A Brief Note About Artists Suffering from Terminal Cranial-Rectal Inversion

This note on Asthmatic Kitty’s web site has me seeing red.  For those of you not in the know, the enigmatic Sufjan Stevens is embarking upon a small tour of the Northeastern and Midwestern US with Cryptacize*.  The long & the short of the note is that the Stevens & Cryptacize are playing a number of shit-small venues for a “variety of very good reasons”, not the least of which is ostensibly keeping down the cost of tickets.  Stevens, who hasn’t toured the US extensively in years, had to know that the announcement of anything other than an odd one-off show would be met by hordes of rabid fans, and sadly scalpers, snapping up his tickets faster than any evil ticket empire could print them.  While it’s all well and good to say that ticket venues will be checking IDs and preventing people who bought multiple sets of tickets from entering venues, I have a feeling this practice will become a government fire drill in practice.  Even smaller venues will have to open up doors hours in advance to check tickets and IDs against master lists to prevent scalped tickets from entering the door, which I just don’t see happening.  Bad fucking move, Mr. Stevens.

* NOTE: I don’t know who the fuck Cryptacize is, either.  Their self-important MySpace page (to which I will not link since I’m irritated…if you want it, go find it yourself) describes their music as “Flamenco/R&B/Showtunes”.  The name sounds like gay Latino experimental hip-hop to me, but I probably would have counseled Gibbard, Walla & Co. to pick any other name besides Death Cab for Cutie.