Presidents!

I went to see the Presidents of the United States of America at the Showbox on Sunday. Their energy really blew me away, but I guess I will start by talking about the opening acts. The Trucks played first. They are from Bellingham, WA and first started performing in 2003. They are definitely a girl band that screams, jams and lights up the stage. Their theme is feminism and the lead was wearing a white dress decorated with tampons--found art anyone?

No-fi Soul Rebellion is also from Bellingham. This is a husband and wife team, and more of a comedy act than a music group. Mark sort of raps to different songs from a cd player while his wife Andrea pretends to play the guitar and otherwise just poses like a rock star. It was a pretty funny schtick, but my lil' sis had seen it before and said it was the exact same show, which I could see getting a little old. Might be time for some new material there, No-fi.

When the Presidents came out, it was "Love Everybody Tonight" from beginning to end. What I mean to say is that they played all the favorites (and there are a lot of them.) They started out with "Kitty" and I would say they played at least 15 songs including "Lump," "Dune Buggy," "Naked and Famous," " Back Porch," "Peaches" and many more. The energy level was amazing with some of the first dancing I have seen in Seattle in years at a club. People were also crowd surfing, the band pulled fans up on stage to help and there was a huge gorilla that lounged around throwing bananas into the crowd. After they finished, the fans hooted, hollard and waited impatiently for them to return, which they did. Another 5 or 6 songs were played with the same great feeling of positive energy as the first set.

People really love this band. There were tons of different groups represented. I saw frat boys, little kids, hippie parents (and other kinds of parents), teens of all types and I think I even saw some hipsters hiding in the corners (because of course it wouldn't be cool for them to be caught at a Presidents show--they used the excuse of seeing the trucks and then stayed on for their secret love ;) It was amazing.

I haven't been able to log in for a while, so I haven't posted. I am not sure what the problem was.

I have been reading very sporadically lately; a little bit of this and a little bit of that, until I started the All Seattle Reads book, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I am really enjoying this book, immersing myself in it as I haven't done with a book in months. It is the story of a son of immigrants from India. The characters have the benefit of coming to the United States as intellectuals, rather than refugees. The son is encouraged in that tradition, as well as the others of his Bengali family. He struggles with the differences between the culture of his family and that of his country, at first rejecting his heritage but finally coming to terms with it. I find myself hoping that there is a similar book about some of the immigrant cultures of our area; Somali and Ethiopian.

I have been working a lot at other libraries lately. I find that I prefer the busier ones. When I am subbing, I don't have any alternative tasks that I can work on, aside from some of the programs I am planning for QNA, so if the library isn't busy, I can be quite bored. The programs I am working on rely on a reply from other agencies, so there is not always something to be done for them. I need mental stimulation to stay alert.