Anyone remember all the songs i found that mentioned being twenty-three? Well, i totally missed one and i’m pissed about it.
Gangsta’s freaking Paradise!
Death ain’t nothing but a heart beat away,
I’m living life do or die, what can I say?
I’m twenty-three now, but will I live to see twenty-four?
The way things is going I don’t know.
This is one of the songs that sparked my deep love of music at the age of ten. 
My 4th of July weekend was a lot of fun. Nathan and i walked down to Des Moines’s second-annual 80/35 music festival, so named for the intersection of those two major interstates in the city. There were three stages, two of them free to the public and the main stage requiring tickets, lots of food vendors, street performers, and a fireworks display at the end on Saturday night.
Here are some photos of my favorite performances:
Tilly & The Wall, photo by Matt Sorensen for Rock Iowa
Girl In A Coma, photo by Laura Lou09
The Envy Corps, photo by britrockatthetop
In all, we saw:
Tilly And The Wall
Modern Skirts
Maps And Atlases
Girl In A Coma
Man Man (Nathan loved this one )
Wild Sweet Orange (disappointing)
Margo and the Nuclear So-And-Sos
Broken Social Scene (I was most looking forward to this one – pretty sweet)
The Envy Corps
Ben Harper (from afar)
Girl In A Coma took me by surprise. They’ve got a punk-y*/’90s alternative sound that i loved, and a lead vocalist with such a great voice.
To say nothing of the rain, the festival was full of people so colorful that for a moment i felt like i was back in Eugene, Oregon. There was a booth selling tie-dye, an all-vegetarian food vendor from whom i bought the most delightful coffee frappe, and a bunch of girls walking around wearing nothing but denim shorts and paint. These “painted ladies” were meant, as the artist herself said, to be “living decorations”, which i found to be terribly demeaning, but i guess it takes all kinds.
It rained lightly all day Friday and continued to be overcast on Independence Day, but by the end of The Envy Corps’s set all the dreariness had been chased away. That band never disappoints me. The crowd really got into it at this show, which can be partly attributed to the fact that by 8pm when they played, most patrons were half-saturated with Old Main beer. They put a few bars of “I Want You Back” into “Story Time” in honor, of course, of Michael Jackson, and that made me pretty happy. The fireworks display after Ben Harper was decent, and a vast improvement over the blunder last year which caused me to miss all fireworks displays altogether on the 4th.
*BTW – by “punk” i mean the original genre which arose underground in the eighties and all that sort of thing, not the whiny bands who flaunt too much eyeliner and feign a damn-the-man attitude while selling records on major RIAA-controlled labels which some people for whatever reason use the term to refer to. 
I am suddenly obsessed with this song. It’s so “eighties” and so much fun to sing along to!
Spiralling by Keane
I have been in the presence of gods, my friends. Gods whom some refer to as Radiohead. Yesterday we made our pilgrimage to the holy land of St Louis, where Radiohead descended to the earth to bestow upon us their glorious sounds. And thus they spake:
“Do i smell doughnuts? Who could eat a doughnut at a time like this?”
(imagine the Geiko gecko saying it–that’s what Thom Yorke sounds like.)
They didn’t say much more than that, but they played probably every In Rainbows song and most of Kid A, along with a few older songs. Fake Plastic Trees was my favorite. I can die happy now, i told Dan.
It was worth the twelve hours in my tiny car, especially since Dan drove the whole way home through the night and let me sleep. Not worth the effort, though, was getting my ass out of bed and to work this morning, only to be promptly canned. Given the pink slip. Laid off. Not fired, exactly, they didn’t want to have to let me go (quote unquote) but times are hard and there’s this block and well, someone had to get chopped.
Whew. Just like that. Two weeks severance pay and then i’m on my own. I’m a full-time job seeker now, and i don’t figure i can be picky anymore. I’ll be pretty much applying all over the country, i think, and let my career take me where it will.
I’m scared, but this is probably the kick in the ass i needed to really make a change. And–hey, at least i get to sleep in. A LOT.