The Robot Co-op

Last night over beers we decided that each day’s loser of Credit Card Roulette (where we pick a random credit card to determine who pays for lunch) gets hasty revenge on one of their coworkers. The loser is allowed to deem one other person the official notes-keeper of the lunch discussion, having to write a post about it by the end of the day. This is partly to prevent our blog from atrophying, partly to reduce the staggering pace of our product development so y’all can catch your breath, and partly to celebrate the idea that forming a company institutionalizes the act of eating lunch together. (Josh likes to point out that etymologically, your com-pany is the people you share bread with.) We’ll see how long this tradition lasts.

Today Hodel paid for lunch and I have to write about our discussion of punk rock. The conversation can be condensed into this haiku:

Punk is as punk does
Punk was as punk used to do
Josh is teh crazy

The long version is that Josh views “indie rock” as a meaningless marketing term and considers all bands that have punk-like intentions to be punk rock. I heard about Josh and Erik’s debate at the show last night and also disagreed that Tapes ‘n Tapes are punk. I further disagreed that the Crocodile is a punk rock club, even though they often book punk bands, and insisted that the Funhouse is a punk rock club, even though they often book non-punk bands. I suggested that Punk is more of an attitude than a collection of musical ideas, that musicality itself is often considered a liability in punk rock. The cultural basis of the genre is one reason Josh can have a much broader definition of punk, yet simultaneously consider it a more important distinction than me or Erik or Dan. So I totally won.

I had a mediocre hamburger with a fried egg on it, which has become a strange tradition for me at the Coastal Kitchen. Daniel broke with tradition by avoiding the extraordinary Cobb Salad. Jason is in town and got to enjoy (or had to endure) another Robot debate.