feist live

feist and rogue wave played the carnegie music hall in oakland last night. i had never been before so i was pleasantly surprised by the set up. the hall is classy and well decorated, like a milder version of heinz hall. they had a significant cash bar (including scotch) set up in the lobby area. the performance area was great. it was small enough to be intimate, but roomy enough to accommodate a mid size crowd (two balconies). there was really not a bad seat in the place. rogue wave opened with a forty-five minute set including new stuff from asleep at heaven’s gate. zach’s voice rang out in its unique, mellow way during their warm glow of an act, and the setting of a music hall suited them well. leslie feist got a huge ovation when she emerged onstage for the main act and it was obvious that she could have done two hours of spoken word and everyone in the crowd (but me) would’ve been rapt. but luckily she played her own unique brand of indefinable pop/unpop music, with the help of voice loops and about twelve different instruments. it was very emotional and i was glad to let myself get sucked in. she played most of the tracks from the reminder, some from let it die, and some covers as well. she ended with an especially bluesy version of “let it die”, which was awesome. i’m pretty sure she was with broken social scene when they came to town last, so i think this is the second time i’ve seen her in person. i consider myself lucky.

rogue wave – “like i needed” (thanks to frozenblog)

feist

in honor of leslie feist coming to town tomorrow here is a clip of her performing “1 2 3 4” on letterman august twenty-seventh:



if you have a good eye, you may notice members of mates of state, the new pornographers, grizzly bear, the national, and broken social scene in the background all clad in white and sparkles. this is basically what i dream about on odd numbered days, except feist has less clothing on and i’m playing the trumpet. i’m not sure a chorus with more indie cred has ever been assembled, and they played like school children (not talent-wise but wide-eyed-like and fun).

pyt

the mtv video music awards on sunday night were the most enjoyable in ten years. they experimented with a hostless format and long cuts to a few of the many simultaneous live performances scattered about. aside from their poor choice in music (looking at you, fall out boy, linkin park) the awards show was great. right off the top we got to see a fat middle-aged woman who looked like britney spears move a total of four feet while pretending to sing a generic pop song. justin timberlake’s party looked like the best, although kanye west’s party’s girls looked the hottest/drunkest. normally i don’t like west’s music, but his new single “the good life”(thanks t-sides) samples “p.y.t.”, which i love. in fact, i was just listening to thriller last week and replayed that song over and over. coincidences like that are what cause me to believe in the myth of hip hop.

long week

so much has happened in the last week and also so little has changed. i fought a war with insects in my circuit breaker room. the verdict is still out. i caught some cloud-free sun and watched part of every televised tennis match of the u.s. open. i strained my neck muscle and couldn’t look back. or down. i turned twenty-seven, the pinnacle age of any young man’s life. i feel old and have less hope for the future. it is all downhill. i can now look backwards, and all i see is smiles. perhaps this track from the hood internet will better convey my emotional state right now: stereolab’s “miss modular” vs.edan’s “fumbling over words that rhyme”. i think if i had to be reincarnated, i’d choose to come back as stereolab.

dan deacon all weekend

the greatest thing about dan deacon’s music (listen to the crystal cat)is that he chooses lyrics for his human parts phonetically, without regard for literal meaning. bands use cadence and alliteration all the time but it’s such a breath of fresh air to make up your own meaning for strings of syllables. i like the unpretentiousness of assuming the human voice is no better or worse than any other instrument. no, i am not seeing red these days. i’m just kind of fed up with everyone’s self-importance. but deacon gives off none of that and the more i keep hearing from the baltimore scene (jones, etc.) the more i like. here’s an excerpt from a great interview:

Anyway, another thing I was interested in was your transition to pop music from more free form experimental stuff. What is it that interests you about pop?

I grew up listening to the Beatles and Kinks and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. I think pop is the music of our century and I think it would be foolish to shy away from it. It's just the most fun, and my last couple albums were a much more diverse mix of arrhythmic noise pieces mixed with strange pop pieces, and after I started touring I began enjoying the more rhythmic stuff and I sort of went into it head first and that's what I've been focusing on for a while. I mean, a band like Arab on the Radar is like a pop band but they're extremely musically violent and dissonant, even though the root of their stuff is pop, same thing as Lightning Bolt. I think that is the most innovative music can be, taking something that isn't very accessible and making it accessible, I think that's really important.

It's interesting that you say that because if you compare a Lightning Bolt show to a Shins show, for example, people move and react at a Lightning Bolt show in a way that is both more utilitarian and primal, and it's as if people have a much stronger and more important reaction and connection to stuff like Lightning Bolt, even though it's much more strange and unpredictable than a Shins show, where people don't seem to care as much.

Yeah, I also think there are obviously many different backgrounds in the audience of the independent music scene these days, and mostly it comes out of punk, ska and indie. And I think the hardcore punk and ska crowd got used to going to shows when they were kids in high school and freaking out, and I think that generation is now in this realm of discovering a new type of pop. That's the scene I came up in. I grew up on Long Island and all that was there were shows in Churches and VFW halls and kids would go just to go as crazy as they could, and then those kids went to college and saw kids just standing around at shows and it was boring as fuck. Why would anyone want to go to shows like this? Then you started seeing more weird rock bands that came through and had that dance element incorporated into them, like early Rapture back when they were much more weird and a lot less slick. Then you see a band like the Locust and Lightning Bolt, and for the live atmosphere, audience is such an important part of the show. If the audience sucks, then the show sucks.

east weekend

this past weekend was spent in the east. that is, of course, relative only to where i usually lay my head. for others it would be north. for a select few, perhaps, it would be purgatory. it was thirty six degrees (c) with what i can only describe as tea-kettle-like humidity, but the town wore it well. it was most pleasant long after the sun set and it was warm well into the darkness. i sat outside at places with fountains and string lights and vegetation. i mixed sweet drinks with bitter ones. during the day i bought a lamp made of cow skin and a couple records at a great store. i even found phil collins’ no jacket required for four dollars. it is a shame that i am not victor ward now lives in the land of spittoons and confederate flags because one of his old dwellings was pretty close to where i was. it would have been fun to hang out. if he could’ve gotten permission, of course.

lasting

this feels strange, though not in the way you would imagine. while i have essentially assumed a guest role in an arena previously (and much more prominently) occupied by my very same person, there is another issue with much more at stake. it's nice to be here.

for the first time, and at a point that coincided with the writing of this post, i viewed myself through a very incorrect vantage point. think misinterpretation meets re-evaluation, or better yet...the unfamiliar world of lacking information. i saw a person completely changed by a specific series of events, a level of interest manipulated by more than time, and the fear of consequence that follows. i thought to myself, "change, damn it, change." revert back. cycle through. rise above or duck below. but perception fades with truth, doesn't it? don't we all learn to accept the here, the now, the never will be? the scene has not influenced the protagonist. i'm three steps ahead, and that fits the script as well.

the south is nice, and by nice i mean overly heated. certain aspects of my life can currently be categorized as approximations, but i lack the time to adjust. my decisions may now be labeled as joint, but the outcomes have remained largely unchanged. i bought the very best television on the market a few weeks ago, just because i could. large amounts of humidity have the ability to change lives. i'm thinking of unsubscribing to what it's accomplishing, baby. price wrote a piece that referenced his own marriage. unsuspecting fiction is the new storytelling.

we'll talk soon. >ciao<

newman's wedding

this new york magazine article about a.c. newman and the new pornographers is short and good. so read the whole thing. however, i just wanted to comment on how newman, who is one of my indirect heroes (he is looked up to by matt pond, whom i look up to), has stolen my wedding idea. not that i ever really discussed this idea out loud or with another human, but i’d always wanted to have mates of state play at the fictional event. doesn’t a married indie rock couple seem like the perfect wedding band? not only is their aesthetic vibe right, they have both slow and fast-tempo songs (a must). and they probably don’t play poultry dance songs in which people make arm-wings. that’s a huge concern as well.

minus the bear: planet of ice

planet of ice is more of the same from the boys. that is not to say it is tired or sub-par. i was just kind of hoping for a revival of the sound from the this is what i know about being gigantic and highly refined pirates era. perhaps i’m just nostalgic for college, but i find the new album sonically very similar to their last album rather than the early stuff. they’ve always had dreamy, atmospheric vibes mixed in with their flawless technical precision, but i think the overall tempo of the last two albums has slowed down. i’d like to hear more walkmen-like drumming and quick staccato guitar instead of dreamy-long wailing. of course, though i may sound like a petulant child, i assure you i already like the album and have been spinning it nonstop since i got it. standout tracks after a couple listens are “ice monster”(thanks themilklounge!) and “throwing shapes”. the former’s chorus is just spectacular and the latter’s theme and pacing recalls “pachuca sunrise” and the best yacht-wine-stars rock of pirates.

the new real o.c.

mtv hit black gold with newport beach, the new california-based scripted reality. not only did they find kids who seem to be more at ease in front of the camera than the laguna has-beens, but they also found a better looking overall cast. the narrator is chrissy, a blondish girl with julia roberts-like teeth and overprotective parents. the way she says “daddy” every two seconds on the phone is downright hypnotic. then there are clay, grant, chase, allie, and taylor. all of them look pretty good so i wouldn’t be surprised to see any two of them together. in the first episode we actually get to see rich high school kids not look bored all the time. this show kind of makes me feel like i might have wasted my high school days solving differential equations instead of lifting every day and partying every night.

cassette

my recent reminiscing about junior high school days led me to rediscover some old cassette tapes that had been gathering dust in my attic for a while. most are compilation tapes (some dating back to 1989) containing white rap, electronic dance, and phil collins. the later tapes have some alt-rock and metal from the age of flannel. but i also found a few tapes of comedic observations that were put together in the nineties. after burning them, i reflected back on the joy of recording within the medium of the audio cassette tape. it was much more time-consuming and fun to make a compilation tape back then than it is to drag and drop and burn a mix today. it took skills to get the volume, timing, and dubbing just right. i lamented that the cassette was quickly vanishing into pop history. but then i noticed this article and took heart; it seems the tape will be around for some years to come. due to the library of congress (books on tape for the blind) and religious nuts (sermons on tape) it appears the minute current demand won’t be fading soon. and that’s’ good news for people who want to stay relevant but still listen to black box tracks on magnetic tape.

boh in pgh

band of horses, that mostly mellow, sometimes-piercing band from south carolina made their first appearance in pittsburgh last night. even though the show started late i was happy. besides, it gave me more time to down budweisers on the balcony at diesel. the crowd was not-too-big and not-too-small all at once. it was loud enough to be polite to the bands but sparse enough that i wasn’t forced to smell anyone’s back. love as laughter opened. they were mediocre as a straightforward rock trio. i must confess i didn’t listen to most of the set, as i was too busy having a discussion about old friends and drug use in philadelphia. band of horses lost no time getting into their set. they played a couple new songs from the upcoming album and a couple covers, but mostly songs from everything all the time. ben’s voice live is just like it is on the record. at times it was scary how much the band sounded like my morning jacket. i was delighted when they played “na”, which is my favorite boh song. it sounded like floating down a river. with a straw hat. and it was nice.

kavalier and clay

i finished reading the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay yesterday. it is a well-written historical fiction novel in which michael chabon, the author, deals with themes prevalent in his earlier works. loss, sexual identity, and estrangement were corners in the foundation for wonderboys and the mysteries of pittsburgh as well. i had trouble getting through the last section. it read like a horror story to me. the call of duty, routine above freedom is, in my mind, one of the stages of hell. needless to say the story affected me and i consider that to be the mark of a great novel. the writing style is familiar to any chabon reader but, in my opinion, the run on sentences and liberal use of the comma and hyphen detracted from the book, which, i think -- nay i know – was not as good as mysteries. yes, this novel won the pulitzer prize and mysteries is considered a poor-man’s catcher in the rye. but both the sentences themselves and their content are sharper and fresher in the latter. when i win the pulitzer i shall set this straight during my speech.

age old question

why does diet mug rootbeer taste so much worse than diet a&w root beer? according to the labels they both contain the same ingredients in basically the same ratios. fuck the time machine i'm working on. i need to know the answer to this first.

indian summer

i have returned from my adventure in west asia only ten per cent less disease-free (down from twenty a few days ago). although i returned six days ago i decided to wait to write this post in order to determine whether or not i was changed by the experience. the answer to that inquiry is, like the answer to everything else, ‘conditionally’ (or the colloquial “it depends”). i am not the same person i was in mid july. but i would also be slightly different even if i’d stayed in my u.s. rut. i can call myself worldly, but the truth is that india was just like i’d expected it. my eyes were not opened to poverty or developing nations. i was just forced not to ignore those things for a while. this is a controversial way to live but i’ve found no other way to be productive at the moment.

since i am lazy, i will describe the rest of my trip in words i have already used. the following is adapted from a letter to a friend:

two weekends ago a couple of us travellers went sightseeing. we went to see some temples and ruins and an open air market (dilli haat). i bought some things for a couple people (very cheap in india) by haggling, which is a skill. i got some incense down from like 200 rupees to 150 (3.5 USD). some other highlights:

-the baha'i temple. it looks like a lotus flower. it is kept silent most of the day and there are well manicured lawns around it. no shoes allowed inside the temple.

-ruins of a fort including tombs from the 1300s. i can't remember what this was called, but it was a massive thing built on a hill, with a (since dried up) moat around it. lots of bats reside inside the stone tombs. also, monkeys live around that area.

-iskcon temple, built by hare krishna followers. from the website..."Drifting an evening sitting on the stairs of this halloweed place, and pulsating to the euphonic chants amidst a tranquil ambience is a unique experience" i have to agree.

on sunday we were in the city looking for a place to eat. a guy came up to us claiming to know a "great place". so we followed him. we came to this golf-cart-like contraption that is essentially a taxi (there are thousands around the city). we thought where we were headed was close, but apparently he was going to drive us somewhere. so we got in. a few minutes later we are finally dropped off at this shady looking restaurant. fearing for our lives at this point, we walk in and walk right back out, gradually finding our way back to the place we started. i guess the point of this story is don't take rides from strangers in india. even if they offer tic tacs.

i lost three pounds even though i was sedentary on an airplane for 34 combined hours roundtrip. the food over there is pretty good but hight in carbs and low in protein. it is hard to buy whey protein from street vendors, so my diet suffered. i am now slightly weaker but not really worse for the trip and i am relishing my return to the category of “one indistinguishable from the rest”.

observation

i’ve noticed over the past couple days that indian women are just much more attractive on the whole than indian men. i’ve never been to the far east, but from my experience asian americans also exhibit this trait. as for caucasians, i do not find one sex better looking in the aggregate. perhaps i am just too imbedded in my race to have an objective opinion, but it could also be we have a fairly flat gender-attractiveness curve. i know someone will point out how this is totally subjective and that they love only asian men, but outliers aside i think i have my thumb on the pulse of attractiveness. at least enough to make generalizations like the preceding.

day one

from door to door my trip out to delhi took twenty four hours, including a fourteen hour flight. that is a long time to let your mind wander. mine ran mostly around thoughts of lost luggage and general discomfort at the sight of poverty. customs in india was pretty quick and after i arrived i soon got my first taste of the country on the ride to my hotel. the roads are utter chaos here, with no lanes and no one paying attention to traffic lights. every car is some shade of off-white and half the size in width and length of their american counterparts. the constant honking, high-beaming, and tapping of cows, bicycles, motorbikes, and autos was pretty surreal.

i have come to the conclusion that i have no internal clock. my body had no problem accepting that i should go to sleep at one a.m. local time friday morning even though that was three thirty p.m. new york time. i got up early and went to the hotel gym. making sure not to ingest any tap water, i went about my morning routine. the ride to work was like the ride to the hotel multiplied twice over. rush hour in the daylight is a sight here. there are people everywhere walking, many looking like they have no place to go. the roads are poorly paved, with outcroppings of rocks and other obstacles all over the place. it had a documentary-like quality through the windows of an air-conditioned vehicle.

last night we got a bit adventurous and decided to explore the urban area around the hotel and get something to eat. walking around was almost exactly like i had imagined it, save the one detail that there was no traditional indian music being played in the background. there were throngs of people, crossing traffic whenever they choose, making the streets come alive. there were some poor children who were taught to seek out foreigners and walk next to us looking sad, hoping for food. there were neon signs and store-fronts that gave little indication of what was inside. the sidewalk was shoddy and very unclean, forcing careful inspection of one’s path. it was both energizing and very saddening. we found a bar/restaurant that i can only describe as a “den”, and decided to eat there. it was smoky and poorly lit, pretty much the opposite of what the travel guide recommends. we got some lebanese food which was difficult to see in the dimness but tasted good. two people got sangria (a bold choice in my opinion) but i just had some beer. all i can hope is that the alcohol sanitized my stomach.

time is an illusion (2 days until travel)

i prepared for my trip overseas this weekend by filling my deodorant container and chapstick tube with hand sanitizer. i then filled my hand sanitizer bottle with hydrochloric acid. you know, just in case. i bought a pair of elephant-riding breeches (just plaid golf pants) and a couple books on tantrism. my course is set. it is only necessary for me to discover and travel it. i think one thing is certain: when i return from india i will speak in an even more convoluted and vague manner than i do today. i apologize in advance.

heart & soul, hot & cold

sometimes i am cold. more often than not, actually. but not last night. last night i found the upper temperature threshold that allows me to function. i finally had to turn on the central air when my home’s ambient temperature reached ninety degrees(f). i could still balance board and walk, but any sitting in the hundred per cent humidity and i would lose any concentration, focusing upon how skin sticks to leather instead of reruns of laguna beach. it is even worse for sleeping. i can’t sleep through the night at temperatures higher than eighty four degrees. i haven’t been sleeping well and i’ve lost three pounds due to water, but i figure that will ultimately only make me stronger. or kill me. or send me into a thin layer of existence by which i will achieve oneness with nature. hopefully it’s the third one.

nine days

i didn’t work last week so you might think that i’d have been more inspired to write about all the recent goings on. but you would be underestimating the hypnotic, lazing effects of lounging in the sun. last weekend i was up north attending the wedding of p.l.a.’s second favorite writer (the first being d.e. the guest-blogger). it was a pleasant affair, first at a college chapel and then moving to a country club setting. since ianvw was obviously occupied for most of the night and would therefore give a rather skewed account of events, i will attempt to describe the wedding night.

4:15 pm arrive at the hotel and check in.

5:00 pm drink beer while changing

5:50 pm arrive at chapel

6:30 pm leave chapel, blow bubbles at groom

7:00 pm arrive at country club for reception, notice they have hoegaarden

7:50 pm beer three halfway gone. i am enjoying the outdoor patio.

8:00 pm bride and groom enter the room as married. i think about why everyone is growing up but me.

8:15 pm buffet dinner starts. the line is fifty meters long. i enjoy conversation and beer at the table.

9:00 pm people start dancing. i don’t remember what kind of band was there. i get lost in a forty minute conversation with a bridesmaid.

10:00 pm blur.

~11:30? pm everyone young heads to the elephant and castle bar/restaurant. i am angry since this effectively kills the post-party at the hotel. i order whiskey.

1:00 am dancing around a pole with streamers in sepia scale.

the rest of last week was spent recovering and alternating watching wimbledon and reading outside. i solved sixteen su-do-ku puzzles and countless rubick cube cycles while listening to three new albums i bought. i saw old friends in town for the holiday and golfed eighteen holes on friday. i spent saturday with a friend drinking and watching movies.

in the near future i have a trip to india and a trip to meet someone i’ve never met. both could have exaggerated consequences, such as they could be greatest or worst trips ever. depending upon the temperature in india and the food and my conversion to hindu, i could see it going either way. and as for the other trip, it will all depend upon how my friend reacts when she finds out i’m neither a prince nor a millionaire but only a bachelor.