KJ is a junior studying Mathematics and Creative Writing. She is entangled in the library system and desperate to break free. Her free time is spent staring at a wall. She felt obliged to write this bio.
Amateur Eyes is a self-described “post punk indie rock group.” Take that to mean whatever you want, but first, give them a listen. They won’t disappoint. To me, they sound like the regretted love-child from a night when The Front Bottoms and Twenty-One Pilots got a little too drunk. I mean that in a good way, probably. Their lyrics are bare and bracing, as if someone dared John Pederson (their frontman) to tell the world the truth about himself and everyone else that he had hidden up his sleeve and he complied by ripping off that sleeve and whispering everything urgently into the nearest microphone.
Joining them will be Air is the Arche, shAAka, Dog Leg, and Fallow Land. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Air is the Arche before and I’m sure the other opening acts won’t disappoint. It’ll be a long and wonderful night of music.
When: Thursday, January 28th (tomorrow!). Doors open at 9:00pm.
The Landmarks getting ready. Photo Credit: The Landmarks
We got there early. Maybe earlier than we should–there were three opening acts, after all–but we didn’t know what kind of crowd to expect, and it couldn’t hurt. Neither of us had been to the Bling Pig before–so we had plenty to observe. For those of you who haven’t gone (and you really should sometime), it’s a dingy, ill-lit cramped space, the kind of place that I always take a minute to check out the emergency exits, but it’s got a lot of character. You can look around and get a sense of the history of the place, of the bands that have played, of the people who have danced , of the bodies that have crashed against one another, of the sweat shed, of the drinks spilled, of the voices that have sung, screamed, echoed and echoing. Ann Arbor’s a city full of places like these–places that tell a story that could only be told here–even as high-rise after high-rise goes up (across from the Blind Pig is one of these new high-rises) and chains encroach downtown, even then there remain these hidden flames of the city that still burn.
For the first two opening acts, my friend and I sat on stools to the side of the main floor. There were a handful of people standing in the center, but especially for the first act, The Landmarks, the crowd was still slim. Regardless, both bands grooved with what was there of the crowd, and there was never that moment when the crowd is too loud or too quiet, when the crowd is clearly uninterested or would prefer for that band not to be playing. No, even people like me, who were sitting on the sidelines gave the bands most of our attention. I preferred the more groovy sounds of the local band, The Landmarks, but the acoustic, softer tones of Air is the Arche were a refreshing break from the heavier, harder rocking beats of the night. Both bands are something to watch out for, and I look forward to them popping back up on my radar.
After Air is the Arche finished, my friend and I left the safety of our chairs to go in search of a bathroom. We wandered downstairs, through a maze of hallways, into the bar below, the Eightball Saloon, which was reminiscent of the inside of a dirty, vibrant carnival attraction. While there, I took the opportunity to read some of the many lines of wisdom, poetry, and advice that had been sharpied on the inside of the stall by various customers, for your reading pleasure. I was reading a rather crude observation out loud, “anal is good for your soul,” when a fellow patron loudly contradicted me–and well, I wasn’t going to disagree with her. After that bonding experience, my friend and I returned to the surface world to find our prime seating location stolen–but there was only one more opening act, so we decided to stand.
By the time the final opening act came on, Valley Hush, there was a crowd gathering in the center, bodies brewing and shifting to the front, to the middle. Some were like us, and merely seatless, but plenty were getting in position for the main act. Still, you could sense the crowd warming up, and some were even dancing to this band, to their fleeting melodies. I liked Valley Hush and their music, but I was impatient, I was ready for the band we’d been waiting for, and I felt like this last band’s set dragged on, we were so close, we were nearing the threshold–oh, I could hardly keep myself together, I couldn’t stand there much longer. I was ecstatic when they ended–sorry Valley Hush, you were great, really–and the crowd began to thicken, now was the time to cram yourself in, to sneak between as many bodies as you could, to find a place as close to the front as you could. Now was the time to rock.
And, nearly three hours after we had arrived at the Blind Pig, Flint Eastwood arrived on stage.
I thought I knew what to expect. I’d seen them before, about a year and a half ago–and I knew some things would be different, there was a new EP, they were no longer wearing bolo ties, but I thought I had reasonable expectations for this performance. They had only been the opening act then and not the main show, but things couldn’t be that different.
I was wrong.
Unfortunately, not a picture of last night. But you get the idea. Photo Credit: Flint Eastwood
Flint Eastwood started with the usual, “Ann Arbor, are you ready to rock?” shtick, which Jax asked us until she was satisfied with our answer, and then they came to life. They opened with the song “Oblivious,” and as soon as the music started, they were everywhere on stage–they were jumping, they were dancing, they were thrashing–they were exuberant with an energy that I cannot imagine possessing. There was only three of them–Jax, her guitarist, and her drummer–but they managed to stomp around the whole stage (except for the drummer, who still managed to thrash and bang on his drums as well as he could) and Jax was constantly on the edge of stage, right over us, right in our faces, banging her body to the beat. She was constantly moving her mic from stand to hand, strutting the stage, leaning out and over, pointing at members of the audience here and there, commanding them to sing a melody or clap their hands–and they listened, how could they not, they were enamored. When she ordered us to clap, we clapped. When she ordered us to sing, we sang. When she ordered us to dance, we danced. If she had ordered us to jump off a bridge, we would have. The band’s energy was infectious and we were pulsing, we were being pulled into Jax, as if she were the heart of a black hole. She too, was being pulled in, not to us, but to the music–there were parts where she was so caught up in it, caught up in her own dancing, that she would forget to sing. It wasn’t a problem, (nor probably even noticeable for most of the crowd), if anything it was beautiful to watch. For the bulk of the show, they played the rest of the songs from their latest EP, Small Victories, but near the end, they played “Can You Feel Me Now,” an in-your-face song if there ever was one. We were told to put our pistols up, so we did, and we rocked out to the song with our pistols, our hands, our arms, flying, thrashing, pounding the beat. After that, they announced that it was time to end and they would play only one more song: the title track from their EP, “Small Victories.” Before the song, Jax talked to us for a moment, and she told us if we were going through shit, she wasn’t going to tell us what to do or how to get over it, she couldn’t, but for the next few minutes we had to dance. So we did. During this “final” song, Jax jumped off stage and into the crowd, where she danced with us as her guitarist and drummer continued to rock, drenched in sweat, and then she climbed back on stage where the three of them collapsed. While they laid stretched out on the floor of the stage, they audience clapped and hollered and cheered, this rising, roaring, noise that never ended, no matter how long the trio refused to budge. Finally, after a matter of minutes, the band rose from the dead, claimed they needed just a rest, and played us one more song, another oldie, “Billy the Kid,” with the very fitting lyrics: this is the end.
After it ended, as we left that dark and dirty place, every member of the audience was handed this note, this little thank-you card. Because here’s the thing, this show didn’t happen at some 3,000 person venue. It happened at the Blind Pig and the attendance was in the low triple-digits. Currently, Flint Eastwood’s latest single,”Find What You’re Looking For,” has 7,684 views on Youtube. For a band like Flint Eastwood, every view, every member of the audience, every purchase of an album, every individual contribution–all of that matters. They know it, and as an attendee, you can feel it. They’re not a band that can take things for granted and their gratitude overflows their being, their presence. So please, next time you’re looking for something to do, skip the blockbuster or Netflix or Jimmy Johns, and maybe head downtown to the State Theater or Fleetwood Diner, but definitely stop by the Blind Pig sometime, even if it isn’t a band you know. Support the places that make Ann Arbor, well, Ann Arbor, and support the little guy–he’s got a long and difficult journey ahead of him, but with your help, I think he might make it.
This Thursday (Dec. 3rd) at the Blind Pig, Detroit-based indie-electronic-rock band, Flint Eastwood comes to Ann Arbor. Flint Eastwood is the project of Jax Anderson and has just released an EP titled Small Victories, which was written by Jax as she dealt with the death of her mother. They will be joined with Detroit-based Valley Hush and Air is the Arche, along with a local band, The Landmarks.
I had the pleasure of seeing Flint Eastwood about a year and a half ago. They were the first opening act for another band and I wasn’t going to the concert to see them. Before the show I had neither heard of them nor even bothered to look them up, but you can bet that after the concert, I listened to nothing but them for a week. I was amazed by their performance. For starters, they rocked. If you listen to one of their EPs, you might notice that their songs are on the upbeat electronic side of indie rock, but live, they absolutely kill it. There was an insane amount of energy present in them and even though I nor the rest of the audience had come to see them, they were able to get us pumped and ready to rock. It was a very unexpected, but welcome, surprise.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to Small Victories on and off. On my first listen, I decided that their first EP was better and I should just stick with that, but something kept drawing me back to Small Victories over and over again. Although Late Nights In Bolo Ties (their first EP) has an in-your-face style that is impressive for an indie-pop band, Small Victories tells a story of overcoming grief and setbacks and all the shit life throws at you–and it leaves you with this feeling that life is worth conquering.
(Please note: this review was designed to not include specific spoilers, so feel free to read on if you haven’t seen the movie.)
Trainwreck is a funny movie. It is crude too, although, nowhere near as crude as the trailers would have you believe. If you want to watch a funny movie with moments of honesty about our lives and our relationships and how we fuck them up, watch Trainwreck. That being said, there were a handful of problems I had with the film.
One of the problems which comedies that attempt to include dramatic or sad moments run into is the problem of spacing. If you’re going to have scenes intended to induce riotous laughter and others that are supposed to make the audience weep, you need to space these out in a way that works. In certain cases, it is effective to switch from one to the other with little to no warning–particularly for the movies leaning more towards drama than comedy, when they purposely want to catch the audience off-guard for greater emotional impact. They also use these twists sparingly–and if maybe Trainwreck had only done it once, it would be acceptable. But every single scene that was supposed to be dramatic or sad was book-ended by hilarious moments and not to the benefit of the film. In less than a minute you would go from laughing at some crude, sexual joke to supposed to be feeling heartbreak over some event in Amy’s life–and even during these sad scenes the tone would flicker from serious to lighthearted. And this happened again and again and again. I appreciate the movie for attempting to include be both funny and heart-wrenching, but it doesn’t work well.
The other major issue the film has is trying to be too big and do too much–and that’s saying something for a comedy whose run-time is two hours. If you’ve seen the trailers, then you know that Lebron James is acting in this film. Based on how prominent he is in the trailers, you would think that he would play a prominent part in the movie–but most of his scenes are those featured in the trailers. Of course, him being Lebron James, they would play up his part, but it wasn’t only him that felt short-changed. This film tried to include a wide variety of interesting characters and while there was nothing wrong with the characters themselves, many of them did not seem to contribute to to the movie and in a way, some even took a way from it. Here is a list of characters I can come up with off the top of my head: Amy, Aaron, Amy’s father, Amy’s father’s nurse, Amy’s sister, the sister’s husband and son, the ex-boyfriend, Amy’s best friend, her asshole coworkers, her bitchy boss, the young intern, Lebron James, Amar’e Stoudemire, and the homeless man she had befriended–and these are the characters with names, who show up multiple times throughout the movie. Other than Amy, Aaron, and the sister, every single one of these characters felt like their crucial role had occurred in a deleted scene. It felt like the film was flaunting its cast, flaunting the fact that they could come up with so many unique characters without putting the time in to justifying these characters’ roles in the film. It left me constantly waiting for characters to reappear or constantly wondering where X character wandered off to. Considering the fact that the movie was two hours, which is already long for a comedy, they should have made some cuts in the cast and given certain characters more screen time.
Despite these flaws, I still thoroughly enjoyed Trainwreck. It’s not winning any Oscars anytime soon, but not every movie we watch needs to. It stands out among comedies and offers a more individual, a more authentic vision of the world than your standard rom-com.
I got there early and sat in one of the first few rows. As the auditorium filled, I spent the time talking to my friend, not paying attention to what was going on around me. But shortly before the reading began, once most of the audience had arrived, I noticed something odd about the members of the audience sitting in front of me and I looked around the room to confirm it: the vast majority of the audience was students.
Now, it might seem silly to find it odd that the majority of an audience for an event located on campus would consist of students–but when it comes to literary events in Ann Arbor, both on and off campus, this is very often not the case. In fact, just this Friday I went to a reading event located in East Quad whose audience was mostly middle age or beyond. Readings and book-signings generally attract the older crowd of Ann Arbor, even if that means taking a trip to campus.
But Justin Torres was different. For some reason, he attracted an unusual crowd. Now, I know his book, We the Animals, was required reading in at least one English class, but that wouldn’t explain the hundred or so students present. I was attempting to process this information when the reading began. Of course, hearing him speak made everything make more sense.
For starters, he is a very young and good-looking man–I say that not based on subjective preference, but from an objective standpoint, as he was named one of Salon’s Sexiest Men in 2011. But his youth extended beyond appearances. There were the things he said in between reading sections of his book–from the Beyonce reference to the statement about how despite taking off his jacket he was still “a professional human being”–which were things one would expect from the a college student, not a college professor. And there was something incredibly youthful about the way he spoke and the way he moved–there was this nervous energy within him and you could see that he wasn’t used to being up on that stage, behind the podium, staring out at us with us staring right back, as if he would prefer to switch places, to be the one sitting anonymous in a crowd of college students. This probably wasn’t his first event and since he is a professor, it certainly wasn’t the first time he stood up and spoke in front of a bunch of students, but this crowd, with its size and demeanor, was definitely not something he was used to.
I found the youthfulness of this event remarkable–it’s the first literary event I’ve been to that felt like it happened on a college campus, not in a community hub. And although I can appreciate getting out there and into the world (it is so very easy to forget that people not in the 18-25 age range do, in fact, exist), every once in a while, it’s nice to do something here that feels like it’s just us.
Missed out on Trainwreck when it was in theaters? Have no fear–now you can see it for free in the Natural Science Building, this Friday at 7 PM, brought to you by M-Flicks. Directed by Judd Apatow and starring Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, and even Lebron James, this romantic comedy tells the story of how a free-loving magazine writer who doesn’t believe in commitment finds herself falling for a sports doctor. If you’re looking for a romantic comedy that doesn’t fall for the same old tropes and chooses to present a more honest view of modern relationships, this is the movie for you. It has been well-received by critics and currently has an 85% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And don’t forget–it’s free!
