• Tomor­row night. TV on the Radio, w/ Griz­zly Bear. Sold out. Pics and sto­ry to follow.
• Lis­ten in: I Was a Lover
• You have plans Sun­day night too. Vox Pop­uli is mov­ing, thanks to a wrong­head­ed expan­sion of Philadel­phi­a’s Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. What was eas­i­ly one of the most com­fort­able, most inter­est­ing, and best sound­ing venues in Philadel­phia will be clos­ing it doors, and mov­ing to a new loca­tion, tbd. Pro­ceeds to defray the cost of the move…and you get a beer or two in the bar­gain. Not bad, eh?

The Depart­ed. Dir. by Mar­tin Scorsese.

Why is it not sur­pris­ing that the Amer­i­can ver­sion of this film felt a lit­tle bloat­ed? Damon and Wahlberg in a cop dra­ma set in Boston? Shock­ing! How do you like dem apples indeed! And why Frank Costel­lo, and not just some rel­a­tive­ly anony­mous rack­e­teer? Dude would’ve been dead before the open­ing scene!

Yet what you’ve heard is true. It is Scors­ese’s best since Good­fel­las, and his return to seri­ous good guy/bad guy dra­ma is pret­ty enter­tain­ing if you’re will­ing to look past any num­ber of exag­ger­at­ed per­for­mances. Cred­it Alec Bald­win and Mar­tin Sheen for their sup­port­ing roles as career cops, who, if han­dled dif­fer­ent­ly could’ve been filed under “scenery”. More­over, Leonar­do DiCaprio near­ly fit in Tony Leung’s shoes, albeit minus, grace and ease, charm and wit, and more in the style of a bodice rip­per with a crew cut and a cellphone.

• O.k. so the RSS fea­tured in the meta tag — low­er right — works. Com­ments still appear to be fucked, but that’s get­ting looked into. Addi­tion­al changes forth­com­ing, like an events cal­en­dar, last.fm pro­file, and oth­er Web 2.0 heavy hit­ters. For clar­i­fi­ca­tion pur­pos­es, Web 2.0 should­n’t read like even so much as a tac­it endorse­ment of Bub­ble 2.0, which seems to be in the off­ing. Has every­one for­got­ten say 1999–2001? Is that owed to the cash buzz and con­se­quent coke haze of fin de siècle US of A? [Looks like man­u­fac­tur­ing could be the next bub­ble — unsus­tain­able eco­nom­ic fads, while unre­li­able, can be excit­ing, huh?
• Since com­ments are down, don’t hes­i­tate to be in touch [email top left; now func­tion­al] about what you like, and what you’d like to see more of, apart from more writ­ing, which has been insuf­fi­cient, spo­radic and unfo­cused late­ly. No excuses.
• Speak­ing of com­ments, mine here earned me a very rea­son­able response from Mr. RffM­rkt him­self, fol­lowed by a pret­ty sweet ad hominem attack by proxy! And I just stum­bled in by chance as a reg­u­lar Wayne & Wax read­er — hell, I even updat­ed my link!

Wel­come to Black­mail Is My Life, 1.5. For­give me in advance for the present appear­ance, but keep an eye out for all things Web 2.0 in the com­ing days, as well as a stead­ier pub­lish­ing sched­ule [like some­times, instead of seldomly.]

And yes, hope­ful­ly the com­ments will be fixed soon! [Com­ments are active!]

Down­load: Ser­e­na Maneesh — Can­dle­light­ed

I asked Emil Niko­laisen [Han sagde: Naa, maend hvor­dan har du det? Og jeg gen­t­age: Meget godt, tak, maend du maa nok lige unskylde mit Dan­sk. Det er daarligt lige nu] if Ser­e­na Maneesh had begun record­ing any nye musik last night before their show at First Uni­tar­i­an Church. He said that with all the tour­ing there just has­n’t been time, and men­tioned anoth­er thing very impor­tant to Scan­di­na­vians [and oth­ers, mind you]: ro, or peace. Their out­sized tour­bus idling out­side impressed upon me the pres­sures to pro­duce new mate­r­i­al, so much hype, etc. not to men­tion play­ing Philadel­phia for the sec­ond time since March [SXSW & CMJ can actu­al­ly help…then hinder!]

Ser­e­na Maneesh played what seemed like an abbre­vi­at­ed set to the small, but enthu­si­as­tic crowd that gath­ered in the base­ment. Abbre­vi­at­ed because when they last vis­it­ed, every­thing went late, very late, past one a.m. in fact, which is uncom­mon for the venue. This time the set last­ed lit­tle more than half an hour, forty min­utes maybe, and not quite as long as Bar­do Pond, whose set pre­ced­ed theirs. There was part of me that was hun­gry for anoth­er epic set of droney psy­che­delia, but that’s a lot to ask — too often bands try to deliv­er quan­ti­ty and fail for any num­ber of reasons.

For­tu­nate­ly, Ser­e­na Maneesh were able to main­tain high ener­gy and accom­plished some­thing few bands do in that base­ment: have good, dis­tinct sound, with excel­lent sep­a­ra­tion and nuanced lev­els for vocals with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the thump and bump in their rhythm sec­tion. It was more than a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ing to see the crowd thin out as Bar­do’s set thud­ded into the night and I could­n’t help but think how much bet­ter served both the band and audi­ence might’ve been at a small­er venue.

See also: [Ser­e­na Maneesh @ F.U. Church on Flickr]