Poker and the Empty Bottle

Headed over to the boys’ place this evening, after checking in on Nebula. En route to Chris’ place, I spotted some more artwork on the corner of Damen and Thomas.

This is a busy corner.

Fast forward through a fun game of Texas Holdem with Chris, Eric and Will. We got down to some high blinds, and I went all-on on a pair of deuces. Bad move, but I felt like I was dwindling myself out of the game by that point. Chris ended up the big winner and appropriately so, as tomorrow is his birthday!

At the Empty Bottle. We got here a bit late, and caught the last few songs from Beans.

Eric, Chris and Will, between sets.

As you may know, I’m a fan of the crowd shot here.

Battles takes the stage. Almost immediately, my head starts bopping a bit and I get into what I’m hearing. I’m really not into dancing at all, so it’s a rare thing where I’ll even move around at a show. But hearing Battles, I really started to get into it.

Right about now I finished off my second whiskey and was feeling really good. At several turns, I was moved to take a lot of video as I wanted to capture as much of what was happening as I could. Listening over to some of this stuff (below), my camera misses a lot of the higher registers. I don’t know if it comes through in the video, but man – what a great group to see live.

One thing to note: check out how freaking high that cymbal is. We all talked about this at length post-show, and it was cool to see Stanier physically have to reach and hit the sucker. It made those moments even that much better when he did.

A bit of a warning: the video is LOUD! Might want to turn the speakers down a little bit for these.

And hey, how awesome is this? We run into Brook and Kristen!

Between sets, Kristen asks to braid my hair.

I mentioned to her Michael’s penchant for braiding my hair.

This was actually quite fun for me, and felt great (it was getting pretty hot after standing in a crowd for this long).

Prefuse 73, taking the stage. Sadly, I wasn’t as taken by the performance. I’ve heard tons of great things, and recommendations from a lot of people…but live, I just wasn’t feeling it. Towards the end of the set, I snuck off with Will to go play a videogame that had caught both our eyes on walking into the place.

Woohoo! I threw a ton of money into this game as a kid. And, all told, I fared pretty well despite not having played it in many a year (got past the Hoth stage on one credit).

That’s right. I’m bragging about my prowess on older video games. I’m a petty man – give me my petty victories.