3... 2... 1.. Awesome!

I hit up the Good Luck Mr. Gorski show at 321 this weekend with Kayla, Adam, Kristi, Justin and Jordan. It was just about the coolest, most fun thing I have ever done.

The show started out with Tim, the owner of the place, playing guitar while another guy read poetry under the soft glow of a table lamp. Tim introduced themselves as something other than Travis Bickle, the group name that the flier had announced themselves as, and got things started. He apologized for his broken arm and explained how it was kind of hard to play the guitar with it.

Not too many of the poems had names. The only one that I remember, because it was so ridiciously funny, was introduced as "'Untitled' or 'Summer's Escaping Dreams.'" Honestly, I don't remember what the poem was called after untitled, but it was something long and specific; quite the opposite of just "Untitled."

Nevertheless, when he read through the first poem, I was totally blown away. His voice and the guitar riffs blended perfectly to create an ambiance impossible not to get lost in. I wish that I had written down some parts of his poem so I could throw it here but basically it was a long list of things that he would rather be doing rather than being there at the moment.

For some of the rest of his poems, the poet played some cassette tapes of spoken word in slow motion. I couldn't identify what the cassette tapes were saying but, again, everything just sounded perfect when he read along with it.

Another cool happened when Tim set his guitar aside and started playing along with the poetry on the keyboard. He used a pedal to capture a small drum loop he played on the keyboard which then repeated it over and over throughout the rest of the soem, song-poem. (or would it be better to call it pong? poem-song?) With the drum loop being played by the pedal magics, Tim was freed up to play some simple stuff on the keyboard along with the loop and the poems being read. Again, I don't think I've done justice describing what they did. It's just not something that you can understand, you have to experience it.

Hands down, the best poem read by the poet was near the end of the show. There wasn't any fancy music stuff along with the poem, just the slow-motion cassette tape voices. In the poem, he talked about how scientists had gotten things wrong. He said "Scientific laws are flawed. Even the speed of light is not constant. If I were to fix all the laws, I would replace the speed of light with sadness. Energy would equal mass times sadness squared." At this point I had the biggest, goofiest smile on my face and let out a laugh. I didn't look around to check, but I'm sure no one else found the poem as funny as me. He went on "light may glow or dim, but sadness is constant."

I'm not even sure why I found that so funny. We have been going over quantum physics and the properties of light in chemistry lately so the poem was somewhat relevant to my life. Today in chemistry, Mr. Spencer said e=mc squared for some reason which made Kayla and I laugh.

After Not Travis Bickle was done performing, Tim said that it was time to give out door prizes to the people that wore costumes. Keep in mind that everyone there at 321 are the mellowest people in the world. They're the kind of cool people that would give someone all their money while being mugged without a fight and then ask them for their phone number so that they could go out to coffee sometime and chat.

There weren't too many people that were dressed up for Halloween. There was a woman carrying her baby dressed up in a cute pea pod costume, a twenty-something-year old guy dressed up like an old-time gentleman with a top hat and cane, a girl the same age dressed up like a bum and, my favorite, a guy dressed up as an intern from the Zissou Society decked out with a red beanie, short blue shorts, a glok and all. After handing out bags of candy and Value Village gift certificates to the winners, Tim encouraged everyone to eat some candy and get hyped up for Good Luck Mr. Gorski in the most mellow tone ever.

Good Luck Mr. Gorski took the stage and talked a little bit about the first time he played a show here on Halloween weekend last year. His entire set was great. He shared some new songs with us and played a few that he hadn't originally planned on playing. I guess that we were just that great of an audience.

It was great to see him perform live. He used to be a big deal on myspace but I had never paid much attention to him. A while ago, Adam had went and seen him perform and really liked him. He picked up his CD and told me that Good Luck Mr. Gorski was some good stuff. I believed him and listened to his album a few times without it ever really sticking to me. After seeing him life and buying his album myself, I can't get enough of him.

After another brief intermission between acts, a guy who called himself Thanksgiving took the stage. The first thing that he did was ask us all to scoot our chairs in close around the stage so that he didn't feel so distant. He got through one or two songs on his electric guitar, which sounded great, before deciding that we were all close enough to the stage for him to sit down on the edge and rock out with the acoustic guitar.

One girl in the audience told him that he promised to do a sing-along song when he came to 321. She didn't have any specific song in mind so he whipped out this quick one where everyone in the audience would sing "you say we're alone" or something like that and he'd sing things back to us. Singing along was fun but not as good as humming along.

We were all led in a sweet hum-along song right after the sing-along. Adrian, I think that was his real name, instructed us to go "Hmmmmmm. Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm. Hmmmm," taking it down about half a step between each hum over and over while he sang. He ended the humming song kind of abruptly and left everyone still humming after the song was long over. It was cool. The oh-along song was similar to the hum-along but we all said "Ooooooo. Ooooooo. Ooooooo. Ooooooo." Up and down all over the place instead of humming. The oh-along was a lot harder than the hum along.

My three favorite songs that he played were about a bag of chips on an over-pass, changing the world and art.

The bag of chips song would talk about different times that he passed over some highway over-pass and notice a bag of chips on the side of the road. Between each verse, the bag of chips would change. He started out saying "I think it's a Sun Chips bag," then he said it was a Cheetos bag and said it was a Funions bag the last time.

Asking for questions or comments between many of his songs, I asked him what his favorite kind of chips were. Little did I know, that question led everyone into a lengthy conversation about the ins and outs of the chip world. He initially said that he liked Sun Chips a lot but then said he liked eating healthy foods like diet chips but for no political reason at all. That all led into a story about the reference to the Funions in the song in which Adrian told us how he once bought a giant bag of Funions. He told us how the bag started out great but, as time went on, just got to the point where they burnt his mouth with their sweetness. Adam compared the sensation spot-on to the way your mouth feels after eating lots of Cap'n Crunch. It was a good conversation.

His other great song, about changing the world, had a good conversation after it too. The song toyed with the idea about what he would say if he could have one thing to tell everyone to change the world. I forget if he ever made a final decision of what to say to the world in his song.

When he finished playing the song, he asked us all what we thought about it. He explained how he knew that we people are always changing stuff in the world by moving stuff around but that he meant change the word in the more altruistic sense; like how a kid dreams of growing up to be president and changing the world to make it a better place. To show us the difference between changing the world by moving things and the altruistic sense, he nudged his water jug from one place on the stage to another and made sure that we didn't all think that that's what he meant by changing the world in his song. It was funny.

Thanksgiving's last song was about art. He told everyone to not judge his music or the way he danced and that when someone sings, it goes far deeper than just them standing or sitting somewhere and saying what's on their mind. He said that when he paints, he's not painting for us anyways and that he'll ignore anything that any of us have to say.

I liked the way that he said it in his song. It was the most accurate description of pure art I have ever heard. Ignoring things people say about your art is one thing when people are cutting it down but in his song he made it seem like he wouldn't care what anyone said if they were cutting his art down or praising it. Being able to ignore what people say about your art when they are praising it just because you really did do it for yourself and not to be praised is awesome. I've never done that. Everything I do here on the site is so that people will laugh at it and tell me how great I am.

Overall, it was a good night. No, it was a great night. Or was it a blue-night? I'm not sure anymore. I'll stick with awesome-night.