• The main NXNE venues are usually no fun later in the evening because they are incredibly packed.
• There are always a few douchebags who wait until the band is about to start, push and elbow their way to the front and then spend the band’s set shouting loudly into each others’ ears.

Why yes, I was at the Man or Astroman show last night.

I think the big thing that literally took the energy out of the night was that the power went out in downtown Toronto just after 10 p.m. and as the Poison Arrows were only a song or two into their set. By the time the electricity came back set times were out of whack, which made it difficult to count on the schedule for the other venues, so I decided to spend the rest of the night at the Horseshoe.

Templo Diez
9 p.m. at Bread and Circus

But before that I started the night out at Bread and Circus, where Templo Diez, a moody, slow-moving post-rock band from The Netherlands, were playing. I felt bad for them when they started because there were only four people in the room. But people slowly trickled in and ended up having a decent crowd to watch their intense 40-minute set. At times, I thought they reminded me of the Arcade Fire if they drained the Springsteen out of them.

Poison Arrows, Wussy, Man or Astroman
10 p.m., 11 p.m. midnight at the Horseshoe

This may have been one of the most memorable gigs of Chicago’s Poison Arrow’s career. It was during their performance that the power went out in downtown Toronto. They were able to play an abbreviated set when things got rolling again. They were a little NoMeansNo-ish, very technical.

Wussy from Cincinnati are your basic fuzzy indie-pop band. Their vocalist kinda reminded me of Erika Wennerstrom from the Heartless Bastards at times.

Man or Astroman sure took their sweet time getting ready. And when they started, their stuff kept falling apart. Maybe it was a night that just wasn’t meant to be. I didn’t stay for Mudhoney.

Justin Rutledge, Oh Susanna and Danny Michel
9 p.m. at Lee’s Palace
I got to Lee’s Palace a little early and caught the last half of legendary songwriter Andy Kim’s set. You may remember him as the guy behind “Rock Me Gently” and, I did not know this, was also the guy who wrote “Sugar Sugar” for The Archies back the 1960s.

Justin Rutledge, Oh Susanna and Danny Michel, each took turns showcasing one of their songs in their brief 35-minute set. The highlight for me was a one-chord song that Danny Michel played. And Oh Susanna played a song I remember hearing from her years ago, but I don’t know the name of. It was a perfect way to start the night.

Andy Swan, Camp Radio
10 and 11 p.m. at Clinton’s

This was part of the Kelp Records showcase. I’ve been a fan of songwriter Chris Page for some years now (and wrote a story on him on the old Shred site) and while I missed his solo set earlier in the evening I was determined to catch him with his full band Camp Radio. And I’ve always thought Kelp Records put out quality music so I thought I’d check out Andy Swan as well.

Andy Swan was ok, kind of twangy, but I thought too many songs had the same tempo.

Camp Radio started out a little rough, with the mix being to high on the bass. Having said that, though, that bass player contributes so much to their sound, and he is a helluva player that it was interesting to just hear what he was doing. Their distorted, hooky power-pop were a definite highlight of the night for me.

I would have stuck around for the rest of the night and am disappointed to have missed Andrew Vincent, but I wanted to catch the Diaboleros.

Diaboleros
Midnight at the Comfort Zone

The Diableros were just ok. I left early. The Comfort Zone, where they were playing, has a weird vibe.

Ben Stevenson and the Wondertones
1 a.m. at The Supermarket

Ben Stevenson was a pleasant surprise when I was doing research on the bands who were playing this year’s festival. His blue-eyed soul music had the potential to be really cheesy. Or at least looking like an end-of-year Humber College Jazz Combo recital. But no, he was high energy, the horn section was awesome, and everyone had a good time.

The Soft Pack
2 a.m. at the Silver Dollar

It was either this, a “surprise” performance by San Diego garage-rock band The Soft Pack or heading down to the Bovine to see Walter Schreifels, which was the original plan. I ended up at the Silver Dollar for the simple reason that I didn’t want to walk all the way to Queen and Bathurst and gamble that there would be no line-up. I’m glad I stayed. They reminded me a bit of the Smugglers.

There were some things I didn’t know, such as:

Say you you write a public update, saying, “My boss had a crazy great idea for a new product!” Now, you might not know it, but there is a Facebook page for “My Crazy Boss” and because your post had all the right words, your post now shows up on that page. Include the words “FBI” or “CIA,” and you show up on the FBI or CIA page.

That’s just wrong.

But Singel goes on to say that he’d like to do things like support an cause without the whole world knowing, or have a profile that friends can see but not his boss.

This, I think is the real issue and goes beyond mere privacy and more to the point of ownership of a person’s social graph. And that goes to who owns a person’s data on Facebook. Facebook seems to believe that they do, according to some of the changes they are making. I’d like to see that issue straightened out once and for all because that would, in an ideal world where the individual owns their graph data, allow for a platform that allows for a granularity of privacy set by individuals themselves, and work toward towards the goal of eventual convergence (or at least some kind of standardization) of the major social media platforms.

For example, I would like one place where I can create lists of people in my network and seperate them into lists like work and personal. Right now, there is a wall between them because I use Facebook mostly for personal and LinkedIn almost primarily for business networking. But there is a little bit of cross over and it would be nice to be able to reach between those two worlds without having to use two separate tools.

But at the same time, I can understand some of Facebook’s moves. They are, after all, in business to make money, and I don’t have a problem with them taking my personal information such as location, date of birth, or even interests, to sending targeted ads when I log in. It’s just the abuse of that power that I have issues with.

Having said all this, I think this is an exciting time. Many of the complaints from Wired and so forth I think are more a result of the technology still being fairly immature. Like any growing industry, mistakes will be made, growth will happen, and who knows, in five years or so all these arguments will be behind us and we’ll be bitching about something else, but enjoying a stable environment in which we conduct our social activities online.

• Anonymity is for sure a big reason why people seem to act like dicks on message forums. Newspapers in particular seem to be a breeding ground for anti-social commentary. Canwest, who seem to have more angry teenagers than others, seem to have taken a more visitable role, this message conspicuously removed and replaced by a message saying that the comment was removed. Check out this example and then for giggles, check out this example for some quality discussion.
• On Fark.com it seems that the posters who are the most thoughtful have a picture in their profile.  The trolls and usually have nothing or a statement proclaiming how badass they are.
• Facebook is an interesting example. On one discussion thread there was some guy talking about whatever and where he was attacked and mocked for making a typo. Somewhere along the lines of “Ha Ha You fuggen loser you can’t even spell LOL! LOL!” So I had to see what an honest-to-god Internet Tough Guy looked like and I clicked on the link to his profile. Let’s just say that, yes, Ed Hardy and indoor sunglasses were involved. One interesting experiment may be to examine trollish behavior on Facebook and see how many anonymous features their profile has and how much they lock it down in their privacy settings.

Anyway, it’s my view that organization that have communities that are overrun with aggressive and abusive members really do damage to their brand. It goes to the point that implementing the community technologies is the easy part. Growing it into something healthy is something else that takes time patience and leadership. Otherwise, as Cracked said, they won’t get participation from the functional adults who don’t want to be called a Shitwhale in public.

An issue of Flipside from 1989

Flipside’s back!

Read it here!

Hudley from the original Flipside has resurrected the seminal punk rock zine that published from 1977 until 2001 or so.  She has certainly captured the spirit of the old zine and engaged many of the old writers. (I suspect thought that this is likely a bunch of friends having a few beers and deciding to get something going again. You know, like a zine.)

It does seem a bit weird to see a Flipside without Al Flipside but it’s also nice to see that it’s still a zine that shows its writers getting hammered before gigs, although wow some staffers have aged, um, interestingly.

If they manage to keep this going I would love to see some of the old columns come back, and try and get Shane of the infamous Shaneshit column he wrote from jail after multiple convictions of armed robbery.

It might seem quaint now but in the days before Suicide Girls and emo-porn, Flipside was the place for pictures of naked punk chicks. There was another zine that did as well, but it was all it focused on and wasn’t as fun.

Anyway, welcome back!

Don’t be a witness.