beadsman
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Posts posted by beadsman
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Since there's no option for 11, should we vote once for 10 and once for 1?
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Detroit Techno Legend Derrick May is credited with describing Techno, the blend of funk and electronic music that he, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson developed in the Detroit exurb of Belleville, as "...just like Detroit, a complete mistake. It’s like George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator."
When the Detroit Electronic Music Festival launched as a free, 3 day music festival Memorial Day weekend 2000, the organizers had no idea whether it would succeed and attract a crowd. 2 years later the festival was still going and the organizers were able to attract the largest crowd and spawn the most all-night after-parties due in part to getting one-half of May's equation to play the festival: George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic. 5 years after P-Funk's 2002 appearance and 3 festival organizers later, the other half of the equation will play DEMF.
DEMF's current promoters, Paxahau, took over the festival in 2006 after Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson took turns trying to keep the festival alive and free. Paxahau gave up on the latter goal to achieve the former. In 2006 festival goers were met with $10 daily entrance fee or $25 for the weekend. In 2007, Paxahau will again organize the fest and charge admission to the multi-stage, open air, public space Hart Plaza on Detroit's riverfront. And they'll have the best lineup in the history of the festival as well as a major concert draw in Kraftwerk.
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Really? I went to that place recently and I thought it was horrible. Very odd place.... and not in a good way. What was I missing?
I do like a good portion of the places on your list.
Ah, yeah, some of the bars on that list are subject to qualifications as to when to go. Rainbo, for example, can be the worst bar in Chicago 10pm to close Friday and Saturday nights. Earlier Friday and Saturday evenings and some weeknights it's a good place for a 3.50 pint of good beer, some good tunes and quiet conversation.
Old Town Ale House is on there mostly cuz (i) it's a 4 am bar (ii) close to the Hideout. Like any other 4 am bar, Old Town is kind of annoying after 2 am, especially if you aren't totally shit-faced. I don't think I've ever been there earlier than 2 am--there are plenty of better, less pricey, less annoying bars to go to before 2.
But if you're at the Hideout and you wanna go to another bar after the Hideout shuts down @ 2 or 3, I think it's a better choice than Marie's. I rarely find people are willing to go to Exit--even though you can walk to Exit from the Hideout and it's also 4/5 am and has cheaper/better drinks than both Old Town and Marie's (Marie's doesn't even have draft and charges like $5 a bottle for Budweiser--the 4 am partial monopoly allows them to get away with it).
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(For better Ethiopian food go further north, but that's another story.)
Definitely. The far North side has the inner hoods beat for quality, tasty restaurants. Thai Pastry, Tank Noodles, Reza's, all the Ethiopian places in Edgewater--it's kinda far to go up there just to eat unless you live up there.
There's not a whole lot else to do, especially with the closing of the Lakeview Lounge ; ) And if you drive up there, it's most likely for Indian food which is nigh impossible to find along the Blue line. Mama Desta's potent, homemade honeywine (most places serve bottled honey wine, it's not as thick as the mead-like stuff Desta's serves) makes up for the hit or miss food and the rather unkempt look and the lackadaisal service. Btw, Pick Me Up further up Clark from Mama Desta's is a good place to get coffee and breakfast late night on the weekends.
My lists just scratch the surface. There are entire neighborhoods chock full of bars, restaurants and whatnot that I rarely make it to, e.g., UIC/Litttle Italy, Edgewater, Andersenville. And bars I drive by every day that I go to once a year (Fireside, Mutiny, Green Eye).
Taking the Brown Line out to Lincoln Square (Lincoln Lanes still open?), or the Blue Line to Damen/North or the Red Line out to Belmont are good afternoon into evening first trips from downtown for someone visiting Chicago.
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"Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first. "
and then once out of earshot mercilessly mock its knocked knees and jug ears
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SOME OF THE BETTER BARS:
Loop:
bucktown/wicker/east/ukvillage:
Estelle's 4 AM
The Continental 4 AM
(fmr Famous Pizza Lounge/Arlene's/Club Hiawatha )
Stella's @ Western and Walton--ran into like 1/2 of wilco there one night recently.
Along North Avenue East of Wicker Park:
Exit Inn 4 AM
Old Town Ale House 4 AM
Lincoln and Diversey:
Clark and Lawrence:
Carol's Pub 4 AM
Clark and Belmont:
Armitage between Ashland and Western:
Marie's Riptide 4 AM
Milwaukee and Chicago Ave:
LOGAN SQ:
ROSCOE VILLAGE:
Far Northwest Side:
Near South Side:
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RESTAURANTS:
--BYOB, right next to the Empty Bottle. Favorite restaurant in Chicago.
--BYOB, right next to the Continental. Like if Bloodshot Records sponsored a restaurant.
--goes around to bars that don't serve food in Wicker/Ukie/East Village
Muffin Lady--What happened to her?
--Ethiopian food--just north of Belmont on the west side of Clark...
terrific food + their home-made honey wine is cheap, strong and
tasty.
--formerly far West side BBQ place. Not much for ambiance, great ribs.
--across the street from Honey-1 BBQ. Good curries, terrific spicy salads, ok Pad Thai. Appetizers are all excellent.
--Place most likely to see Sally Timms sharing a bottle of wine with Neko Case.
--Like Bite, but not as good and it costs more.
Mexican places around Chicago outnumber pizza and hot dog places combined.
A couple of the best taco stands in the city (now more a subject of debate than best pizza/hotdog):
Close to Millennium Park:
Giordano's (tucked away a bit on the Northside of Millennium Park)
-I liked their thin style pizza with pitchers of cheap beer.
--pretty excellent cheap food.
--kinda an odd place. good drinks. food is better than Bennigan's et al.
--4 am bar right downtown.
--Burgers.
Other good restaurants around Chicago:
--really good, really pricey veggie
--back patio in the summer months = an oasis in the city.
-new mexican place near the Continental, Feed
--10 cent wings on Mondays. Good brunch on weekends, Free food late Saturday night.
-after the bar pizza
-24 hour diner between the Hideout and Wicker Park
--food is aight. sort of a novelty thing and you have to go late at night if you want the promised entertainment.
--Pretty good food, if overpriced. Terrific rooftop seating in the Summer.
Good drinks. Bartenders play a lot of Bloodshot and alt-country music.
--next to the Metro/Smart Bar. good place for pre-Metro show drinks/tapas.
--best sushi for the price in Chicago.
--included cuz it's right next door to Renga Tei, BYOB and closest to home-cooked Mexican food in a city inundated with Mexican cuisine.
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SOME DECENT RECORD STORES:
These four are all near the Clark/Diversey/Broadway intersection:
Reckless Records (Broadway & Belmont)
North Lincoln:
Roscoe Village:
Wickertucky:
Reckless Records (Wicker Park)
RANDOM RETAIL:
Where to get kowality, cheap guitars & other musical instruments:
Like ebay, but IRL:
Best Mindfuck Yet:
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Looks like tony margherita has an intern/admin playing whack-a-mole with the various blogs posting these songs.
anyhow, hypem.com is cool, but its results lag behind this:
search on: wilco sky
sort by date
^^^ this is probably how the band's representatives are tracking things
you can set up an alert so anytime a new blog entry appears on the internets with wilco sky or sky blue sky or whatever search terms you want to use you'll get an email:
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I dunno how much of the difference is logistics and capacity, problems they can solve (one hopes), and how much of it is expanding the size and having the stages and housing more dispersed with 3x's the people.
Seems like they expanded the proceedings to the point where maybe they lost (quite?) a bit of what made ATP UK especially enjoyable.
Probably mostly a matter of whether you're coming from the UK or Northern Europe vs from across an ocean--if this festival were in a resort 3 hours away on a beach in western Michigan, it'd be a no brainer to go, Queues Of Doom be damned. But a 7 hour flight, $40 ride on the Heathrow Express, another $100 each way to the festival grounds from London...you'd like to know that you're going to see the band(s) you suffered planes/trains/wrong side of the road driving to see. At Camber Sands you could go back and forth between stages, chalets, the beach so easily at any time, it was great--definitely worth the trek.
The Pound being at a 15 year high against the Dollar, $2 =
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oops, my evangelizing "by far the best music festival experience I've had. Intimate, friendly, accessible, relaxing festival experience."
Camber Sands = 2,500
Butlins Minehead = 6,000
No wonder it's not yet sold out. Cuz it was so small, previous ATP's at Camber Sands would sell out by December at the latest on only the announcement of the curator. People who went to ATP @ Camber Sands enjoyed the experience of that intimate a music festival and wanted to return regardless of the details of the lineup.
I'm not saying I wouldn't go to the new location for an ATP. But if it were a lineup I liked and it were at Camber Sands, I'd have booked tickets and flights months ago. This new place is probably fine, but the lines and capacity issues sound very un-ATP like.
And the new place is further from London than Camber Sands (3 hrs to Minehead vs an hour or so down to Rye). and it sounds like you almost need to drive to get to the new location on time--they don't let you check in until Friday and the bands start that afternoon. Getting from London to Rye by train and then a quick cab ride to the festival site and checked in on time wasn't bad at all. Getting from London to Minehead on Friday and checked in on time sounds like a challenge absent driving a car down there.
I understand more people = more $$ = bigger name bands on the lineup (tho I don't think anyone was kicking about previous lineups). But it sounds like they've sorta reduced what made ATP UK so good.
If they upped the price of the tickets to the Camber Sands location to cover the cost of the Wilcos and Iggy and Stooges et al, they'd still sell out the 2500 tickets every year. And you wouldn't have issues like these:
"So there were some serious line issues at ATP this year. It was kind of alarming, really - like it wasn't like that at Camber, and people were clearly pretty upset about it. They did a fantastic job working with what they had, but, I mean, there were definitely some issues. The security people were ridiculous - I mean, seriously. They were searching people's bags CONSTANTLY. And for what? WHAT? You could bring in a camera? Everyone there was smoking pot and um... seriously. What were they searching for? Over and Over? You couldn't bring drinks from one stage to another - um.. why? And who's gonna travel all the way to Minehead and not have a wristband? Let it go, let it go. We had a mixup with our wristbands so we popped over to get different ones and the organizers were telling us that the capacity of the rooms was 3,000, 2,000 and 1,000 for stages 1,2 and 3 respectively, but that security was stopping people from getting in when there was still 600 empty spaces. They were negotiating to get more people in - not sure how that worked out.
BUT, the cool thing is, the organizers were doing everything they could. I'm a bit worried how future ATPs will work out - I mean, the Butlins people didn't seem super happy to have them there. I was thinking about how moving ATP to Minehead was like moving the soul of their whole enterprise. What if it didn't work? Can they go back to Camber? And they have TWO MORE coming up that they're gonna need to do some serious work on before they make it happen.
Before the festival, they identified two bands that were going to draw so many people that everyone that wanted to see them wouldn't all fit at stage 1: Iggy and the Stooges and Sonic Youth. In the end, there were more like 7-8 bands that were playing the main stage that more people wanted to see than the room could handle. Luckily the bands were all pretty much awesome and agreed to play multiple shows, so in the end second sets were played by Dinosaur Jr, Deerhoof, The Melvins, and Gang of Four. They did some cool stuff with the MC5 where if you REALLY wanted to see them, you could get a wristband in advance and get priority entrance, so that solved that problem."
http://billetdoux.livejournal.com/539191.html
"As many of you know, I have waxed on ATP for a long time now, and one of the best things about this festival was the fact that you could see the big named acts in smaller than usual capacity, and the relaxed vibe about the whole thing. Bands/artists mixed with punters, and it was great. However, in the move from Pontins to Butlins a lot of that intimacy has been lost.
The Queues Of Doom were a nuisance and I could've really done without them. Frankly, bits of it were utterly shambolic - Melvins, Deerhoof, Gang of Four and Dinosaur Jr all had to play extra shows because of the sheer number of people who failed to get into see them, and there was also a last minute wristband scheme for MC5. You know, I'm not saying organising something like this is easy, but you shouldn't have to put on extra shows. Having enough capacity so everybody can get in to see something (more than once there were queues in all three halls) should be part of basic planning, no?
On the other hand the facilities at the new venue are much better, the town is really close and the chalets are much nicer even if they are further away.
Despite the blips it was a great weekend."
http://www.last.fm/user/indielass/journal/2007/01/27/327355/
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I like this person. Rhett or Old 97's would be fantastic.
Old 97's opened for Wilco in November '99. Handsome Family opened for the 4 piece Wilco September 2001 (other times as well, I imagine) tour. Elf Power opened some of the later shows on that 2001 post 9/11, pre YHF release tour. All great shows by all 4 bands, even though Handsome Family received a mix reception from the Wilco faithful at the time. Old 97's|WILCO shows were F I R E.
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Mike Doughty - Frog and Banjo.
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Write-in vote for "Recreational Pharmaceuticals"
or maybe just "Thax, Drugs and Henry/Sue Miller"
What to do in Chicago
in Tongue-Tied Lightning
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Anyone else taking a flyer on it being Jon Brion and buying tickets for the Hideout next Sunday night?