excuse to present the most insane site, clothes and haircuts and production values in varying degrees of quality:
1500 videos from the ’80s (looks like they’re actually hosted on YouTube), where I threw my productivity down the toilet for an hour and gleefully watched the Eurogliders and Climie Fisher and Fiction Factory and Cyndi Lauper and the vine-swinging in Haircut 100′s “Love Plus One” and that fake telephone that John Waite smashes in “Missing You” and the Vegemite sandwich from Men At Work’s “Down Under” back to back. And without the slightest smidgen of irony.

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