April 18, 2006
His girlfriends always taped his shows
and he applied the term "girlfriend"
pretty liberally
so his shelf of DV tapes
documenting The Thursday Brigade's gigs
11/03-present (even a couple gigs when they were still
Traumadon)
is a pretty good sampling of Girls In The Tri-State-Area
Who Would Date A Reasonably Good-Looking Dude
With Hair Over One Eye
And Varying Degrees Of Beard,
11/03-present,
and their respective cinematography styles.
Kelly was never much for anything except
EXTREME CLOSE UPS of him and only him
and the band threatened to get THEIR girlfriends to start taping shows, too,
if she didn't widen up a little bit
but commitment-phobia saved them the trouble
Shannon would just go extra-wide, leave the camera on the bar,
and run off to flirt and do coke in the bathroom,
which he actually didn't mind until one gig her static camera missed
a brilliant bit of improv with him giving hugs in the crowd
(she was stall-trysting but had she made it back from the magazine editor's cock
in time to catch his messiah routine, it all probably
would've been forgiven)
Ashley was a film student: she'd expose off colored lights
to get neat in-camera effects and even get crowd reactions
and b-roll, but she got too experimental,
with the camera and
with the bassist
Nicole was workmanlike but she got the job done
for a year straight, until Lisa,
who you can actually see in the crowd in Nicole's last video
and Lisa had good instincts but was hell on the zoom
and there's actually no record of their 4/14/05 gig at Scaffold
because the tape ended up strewn across the parking lot,
Lisa going: "The only reason you're even UPSET is because
I'm destroying your stupid IMAGE!" and no, the reason he was
upset is because the guy who said he might want to sign them to his
label said it was a "CMJ-quality gig" and he wanted to show it to his bosses
"if you guys have, like, a tape,"
(and plus his hair looked
awesome that night.)
So for now the camera is on a tripod at the back of
The Regal or Herman's or The Bro Shack or wherever,
but if you want it,
just get a back-tattoo,
fifteen minutes of vaguely interesting conversation,
and be crazy enough to write rock songs about.