LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

I really should've written this post sooner. I say that because what I want to talk to you about—my deep, rapturous and newfound adoration for Star and Micey—was born this week as a result of the fact that their self-titled album has been streaming on Spinner. And I should've told you sooner, because it's only going to last the week and frankly, I want you to fall head over heels for this record, too.

As of this weekend, I am an official resident of Cooper-Young. If your dog just perked up, it's because he can hear the very high frequencies of my excited squealing.

Many moons ago, I was a creative writing minor during my undergrad and someone, somewhere taught me that it's much harder to write a short story than it is to write a novel. It's clearly a vast over-simplification, because neither one is easy, per se, at least not easy to do well. But the short story has its own unique set of complications and requires a writer to be able to powerfully choose just a handful of words to communicate the same emotion or image that a novelist can explore for pages and pages.

I'd never try to pass myself off as a movie critic. I don't know celluloid from cellulite and I pretty much want the boy and the girl to get together in the end because if they don't, I have a really hard time chalking it up to art. I don't doubt that it is, it just has to be said that I can critique music all day long but movies are just for fun.

This weekend, I experienced my first GonerFest.

I figure that's the best place to start, since you can already make some assumptions based on that statement. Namely that I had no clue what I was in for when I finished pretending to parallel park my car, left it jacked up on the curb and headed for the Hi-Tone on Saturday night.

So things have been pretty quiet around here for a while, mostly because this condition I suffer from called Chronic Poverty has made it a little tough to get out to shows as much as I'd like. I've been suffering from CP for a few years now, and it's totally manageable through consumption of hot dogs and processed cheese as far as I can tell, but it does tend to have dampering effects on one's social life.

Thankfully I will be basking in the glow of GonerFest this weekend, praise Allah, but I'm also always on the lookout for my favorite F word: free. Thus far I've been only mildly successful, mostly because I'm not just looking for free music. Free music is pretty easy to find, particularly right now with the Levitt Shell jamming almost nightly. But free music featuring local bands and artists? Not always so easy.

Lately I've started wondering, though, if it's not that free music is hard to find, but instead that my relative newbie status has me looking in all the wrong places. So where should I be searching? Whether it's a web site that lists events, a particular bar that features no-cover nights or just a particular gig you know of coming up -- any tips you've got will help me overcome my chronic poverty and increase my live music intake. 

And of course, I'll see y'all at Gonerfest!

Thursday night I pulled up at the HiTone at 8:30. Tyler Keith was supposed to go on at 9, and I wanted to have time to catch up with my friend Mike and have a drink before the music started.

I'm pretty sure I crashed someone's birthday party. There was cake, people sang "Happy Birthday", and I could swear up and down that I was the only person in The Buccaneer who did not know Chuck or, alternately, what the hell was going on.