So, I'm going to share an older picture I've done before, but instead of any kind of critique or observation on my work, I'm going to relay the story around this photo. It's gonna be long, but trust me, it's a good one.
This is DJ Erika, who you can listen to at her website. This picture was taken last spring in Ann Arbor, at a small show in the basement of the incredibly popular comic book and nerd store, Vault of Midnight. We were promised a huge show, one that used "interactive media and music" to create some sort of play. My close friend Cado (his website here) sent me the brochure and I was pumped. I was imagining giant Plasma screens showing incredible images that the musicians would interact with, there was supposed to be dancers...how awesome it would have been. We loaded up into the car and headed to Ann Arbor, excited for what magical, musical wonders we'd see.
That...isn't quite what we got, but more on that in a moment.
The show opened at around 9 pm, the only way to access it in the back-alley behind VofM. We had some good fun chatting with the folks in the alleyway, actually, sharing stories and discussing nerdy subjects like Doctor Who and model-making, and musical interests like what we'd do if the other three Ramones came back to life and started touring. Then the doors opened.
The basement for VofM is awesome. So many vinyl figures and posters line the walls and ceiling that any geek would go down there and grin to himself (or squeal, if s/he was THAT kind of geek). Erika was setting up, and in about 10 minutes she started her magic. Honestly, Cado and I thought this WAS the show, and were a little disappointed that there was no Plasma screen, belly-dancers, or hell, any kind of "interactive media" besides some pretty lights that she had set up behind her.
But DAMN, her beats were good. Honestly, after a few minutes of listening, we took our spot on a couch and just let the trance-techno she was bringing forth whisk us away to dreamland. The stage-lights definitely added to the trance as well, the colors on the buffed floor acting like some sort of LSD light show. Naturally, having brought my camera, I started taking a few pictures, but kept my spot on the couch so as not to get in anyone's way. I was just starting out last year, and didn't exactly have the willpower to push my way through a crowd just yet.
Then the music stopped, the fluorescent lights went back on, and we snapped out of our haze. Erika was packing up, and some other guy was pulling out an electric guitar while they set up drums in the background. "Oh, she was a pre-show. THIS is the show we came to see!" I exclaimed to Cado, sitting back up in excitement. "If she was that fun to listen to, these guys must rule!"
My optimism diminished somewhat when I saw them pull out not a series of monitors, but an old-as-shit looking projector and a white sheet that was to be our screen, which they dangled loosely from the pipes in the ceiling.
I tried not to judge, it was possible that they had a kick-ass show but little money to spend on the extravagances. My optimism returned when the man who appeared to be the main singer stepped forward, with a device on his hand that was similar to the old Nintendo Powerglove (it's so bad). He explained that he used to develop this device, which connected to computers through USB, to allow people to manipulate their computer programs. I thought that sounded groovy.
Then the first song started, "The Glory of the Sing" or something new-agey sounding like that. He used a voice modifier on himself to make him sound not unlike Daft Punk, but if they were trying to sing over a Speak-and-Spell at the same time, and we got a taste of what our "interactive media and dancing" would be for the night. He brought up a program on his Mac that was projected onto the sheet, which was nothing more than a photo-stitching program that lets you form a 3D image with a series of pictures from the same place, and was trying to spin around an image of some woods as he sang about...something.
I said "trying," mind you. That glove didn't work very well, apparently, because instead of a smooth-pan through a spherical image, the program bounced and snapped all around, looking like someone was having a seizure in the middle of the woods. I looked at Cado with a worried expression, and he returned it right-the-hell back. Luckily, we weren't alone; no one seemed to be enjoying the show.
The next song was worse. He put away the damn Power Glove (halleluiah), but then then the dancer stepped forward. Mind you, she wasn't ugly or anything, but she was wearing a black turtleneck and pants, black ear-muffs (it was April, so that was odd), and her dancing seemed to consist of staying in one spot and performing interpretations (badly) of whatever he was singing about. It was more embarrassing to watch than entertaining, mostly because I got the sense that she didn't want to be there.
And this song consisted of admittedly jumpy beats while commands about what to do came up on the screen. Mind you, I'm in a room full of people in their late teens to early twenties, a number of which had alcohol in their hands. I'll leave it to your imagination what it was like when "FREAK OUT" popped up on the screen and he was encouraging everyone in the room to jump up-and-down and wave their arms around.
To quote Cado later that night about it: "It was like one of those Christian-school shows I went to when I was 8 that had some overly-cheery performer would bounce around the room with the kids and tell them to 'jump for Jesus!'" If you've ever been in an elementary-school assembly, you know what that's like as well.
So that song ended, and the next song had a slight delay as he clicked around his desktop looking for the file. The dancer stood their, staring at him awkwardly, as he brought up a video made with Bryce 5.5. Oh boy.
For those of you who don't know, Bryce is a program (sharing my real name) that is used to make 3D environments, sometimes for video games, mostly just for images. I actually knew the program very well at this point, having worked on it for years as a hobby. I was able to whip up a large, snowy landscape in an hour once back in high school, and was commended for it.
So, I was a bit unnerved to see what he was displaying on the screen. It was a tiny, poorly-made island with a shitty palm-tree in the middle of some sort of ocean. I didn't realize that at first, because the "ocean" was flat-grey with no texture of waves or ripples or anything, and the island was reddish in color and just odd to look at. The song he sang was about isolation or something, I think, since he talked about a "panoramic view" somewhere in there, but the only panorama in the image was a huge grey sea under a crappy pre-rendered sunset sky.
In my experience with the program, my guess is he whipped that up in 5 minutes and called it good. The dancer went from a strange moon-walk to some sort of modern-day twist when the chorus hit about 5 seconds late, obviously never hearing the songs before and trying to adapt to the terrible tune on the fly. Awkward doesn't describe her performance adequately.
Suddenly, a beat I recognized started playing. "Walking on the Moon?" Hey, I knew this song! It's not the greatest song, but surely with a cover-version of an older song, it can't suck that bad, right?
Wrong. Sooo wrong.
First of all, you'd think that the moonwalk would be kind of obvious for this song, right? So did the dancer, apparently, because she instead opted to do an "interpretive" version of what walking on the moon would be. Tell a 10-year-old to pretend to walk on the moon, and you'll see the "dance" she was demonstrating to us. Good lord, if I was with my girlfriend at the time, who dances professionally, that girl would have been chewed out and we'd be asked to leave. Not that we stayed much longer, though.
The song was going...okay, though the singer could NOT hit the high-notes properly, but then he busted out his electric guitar for the solo. He had played it earlier, and while not terrible, he wasn't amazing, but I figured he'd do about the same level of performance this time. I don't know what happened, maybe he just lost his bearings for a second, but the sounds coming out of this guitar were like a giraffe being strangled with piano-wire; high-pitched, pitiful, loud, and just painful to listen to if you can't save the poor creature.
Slowly I turned to Cado, who was looking at the performance with an emotion that could only be described as "shocked and appalled," and suggested that we go down the street for Fleetwood's for a burger. He just nodded, unable to speak about what was going on in front of us. We quietly made our way out, closed the door behind us, and stepped onto the chilly alleyway's pavement.
And we laughed. Friends, you have no idea how hard we laughed. I don't know why we didn't downstairs, but once we got outside, we just couldn't help ourselves. I'm sure people passing by the alley were a bit concerned, seeing two men in their 20s laughing so hard together.
"Come on," I said, wiping the tears from my eyes as short gasps of laughter escaped under my breath, "I need something with bacon on it." We walked the rest of the way to the diner, laughing and mocking the show, and knew without question that this was our favorite place to live.
-Track
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