Where is my mind ?

Yesterday M had a dinner out with her dad. As they came back, she suggested we go out to MFNW (Music Fest North West). For a week, groups play every night for one hour each in 15ish concert halls around Portland, most of them around Burnside. I had a quick look at the (large) program and didn't recognize anything and figured it was expected as it would probably young underground alternative groups.

We headed to the Crystal ballroom to join Allen, but as we arrived it was sold out :(. We decided to walk on the direction back to home and pick a concert on the way. M picked the shows at Dante as she knew a song of the group that was on. We stopped by, payed 15$ each for 2.5 shows (6$ / showing). The group playing: The Moondoggies actually sounded quite good. The following group, Bobby Bare Jr. was really weird and honestly I didn't care for it.

The last one was a single, older guy with his guitar singing some bluesy, hardish, rough songs. We sounded really great. After 10 minutes I was commenting to M, that this guy really deserved to have a group with him and it would sound great. I checked again the program and saw the name "Black Francis". It didn't take me too long on wikipedia to realize that this was the guy I knew under Frank Black, formerly singer of... the Pixies... Yeah the purists will remind me that his old scene name was Black Francis... Anyway, I'll remember this night as the night I saw the singer of the Pixies for 6 bucks in a tiny room, 3 meters away :).

And yeah, he definitely would have sounded better with his band but still, he was great :). I didn't have my camera as Concert halls tend to not allow to take pictures, but this was apparently not a problem :(. So I only have phone pictures.

Concert in Caesarea

Last night we went to a Israeli-Spanish music and dance show in Caesarea. Our company had booked the roman amphitheater for the occasion and the show was great. It was a fusion of traditional spanish guitar music with a lot of heteroclyte percussions, all in a very "ethnic" style. It's quite hard to describe but we had a great time.



Additionaly to the pictures from yesterday I also (finaly) posted Bangkok and Sri-Lanka pictures on Zenfolio.

Weekend in Tel Aviv

I spent this last weekend in the city that never sleeps and... well I didn't sleep much either :). Friday afternoon an excellent lunch in a good restaurant, party during the night, saturday night Tori Amos concert and in between long promenades in the nearby parks and sea front. Tori's concert was a fantastic performance and convinced me I should listen more to her :).

I took the camera along (it's becoming an habit) and some samples can be found at the usual place. I found this scene to be pretty amusing (probably not for non french though):


And if any of you can find what the following picture is refering to, I am quite curious. Google didn't give me any easy answer.


I assume it is a reference to фронт though, but why 5 ?