Thursday and Friday I worked on The Bike With 2 Brains a bit during the day — just like last year, painting parts. On Friday night Ali and I headed to Betty Meyer's Bullwinkle Café (622 Lake Ave., a.k.a. "Bullwinkle's") By the time we arrived, Autumn In Halifax was midway through his set. I've seen Dave be more focused and do a tighter set, but Bullwinkle's brings out the laid-back in anybody. Next was Carbonic who did his good muted-vocal acoustic. I realized that whenever I hear him, around the third song I'm thinking he's pretty interesting, but since his style doesn't vary much (or at least something about his style) that by the eighth song, I don't like it anymore. Anyway, we stayed through Idatel who are this chaos-rock styled band with drums, guitar, banjo, and accordion ... they were interesting and complex but would do much better at more of a rock-venue. Ali noted that "they have fantastic melodies."

On Saturday I got up pretty early and quickly set up a simple flyer for The Bike With 2 Brains to identify the website mostly. Around 3 I headed to ARTWalk (University Ave. at Atlantic Ave.) and got in touch with the coordinators. I set it up in the parking lot near East Avenue at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) No pictures really capture it operationally as the whole trick is in its chaotic motion — the illusion that you can easily navigate through cooperation. A few friends of mine showed up and I was really glad that Dave from Autumn In Halifax got a chance to see it because he let me use some of his music with it. In all, there were probably 60 people who stopped by to check it out and about 20 who tried it. Toward the end of the event I was horsing around on it and broke one of the welds on the back — not surprisingly, really: every time I upgrade the frame so it won't break, I make it a little bit stiffer, and now it's tougher than before but more in some ways more brittle, so it won't flex enough to permit sharp impacts. Oops.

Monday evening I made it out to The Bug Jar (219 Monroe Ave.) Ordinarily it's 1980's DJ night and this was no exception. However, they also featured a couple bands early-on. First up was Roger Houston and I was pleased that there were 15 or so people who got to see him. I've admired his clean, simple solo-synth-pop sound [thankfully that's written because I'd hate to have to speak that description]. Kind of like hi-fi low-fi: his equipment offers good quality sound but the experience is that of a basement-band. After he finished, they decided to let one of the DJ's have a crack for a while. The songs were quite good and a lot of people got up to dance, so I was concerned that the second band would either get bumped entirely (and they came all the way from Florida) or the crew wouldn't like them.

Fortunately, once Yip Yip got going, it seemed people liked them. The band is this duo who are completely covered in black-and-white checkered-print and who play this great, "dreamland" synth-pop. The music is rather catchy and disorienting, and combined with the absurd visuals, it feels like you're watching a dream. It's the kind of band that Tim Burton would put into one of his movies if he needed a band, and they conveniently would already sound a bit like Danny Elfman and/or Oingo Boingo.

Tuesday night I went to The Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Gimme Shelter. It's essentially a documentary that follows The Rolling Stones on their United States tour that culminated in the free show at the Altamont Speedway in California. At that final show, The Hells Angels were acting as bouncers/security and ended up stabbing a guy to death — an act caught on film, further revealing that he had drawn a gun. The film is structured as footage of a song each at several cities on the tour interspersed by the Stones' reactions to the violence at Altamont. Through this, the whole tour seems ominous and tense — it's really quite unnerving to watch.

The whole thing got me to thinking about conflict and its resolution. In one sense, if a guy pulls a gun he has it coming. I guess my thought is that there are other ways to handle such a situation. The Hells Angels have been known as a group who uses violence as a universal solution, so in a way, a coldly rational, inhuman solution would be to eradicate the Angels — I mean, they tend to act like wasps in that if the others think you've injured one of them, you're in a world of hurt, so to avoid erroneous attacks, murder is the only logical solution.

However, it's really the capacity to quickly kill another person that exacerbates the problem. I mean, it takes a lot of effort to kill another person with your bare hands — at least given that there's an even match, and alternatively, at least much longer a process than pulling the trigger on a gun or even the slash of a knife (which are actually more deadly up close, and perhaps even more deadly close than guns are at a distance.) Diplomacy is only possible if you've got the time to do it, so in a situation where people can kill one another quickly, it's really not effective. When thinking of the lightning pace of a fight, it's comparatively strange how blandly sterile courtrooms are — without weapons, crime and violence seem like an abstract concept rather than a concrete reality.

In the end, I'd rather have cooler heads prevail. Fewer dead people that way.

• A Lion in the House (at The Little) - According to The Internet Movie Database's summary, "Five families struggle with the ups and downs of cancer treatment over the course of six years."
• An Inconvenient Truth (at The Little) - Despite efforts by Exxon-Mobil to hide it (see, "Put a Tiger In Your Think Tank" from Mother Jones Journal) it appears that climate change is upon us.
• Down in the Valley (at The Little) - A delusional man thinks he's a cowboy [can't ... resist ... sarcasm] and thinks that's all it takes to be President.