Category Archives: music

Like a Lovecraftian heroine, I find myself coated in slime


[embedded video: coughs & sneezes]

I can’t recall ever being sneezed on. Not by another human being, anyway. Horses, dogs and cats? Yes. Another person? No.

Not until Friday night. I was minding my own business, sitting in the front row of a packed concert hall, listening to Neil Gaiman speak at George Mason University’s Fall for the Book Festival, when the gentleman seated behind me suddenly blasted the back of my head with a great honking snootful of mucous.

These things happen. Sure. Yes. Absolutely. No malicious intent. Just a sneeze.

His wife made a half-hearted attempt to discretely wipe some of the snot from my hair. Or maybe she was just trying to rub it in, thinking I wouldn’t notice. I’m not entirely certain, as I was trying to ignore them and pay attention to the person speaking at the podium a few feet in front of me.

Here is a dramatic re-enactment of the aftermath of this event, as I now remember it.


[embedded video: ghostbusters]

Then it happened again on Sunday night while Michael Chabon was talking.

Then it happened again while I was listening to David Byrne and Dave Lowery speak at a Smithsonian event Monday night.

Oddly, this doesn’t outrages because of the yuck factor or the amount of time I’ve spent washing my hair this weekend. Accidents happen. This annoys me because I’m once again on a very high dose of a very unpleasant drug designed to cut my immune system off at the knees and at each of the 3 public events I chose as calculated risks there was a single solitary sneezing guy – and each time, that guy was seated right behind me? How is that possible? What are the odds?

I guess it would be weirder if it had been the same guy each time.

I’ve upended my life to minimize the amount of interaction I have with germyness for the next few weeks. I’ve stocked up on hand sanitizer. I’ve rearranged my life to avoid Metro and small children and teeming crowds as much as humanly possible. And yet? Old dudes with weaponized nasal passages seem to be homing in on me like Jack Ryan after the Red October.

To be fair, avoiding Metro and small children and teeming crowds is pretty much my avocation, but I’m too tired to work up a funny line of persecution and inconvenience and indignation, so let’s just pretend that in the day-to-day, my favorite activity is taking small children to big events via Metro, where we lick the handrails and seatbacks to pass the time along the way.

I’m lacking a punchline today. Here, have a sneezy baby panda, instead:


[embedded video: sneezing panda]

update: comments are being harshly moderated to eliminate any links to sneeze fetish sites because, although my moderation criteria is pretty liberal, some of the stuff that’s been left in the comments crosses some serious lines. Also: yuck.

Get Focused

The nice folks from the Future of Music Coalition are spreading the word about a paid focus group this week:

Are you a musician, visual artist, dancer, actor, filmmaker or other artist living in the DC area?

Are you interested in making $50?

If you answered YES to both questions, we invite you to participate in an artist-centric focus group on Thursday, Feb 16. The meeting will be 90 minutes long and held at a Metro-accessible location in the DC metro area.

Email artistfocusgroup@reingold.com or call 202-333-0400 and ask for Jillian to find out how you can get involved!

Please repost and share widely with your artist friends. We want to hear from a diverse range of DC-metro artists.

I don’t know anything else about this program, use the contact info in the post to get more details or go to the facebook page to find out more.

MTV

In the summer of 1981 my brother and I spent a lot of time at our cousins house. They had a TV. And cable. And they were cool. And on August 1st, they got MTV. And they got to stay up as late as they wanted, so we all watched it’s debut.


[embedded video]

I could spout some media and cultural theory bullshit about the dawn of MTV. Instead I’m just going to do what everyone else is doing and embed the moon landing station ID and the Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star,” because frankly, as a 5th grader, watching the debut of MTV didn’t fill me with any grand-eloquent sense of the future of music. I just thought it was cool.