We Are Guest Talk

[l33tminion]

Things I've been up to this week:

Seeing the new Captain America movie (worth seeing if you like comic book movies), finally watching Silence of the Lambs (which I've had out of Netflix for months now), getting bruises on my forearms from new kettlebell exercises, bouldering because I get to the climbing gym late, playing Bastion (pretty good, and addictive; it's way too easy to buy and download XBLA games).

Last Sunday, Ames invited me to a music festival at the Cambridge Y, an event called "We Are Guest Talk, Free: $10". Unbeknownst to me, that event was the third annual installment of the "Weird-Stalk" concert series, so it was significantly stranger than I'd expected, including:

• Genres of music that begin with a hyphenated "noise-"
• The sort of jazz that raises the questions "how do you get that sort of sound out of a saxophone?" and "why would you get that sort of sound out of a saxophone?"
• "Preggy Peggy and the Lazy Baby Makers"
• Rock that sounds like it was created for and by extra-terrestrials (or at least some far-future sub-culture (actually a present sub-culture, thanks to insanity and the magic of the internet)) with radically different aesthetic sensibilities from ordinary human beings, played on an instrument that looked like the Reaver version of a theramin after it had dismembered and adorned itself with the internals of an innocent family of electric guitars
• A husband-and-wife team performing advertising jingles
• A multimedia theater/film piece about a mannequin communicating with its creator / data entry specialist through a series of VHS tapes entitled "How to Become a Better Person Through Clothing Choice"
• The sort of absurdist theater that is to theater as "noise-[whatever]" is to music
• Packing tape and a microphone as percussion instrument