A Tale of Two Shins *

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Liz, what the hell are you doing looking totally unmetal and posing with Beefcake the Mighty. We'll get to that in a minute.

It was an eventful weekend filled with excitement and brutal physical pain, the latter occurring completely as a result of the former. Take Friday night, when I was so busy dancing to Dinky's set in the balcony of Boardner's that I turned around and banged right into a footstool/chair, thus bruising my left shin. The following day, in an attempt to race through the crowd towards the entrance of the Anaheim Convention Center, I walked straight into a fire hydrant, subsequently bruising my right shin.

Yes, Anaheim. Much as I hate ever having to travel across the county line, there are times when it must be done. For example, NAMM. I covered the event for the LA Weekly, with a focus on the DJ gear. There was a lot of it, so I zoomed in on three pieces. Go read the story when you are finished with this.

If you're in the market to see musicians, NAMM is definitely the place to be. I can't even tell you how many people we recognized, let alone the amount of unrecognizable faces with recognizable names that probably passed us. At some point in time, I practically screamed, "Oh, my God, GWAR!" That's when Carlos took my picture with Beefcake the Mighty.

We also caught Roger O'Donnell, the great keyboardist for The Cure (need I remind you of that truthful quote from South Park "Disintegration is the best album ever"), from back when the band had a keyboardist, playing over at the Moog booth.



The members of Shiny Toy Guns were there and I had the chance to talk to Sisely Treasure for a little bit. Like me, she was keen on checking out the new Serato systems.



As far as Serato madness goes, I'm intrigued by both Vestax and Numark's work, but I think I'll stick with my turntables for now. As I said to my friend Robert on the phone today, it seems to be less of a pain to carry a few crates of records to a gig than to have to import my entire collection into my computer.

* The title this entry might also be the title of an episode of Shin Chan. If it isn't, it should be.