i'm up, i'm up!
oooh boy. je suis encore fatiguée aussi. i didn't sleep on thurs night at all, so last night's sleep was niiice.
alright, this one will probably end up looong.
the plan was to arrive home by 5 p.m. and maybe head downtown at around 6. HAHAHA--like that happened. my school's charter bus decided to piss me off by getting stuck in traffic, and the damned trip from k-town took 4 fucking HOURS. that's half a working day. that's loong. it didn't get in until after 6 p.m.
so we didn't really get to wander around or have dinner anywhere. some other time, maybe?
at around 8 we took transit down (w/ a little help from cgal's dad) and ended up in quite a sketchy (i can't believe i'm using that word) neighbourhood. but it was the right neighbourhood, 'cause we found the venue w/out much of a problem. now that we'd arrived, the real problem was actually if we were going to be allowed admittance or not, b/c the tkts that i'd ordered a month ago hadn't arrived in time, so we didn't really have any... oops. i'd e-mailed some guy named kevin about it, and he'd told me to just bring i.d. if they hadn't arrived before i left k-town.
so we walked in, and there was a table w/ two british-accented guys standing behind it, and i tried to explain the situation to one of them. he looked for my name on the lists they had on the table but couldn't find it, so he went looking for the guy who was running the event. he came back w/ the guy, and i told him that i'd spoken to some guy named kevin about it, and he told me that he was kevin. he asked if i had brought my i.d., i showed it to him, he wrote my name down on one of the lists and asked me how many tkts i'd ordered (2) and then crossed it all off. i like how easygoing he was about it--i'd half expected him to not believe me, even if i was telling the truth. later on, he even thanked me for coming. friendly, friendly ppl. gotta love the british. or scottish. during the show, torq said they were scottish, but they seemed to sound english to me. oh well.
we checked our coats, checked out the washrooms and then headed into the main room. cgal looked fabulous in her lovely pink skirt from the clothing show and her black top. our wardrobes were actually colour-reversed, 'cause i was wearing a black skirt w/ a pink top! eek. at least we didn't both wear the blue shirts we got at kensington.
cgal seemed to be in love w/ everybody working the event...heehee. they all had those addictive accent things going on. and they were all so easygoing and friendly.
the room itself wasn't anything spectacular; it looked like the inside of a warehouse, so we were joking around saying it might be a film studio, but they definitely only shot porn there. we headed over to one of the bars to see what there was to drink, and the bartender said it was only amsterdam beer or hard liquor (hahaha...btw, this bartender was the one cgal wanted to walk up to and say something like, "sorry, but your look is just not working." he had some weird hair-flipped-over-to-the-other-side thing going on, and it really was not very attractive). i decided to get a beer, and then he asked me if i had a drink tkt. drink tkt?!?? what is this, some school dance or something?? so we had to go and buy drink tkts. it was $6 (?!) a tkt or $20 for 4, so cgal and i split the 4. i didn't know that amsterdam and eye mag were sponsoring the show, but it turns out they were.
there were screens projecting images on both ends of the room, w/ one screen above the stage on the end opposite the bar.
ooh--there was food, too! it really was like a dance...haha...they had a table w/ platters of veggies and dip, cheese/artichokes/other stuff and pitas w/ hummus (but not "authentic" hummus, as cgal is an expert when it comes to determining these things).
so as we were waiting for STARS to come on, we stood around and watched the hipster crowd of blasé cool ppl mingle in their little clusters...there was a bit of variety though--i spotted some older ppl among the skinny boys wearing harry potter scarves and black rimmed glasses. ;D
as the room began to fill up, we made our way to the front of the stage (stage left) and watched some of the band members set up. hot guitar man was there!!!!! however, cgal ruined my euphoric high by noticing that his hair that night made him kinda look like lyle lovett...YOU'RE A BUM, CGAL!!!!
the two dj's spinning music before the show and after were the two british dudes who run these "ukula" nights (one of them being the kevin guy who let us in). they played some great stuff--mostly britpop. they played rh's "there, there" before STARS came on.
STARS went on at around 10:30 (maybe a little after that) and blew me away yet again. i don't think i wrote about wed night at the grad club, but it was pretty hilarious. on wed, they were incredibly intoxicated, and amy millan ended up dropping her guitar to the floor and bended over scratching away at it. torq ended up grabbing a brush for the drums and was whacking away at one of the cymbals (although from my view it looked like he was abusing the bassist). they didn't do that last nite, but the energy was just as palpable. and it was made even better w/ the occasional additional accompaniment of previously-hot guitar man (who i will never look at in the same way again, thanks to cgal), kevin drew and brendan canning of broken social scene. before i talk about the music, i must describe some of the other band members. torquil was wearing a white t-shirt with scrawled writing in black marker that said something like, "i am steve" (was it steve? i think it was steve) and under that, "bartman." huh? the drummer, pat, had turned his mohawk-ish hair into little pigtails, and he looked like a seuss-ian who.
the music: they played côte de neiges! that was pretty amazing. everyone (STARS + the 3 BSS guys) was on stage, and they were rocking out, making it sound a lot fuller than on the electronic-poppish recording of it. i honestly think they played less songs than they did at the grad club show though. the set just seemed really short to me, but maybe that's b/c i didn't want it to end. i remember 'em playing "the comeback," "what the snowman learned about love," "elevator love letter" (yays to cgal for knowing it and doing her "listening research" before the show), "look up" (my FAVE song on their "heart" cd), their new song...oh, what does it matter? you guys don't know the songs anyway.
i'm glad cgal thought they were as jawdropping as i did! you can be my new concert buddy! we will be concert whores this summer!
so STARS get off the stage and tell us to stay b/c they'll be coming out to dance later on. i sure didn't see amy, torq or previously-hot guitar man anywhere on the floor. hmph. we did spot brendan canning (wearing a scarf around his waist?! haha...cgal, remember when he was standing across the room and i was wondering why he had it around his waist and you said he put it back around his neck after i said that?), chris seligman (who used to babysit the journal's asst photo ed, as i learned on wed night) and a few others on the floor, but they weren't exactly dancing.
as always, most ppl seemed to be too shy (or too cool) to dance, except for this girl who was very obviously lesbian and her guy friend, who may or may not have been gay. yeahyeah, i think she was trying to pick me up (do i look like a lesbian?!?), but cgal had another girl who was wearing red (maybe she was attracted to cgal's pink skirt) hit on her! no matter how much she tries to deny it, it happened. who are you going to believe, cgal or me?
cgal wanted some water, so we asked the tkt-selling guy if the bar had bottles of water, and he said that it was half a tkt for a bottle of water. i asked him if he would sell us half a tkt, and i think he laughed and just handed me a whole tkt. nice guys, i tell you. we went over to the bar and it turned out they didn't have any water, so they gave cgal a cup of ice instead. we didn't want to waste a perfectly good whole tkt, so we got another vodka 7.
cgal was trying to show me this guy who she claimed looked like jonny lee miller (at the time i completely disagreed w/ her), but i think the guy's friend thought she was looking at him instead. eventually, the guy's friend came over and started dancing w/ us (he was a funny, funny dancer), and i think he was trying to hit on cgal. :D but hanging out w/ him was okay, 'cause that made his hot friend come over after awhile as well. i can't remember his name (was it steve? something w/ an s?), but he was pretty cool. he told me he was friends w/ the funny dancer guy 'cause he was fun to have around. these guys were nice. they weren't being slimy or blatantly obvious. the hot friend--let's call him jonny lee miller, so i can pretend i've actually met him--asked what we were doing for valentine's day, and i told him that we didn't believe in it. i wanted to elaborate on our plan to pelt slightly-warm chocolate hearts at lovey-dovey couples today, but that was too complicated a thing to explain yelling over loud music. apparently jonny lee miller went to guelph u (love that place!), thinks "look up" is his fave song on "heart" (like me!), currently works for a non-profit company that helps charities like "literacy for children" but wants to go back to vietnam to help out ppl there or something, and discovered STARS through a sampler cd that was distributed at the BSS/metric show at the phoenix in dec. he sounds too good to be true. he must have some huge flaw that i guess we'll never discover. he said one of the two guys next to us was claiming to know me (that guy claimed to be an actor), although i'd just met him that night, which was pretty damned creepy.
jonny lee miller also said he goes to a lot of shows in TO, and he said he has friends in the sick lipstick, a band that is opening for the gossip here soon. he also mentioned the yeah yeah yeahs show. i'd go to that if i didn't have school...argh.
funny dancer friend is apparently a children's television producer, as the business card that he gave cgal says. do you think we'll ever see 'em again? :D
we left at around 2, and it was quite an adventure trying to make it home. we endured quite a bit of heckling from sketchy men in the neighbourhood, we stole a cab from a group of guys, we watched a man puking alone in front of a store that sold a scary amt of religious items...that's what happens when the subways stop running.
i might've missed some stuff, but it's dinnertime, and i'm hungry.
thanks for coming w/ me cgal--you rawwwwk.
