Music and Cultists Dept.

Karen and I went to see jr play tonight. She’s a singer-songwriter type of gal, and I’ve been going to her performances for almost four years now, several dozen times at this point. jr has a beautiful voice and a way of playing guitar that’s unique, an amazing crystalline clarity somehow flowing liquidly at the same time. I’d encourage you to listen to some of her songs at her page on mp3.com; there are high and low bandwidth versions, and you can also just download some of the songs in mp3 format to play on your computer.

When I’m not a jr cultist, I’m writing about cultists. Today I was at Flying Lab again writing material on a cult we’re using in the prototype for E3. It’s a cult I made up for this purpose, but it’ll probably turn up in the game in some form. I took the inspiration for it from the work I did on The Golden Dawn years ago, and specifically the whole Sheela-na-gig thing. If you aren’t familiar with the Sheelas, this site has info and photographs.

Friday, it’s time for the Bad Movie Club to reconvene. Our selection for the morrow is, of course, Queen of the Damned, whose reputation precedes it. We expect it to be atrocious. Damn shame it’s the last film from Aaliyah; I quite liked her in the enjoyable Jet Li flick Romeo Must Die.

I keep thinking about summer. This summer holds such promise. I’ll be done with UA2, and my only major project will be the DG computer game. That means a big chunk of time I can spend on whatever I damn well want to. I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet, but chances are excellent that I’m going to write something for myself, an actual personal project. I’ve been turning things down as they come up, saying no to everything, in hopes that I can keep half of my summer to myself. Here’s hoping.

Saturday some friends are hosting a birthday-ish party. Food and drinks and of course, a screening of the crowning glory of Hollywood: Battlefield: Earth. Oh man. I can’t wait. I’m especially eager to see this massive turd again because they allegedly edited the film for home-video release, changing it around a bit to make it suck less. Hah! I just fear they might have removed the awesome, stupefying scene where John Travolta whips out his blaster and shoots the legs off cows. Wow. Even just remembering the scene from that day in the theater makes me heave.

I forgot to mention: we saw jr play at a great place I hadn’t been to in years, Sit-and-Spin. It’s a combination laundromat/restaurant/nightclub downtown, and it’s fantastic. The performance space in back is actually one of the best in Seattle. It’s beautiful and intimate, and the sound system is actually good. That’s no small feat. Plenty of clubs dump bucks on a great system and then assign a random ass clown to run the sound board. In no time the thing’s so out of whack that few bands emerge intact. But jr’s show at Sit-and-Spin was perfect. Beautifully clear, wonderful sound. Must return. Check out their web site for a precious few shots of the awesome decor. Though I still miss the homey OK Hotel (an earthquake casualty) and the raucous, David Lynch-inspired 700 Club (their ghost of a web site still lives). For a while Glancy and I were quite the clubgoers, spending most every weekend at the OK or the 700, carousing like jackals. But eventually we got respectable or something, and now those clubs are gone. So it goes.

Which reminds me of a night we were at the 700 Club, drunk as lords. We wandered out into downtown and, lo and behold, across the street was a brightly-lit all-night porn shop. In we went, looking for laffs, and man we found them. They had the best porn magazine title ever on display: MANDATE. Oh lord. We laughed ourselves stupid over that one.

Ah, it’s late. Tomorrow I need to take some Godlike files over to Detwiller and then see if the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.1.3 I started before I left my studio on Wednesday worked or if it destroyed everything. Should I drive up to find a smoking ruin where Activspace* once stood, I’ll have my answer.

Then it’s time for Queen of the DAMN!!!

* I love that great description Activspace’s site has of the building my studio is in. They leave out the part where it’s across the street from a gun store.