It was fitting that I caught Alexander Proyas’ “Dark City” on cable the other day. In case you’ve never watched it, it is set in some noir city where it seems like it’s always night, and for some reason there doesn’t seem to be a way out of it. One of the characters comes to realize this and basically goes insane, repeatedly drawing spirals everywhere he goes. (Wow, that’s weird, I just realized that this happens in China Miéville’s book Iron Council as well—one of the characters goes around the city of New Crobuzon drawing spirals everywhere. Totally different meaning, though.)

I ended up watching two out of the five bands playing at Lolopop, which featured Filipino American musicians. The one that drew me (and the only one I recognized) was Julie Plug which I blithely described to Andy as a girl-fronted alterna-pop band (which was apparently the fad in the late ‘90’s) I first heard about them in the waning years of my college career, introduced by Manny. Their first CD ”Starmaker” rapidly spread virally amongst my friends and there are quite a few memories attached to some of their songs (in particular ”Sometime in June”) We watched a couple of shows, the last of which was in SF in 1998 after we all graduated.