Dave's Super Excited List

Here's a list of some stuff I'm super excited about these days:

1. Farm Aid

For those who have been living under a rock, Farm Aid is in St. Louis this year at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater. My brother and I are taking our father for his birthday. We got our tickets first day, and it's a good thing too because last I heard there are only individual seats left in the seating section, everything else is on the lawn. We are sitting in the upper right corner of seats, and though certainly not close, it's better than being on the lawn all day.

I'm super excited about this show for a few reasons. First of all, how often do you get to see Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp on the same bill? Wilco has also been added to the line-up, with more artists T.B.A. There are usually about 20 artists on the bill, which is cool because even if half of them suck (Dave Matthews anyone?) you're still getting a lot of music for your money. Now, this does mean that most of the sets will be short, say 20-45 minutes but that's okay, it should still be fun.

Also, I believe in the cause. I'm not necessarily against factory farms, but I do feel that we should help out the family farmer. As Charlie Daniels once sang, "He's the American Farmer/And he's damn hard to beat/You better wake up America/'Cause if the man don't work the people don't eat." Farmers deserve to sell their crops for a fair market price, and deserve a little help when the crops fail due to a bad year. The main sponsor of the show is Horizon Organic Foods, who not only use family farms and pay a fair price, they also have higher safety and environmental standards than factory farms do. And you thought the organic thing was just for health nuts. So not only do I get a good show, I help out some good people too. It's a win-win.

2. Man v. Food Season Two

My favorite show and my t.v. hero Adam Richman are back beginning Wednesday night August 5th. Yay! Food, it ain't your day.

3. Motorheat

Two of my favorite rock bands, Motorhead and Reverend Horton Heat, are touring together this year. Miraculously enough, St. Louis is actually getting this show. You see, this is the type of ultra cool show that normally skips us in favor of Chicago or Kansas City. St. Louis is often deemed not hip enough (by promoters) to get awesome stuff like this. Two legendary(if fairly underground) rock bands, one night. My face is already in pain just to train for how much it's going to get rocked Sept. 23rd.

4. Watchmen

Just saw the Watchmen DVD and I really liked it. I was a bit concerned as I haven't read the graphic novel and had heard from several sources that I would probably get lost. Well, no worries there, I had no problem following it. Valerie could follow it as well, and she was sewing at the time.

So anyway, I thought overall the movie was really well done. It looks absolutely fantastic, and moves quickly. It also rewards you for paying attention, which I love. I don't like it when movies require I turn off my brain to enjoy them (well, unless it's a silly B movie with big dumb rubber monsters or something like that), and Watchmen is just the opposite. Now, that doesn't mean it's perfect. I did see most of the reveals coming a mile away, and some of the casting choices didn't really do it for me. I also could've done without Dr. Manhattan's wang. However, the themes of violence (of which there is much, and it's graphic to boot), justice, political and personal power, psychosis and the nature of time and humankind make for a rich experience.

Even at 3 plus hours, they had to leave stuff out that was in the original comic (it's a big one folks), and they changed the ending for the film too. So now I'm looking to read the original piece and see what all I've missed. Anybody feeling generous can send me a copy. Okay, I didn't really expect that to work, but it's worth a shot.

5. Blue Tattoo

My band is currently recording a bunch of songs for our next project. The form isn't totally decided yet, but it'll probably be a self released CD with 11-14 songs, and I'm sure we'll do something digital on our website as well but we haven't really talked about that yet. So far we've got about 5 or 6 songs in the can minus backing vocals, and have scratch/drum tracks for more. Hopefully we'll get the recording part done in another three or four weeks and then we can start approaching clubs again. We haven't had much luck in the clubs as of yet, but if we can get a little more disciplined and really attack it, I think we'll be successful. A few weeks ago I was feeling kinda down about it all, but here lately I've started to get a lot more excited about the whole thing again. There will be more news soon...watch this space.

6. The Happy Dance

Apparently Valerie and Tessa have their own happy dance they did earlier tonight (8/4/09). It was a happy dance. In the potty. I missed it. I'm not sure what's involved, but I'm already fascinated. The story I got was that Tessa peed in the potty (accidentally, but she did it), and she was so proud of herself, as was Valerie, that a dance broke out. Now don't get too excited, she's too young for potty training to stick, but that doesn't mean we can't dance about it. Perhaps we do the dance of joy as taught to us by Balke from Mepos. Or maybe we do the Time Warp. The Funky Chicken? The Thriller dance? There's so many to choose from!!!

Anyway...

There's your list of what's keeping me excited and entertained lately. Actually there's other stuff too. but I thought these were the most interesting. At least I hope it's interesting. Otherwise, I've wasted your time dear reader, which you probably find quite boring. But either way I'm still entertained. So there.