Hilotrons

Friday was busy. I committed to going to a concert by the Hilotrons, who are doing pretty well lately, and the lead singer of which I used to do music with (well, he was an engineer in a studio I recorded in, and he engineered a couple of tracks for me, and also played keyboard on a song for me.) I'd already previously committed to supervising the school's Neon dance as well, so I arranged to still do that, but leave a bit early. A teacher buddy of mine didn't want to go see the Hilotrons all alone, so I offerred to check out the show with him.

     First I tried out my "Poetry Scavenger Hunt" idea at work, and it worked well.  It works like this:  I give a sheet which askes the kids to go through the dusty poetry books in the classroom and find three poems about a) animals, b) nature, c) romance, d) death/dying. Then I got them to write what they'd seen according to the formula "Animal imagery is clearly seen in Poet Guy's poem Name of Poem, when he writes, "The poetry stuff that he wrote which shows that animal imagery is seen in his poem." Most teachers just make kids "answer numbered questions" about everything, which they are trained to do like dogs, but which doesn't show up their numerous specific and troubling areas of incompetence, nor demand that they try newer, more useful, real world, harder things. I know, poetry analysis isn't very "real world," but I have this idea that writing something that sounds like it could be read by someone sometime, even if only a poetry circle or scholar trumps writing answers to questions that even I don't want to read. Then I came home for an hour, picking up my concert ticket from the high school near my house where my teacher buddy is working right now, and returned for the dance.

     I supervised the dance, mostly talked to the cops, left, and met my teacher buddy at the club in Ottawa just in time for the opening act. The opening act wanted to be Bjork with an art rock/neo-punk band, in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The lead singer chick was a graphic right out of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, wearing torn black leggings with bare feet, a red dress, red feather boa, and with bangs pulled over one eye, hair dyed magenta and teased to improbable size, and with white plastic swim goggles on her head. They were enthusiastic, obscure and eclectic, but not very engaging.

     The Hilotrons had a roomful of fans, who were ultra-hip. A lot of grim young women in their 30s with belligerantly ill-advised hairstyles proclaiming to the world "I will NOT look good. I will NOT and no one can make me! Excuse me, I'm ovulating and I haven't had anything pierced for a few weeks and that always makes me...anxious." I was interested in what the Hilotrons did, though their music isn't my first choice of entertainment. They had a real Talking Heads/Devo thing going on with a bit of The Cars tossed in. Mike's singing style with this group is all Ric Ocasek hiccups, falsetto, little sudden screams, rising growls and an interesting (natural vocal, not electronic) effect which sounds like a kid wobbling the volume knob off and on all the way really quickly. He also has a vocoder microphone hooked below his regular vocal mic, so he can switch to it, and play a little keyboard that's mounted on the mic stand, to pitch the ensuing robot-voice to whatever note he plays. He did a fair bit of singing in the regular mic, and then echoing what he just sang, into the vocoder. Art music by robots.

     Saturday was a whole lot of watching the extras from The Mighty Boosh DVDs Troy's wife brought him back from England, and buying groceries and doing laundry. My latest book of Christian liberalism is in, and it isn't as good as the other. For one thing, it is trying to talk to conservative Christians and make them all liberal, and I'm not conservative, so the points sound all obvious, and I also hate it when people try to write a book to revolutionize, well, anything. I also watched the rest of Dexter season two, and the new episode of Battlestar Galactica. Dexter was pretty good and made me think. Battlestar Galactica continues and did not. A couch potato day. It was nice. Today perhaps I'll go into the city.