Wednesday, Aug 25, 2004

You ghostly orcas, skimming the surface from below,

The bears are back, and when we say 'bears' we mean the gentlemen carnivores of We Are Scientists; and when we say 'back' we mean beautiful to look at. Ha ha! No, we mean back in New York, natch. This paragraph so far has been a whole Batch o' Natch, hasn't it? Nothing but stuff that goes without saying. Let's maintain that trend:

• The L.A. shows went swimmingly, with us giving dynamic, gorgeously flawed performances, and with the kids in the crowd clenching their bodies tightly to keep bowels from relaxing and eyeballs from spinning in sockets. Here is a photograph we took from the stage:
  
• Like camels come across a plentiful oasis, bloating themselves with water in anticipation of returning to the sand – thus did we take of LA's delicious Mexican food. Sharky's, Dos Burritos, Benito's, Sharky's again... We ate with our eyes rolled up in our heads.

• The weather was wonderful. Sunny, clear, dry, distant-horizoned, cool in the shade, warm, breezy, yellow-sunned, blue-skied. Though we return to top-shelf weather in New York, LA maintains a certain edge. We remind you that the Reviews page of this site represents the individual opinions of band members; we feel compelled to point that out right now in order to distance WAS, the institution, from these comments made by Keith last year. Though clearly they hold true.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without a shitload of help from our friends. Big thanks go to Steven Hauptfeur, who not only put us on his Wednesday-night Radio bill, but also used his 800lb.-gorilla clout to inject us into the Vice store's Sunset Junction line-up. Ryan Kuhlman should be given John Kerry's discarded medals for his terrific efforts at putting together the beginnings of a music video with WAS, perhaps this nation's most creatively indecisive arts collective. Ariel of Dirty Little Secret gave generously of his time and produced what is initially sounding like one and a half of the best songs we've ever recorded. David from Western lent his band's equipment and part of his evening so that we'd be able to play Sunset Junction, even though we missed Western's show earlier that afternoon due to a previous commitment to that asshole Ryan, or maybe that fucker Ariel. (How quickly our loyalties shift!!) Mariko Jones made valiant efforts to get us onto several bills; that they were ultimately abortive has nothing to do with Mariko's persuasiveness or tenacity and everything to do with the fact that some booking people are just threatened by how goddamn handsome we are (scientists are). Finally, we increased our already immense debt to one Greg Fishbein, who selflessly donated his plushly carpeted floor, his Futurama library, his expansive knowledge of whisky, and a euphoric half hour of his time, cut though it was with sediment of pestle.

But we're back in New York, and the future is now. There are about a hundred shows coming up over the next month; if you miss us, you have only your seeing-eye dog to blame. The Royal Oak shows should be particularly nice, as we have TOTAL CONTROL over how things go down, and we plan on exploiting that by telling more jokes than ever, projecting slides, doing little dances, drinking more than is even remotely responsible, that sort of thing. Hey! C U there!

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