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Links Round-Up, Mostly
May. 28th, 2019 12:17 pmI rather like the theology of today’s Wondermark.
A couple of days ago on Tumblr I read an interview from 2013 with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, about the band’s early days in 1980s Greenwich Village:
JF: You know what’s funny, I had a really great guitar teacher when I first came to New York. His life was a complete mystery to me, but I really paid very close attention to his advice and kind of tracked a lot of things he said very closely. And one thing he said, in this very avuncular way, was “There’s not a gig in New York that isn’t worth doing.” And I was so green, I really took that at face value. When I was kind of the de facto booking agent for They Might Be Giants for the first couple years, we applied that philosophy. I mean, we played in bars where there were Irish wakes going on in the back. We did a million shows that, in fact, were probably not worth doing. We just did them anyway. It was a very low threshold. If we could pay for getting ourselves there and back, we’d just do it. We played at parties for strangers and it was completely weird. To this day, I have people leave notes like, “You played at my birthday party in the East Village in 1984,” like, “You guys were so awesome.” And I don’t know why we were playing at strangers’ birthday parties. I mean, who plays at strangers’ birthday parties? But we just did it. In retrospect, I realized my guitar teacher almost never played out. I only found that out much later.
Four On the Floor, Episode 12 (1986):
If you’re not Canadian, the Frantics were like a 1980s version of the Kids In the Hall. I watched this the other day for the “A Message from Phil” running gag, which feels very KITH, but the episode also contains a raccoon burial at sea, the guys who think they drive chicks mad, a Mr. Canoehead adventure and some other stuff.
Would-be writerly stuff: I’ve been posting chapter links to a Doctor Who fic I’ve been working on this month – now, I make no bones about the fact that my DW fics are usually what I write when I have some original characters/scenarios and want to embed them in an existing fandom so I can just post them on AO3 instead of trying to tempt people to read something unfamiliar;( Read more... )
A couple of days ago on Tumblr I read an interview from 2013 with John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, about the band’s early days in 1980s Greenwich Village:
JF: You know what’s funny, I had a really great guitar teacher when I first came to New York. His life was a complete mystery to me, but I really paid very close attention to his advice and kind of tracked a lot of things he said very closely. And one thing he said, in this very avuncular way, was “There’s not a gig in New York that isn’t worth doing.” And I was so green, I really took that at face value. When I was kind of the de facto booking agent for They Might Be Giants for the first couple years, we applied that philosophy. I mean, we played in bars where there were Irish wakes going on in the back. We did a million shows that, in fact, were probably not worth doing. We just did them anyway. It was a very low threshold. If we could pay for getting ourselves there and back, we’d just do it. We played at parties for strangers and it was completely weird. To this day, I have people leave notes like, “You played at my birthday party in the East Village in 1984,” like, “You guys were so awesome.” And I don’t know why we were playing at strangers’ birthday parties. I mean, who plays at strangers’ birthday parties? But we just did it. In retrospect, I realized my guitar teacher almost never played out. I only found that out much later.
Four On the Floor, Episode 12 (1986):
If you’re not Canadian, the Frantics were like a 1980s version of the Kids In the Hall. I watched this the other day for the “A Message from Phil” running gag, which feels very KITH, but the episode also contains a raccoon burial at sea, the guys who think they drive chicks mad, a Mr. Canoehead adventure and some other stuff.
Would-be writerly stuff: I’ve been posting chapter links to a Doctor Who fic I’ve been working on this month – now, I make no bones about the fact that my DW fics are usually what I write when I have some original characters/scenarios and want to embed them in an existing fandom so I can just post them on AO3 instead of trying to tempt people to read something unfamiliar;( Read more... )
