Wednesday, April 17
Hooooboy. I'm going to write about yesterday and our little adventure that carried on over to this morning. Ben says that nobody likes to read my block paragraph catchup entries; i will try to avoid making the paragraphs so monolithic this time. But hey, it's my thang. Ignore the incompletes below, and they'll probably go away.
It was a Tuesday morning on less than six hours of sleep, wrapping up with Hume, writing a few pages in un petit livre bleu before checking out of class early, and syntax syntax. Sharples lunch with DJ Mark Angelillo ("only if you're willing to sit outside") enjoying the frustratingly good Sharples menu (too much good stuff - I didn't even get to the pierogies) of chef salad, chicken bbq sandwich, and lattice fries (unfortunately they weren't the usual kind, they were "savory," which apparently means "deep-fried.") Not great, you know, but good summer food, and talking about party. Jenny Yim was not in her office, which frusts, nor did I talk with Goundie about this new outdoor party stipulation (!?), but picked up a valentines red course catalog, paged through for ideas. Not much stuck out as appealing (what is Discourse Analysis again and do I want to take it?) except the things I already had my eye on - culture stuff: Dada & Surrealism, Bach, ModAmerComposers, Film Studies (conflicts with the Arth Seminar - please someone else take the seminar with me.) Vague options - stuff I may want to take sooner or later: Foundations, CompSci 21, P+P, Intro to Spanish Lit, French 3 (?), nah.
Thinking I was going to have a nice long afternoon to write here and stuff like that, I set to work on music 48-ness, googling for Bartók and so on. I got about four sentences down when Ben called and gave the go ahead. The previous night he had been pretty pessimistic about wanting to make the seven-hour roundtrip for a concert that would be no boon to his flagging health, so I had resigned myself to not going. But now he was up for it, he decided. The right choice. For him especially. "There's a train in three hours." So my mission was clear - I typed up the two record reviews you see below (not my finest work, but hopefully they're hyperbolic enough to get the point across that these albums freaking rule) and sent them off to Duffy-Greenburg-land, changed my clothes (adidas, loonshirt, scruffy stuff), stuffed a pack (throw pillow, lightweight longsleeve, toothbrush, earplugs, cloudsplitter, and headed to meet him at Sharples. Couldn't find him, so I sat with Louisa and octet splinter group, which made for hysterics as usual, esp. latest developments in the Fiona saga ("usually I would have said no, but since I fell in love with someone I hated, then maybe"). But it was too hot to eat - just picked at Caribbean bar (I thought it said "Canadian") and a lemon-meringue pie. Many trips back to the water-cooler to fill up for the train ride, and I grabbed some bagels and fruit. And then we took off, leaving Kate and pal, en route to Paul "celery-cruncher" McCartney concert, at 30th street.
Just missed a train that left a few minutes after we arrived, so we scrounged the Amtrak gallery FYE music store for accessory bargains. Bits of reading (Petit Prince-okay, can I just say? should this be underlined and italicized?) but mostly talk, as we missed the 7:40 from Trenton because of slow ticket machines, caught the 8:20 instead, and walked a few blocks from Penn to our destination: about Worthstock, SAC, and WSRN. Frustration and hope.
The line outside the Hammerstein Ballroom seemed ridiculously long, with multiple gaps allowing access to the lobbies of buildings further down the block, but they herded us through quite quickly, gave a cursive glance through Ben and my bags, clicked their clickers, and we were inside. What an awesome venue. A huge open floor, and several layers of spacious seated balconies. A lighting setup in the center of the room projected swirling patterns on a flying-saucer shaped holographic disc hanging vertically above the stage. Following Ben's footsteps, I made our way to the front of the venue, about five feet behind the metal railing that created a five-foot gap between crowd and stage; for a while I was standing right at the railing, with our backpacks stashed at its foot. Then a big one-time frat guy barged in to me with his mini-handbag girlfriend, they complained about driving seven hours to find themselves not on the guest list after all. They shared space pretty well - actually, considering it was a sold out show, it didn't feel terribly crowded at all. I would have expected more rabid Chems fans pushing up towards the front, but things were pretty chill. It was an older crowd - probably fans from '97 - not surprising given the ticket price. Opener was DJ Pete Tong, who had presumably been spinning for a while when we showed up (start time 9:00, our arrival about 10:15), and I was enjoying it, particularly a fuzzed out "I Would Die 4 U" and later on the vocoder track from "Harder Faster Better Stronger" over some straighter funky stuff. In general his choices were nice and varied and danceable, although his transitions were pretty standard, and he pulled some cringe-moments like a Martin Luther King speech over some blase trance. Towards the end of his set (last half hour?) his equipment started screwing up, which was especially weird because he didn't even seem to care. He kept doing the same things over, and it seemed like everything he touched screwed something up. It definitely wasn't intentional. He slipped on something which Ben first recognized and then I confirmed as David Byrne - then I remembered hearing about a house single he collaborated on. It's called "Wicked and Lazy," and it's awesome, I'm trying to figure out how to get a copy. Then he had some weird rock guitar house a la Apollo 440 with "God Save the Queen" lyrics over it, which went on for way too long, then he cut it off abruptly. Weird.
A synth-washed version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" flooded the arena, as smoke machines started blasting away and spotlights scanned all over the place. The tune looped the line "surrender to the void," and the mob of techies on stage left to reveal a gleaming white platform for the brothers with high sloping walls that looked like a bathtub or the prow of a ship. The disc-shaped thing flew up to be perpendicular and over top of it. Both of those turned out to be the fields for visual projections. They got on stage and screwed around a bit, headed towards what I had predicted would by "Come With Us." It was much more interesting live, after the first few minutes when they started changing things up, and the projections showed cutout figures of businessmen, dancers, and gunmen. A spoken loop announced the next number - "Block Rockin' Beats" (pictures of buildings) and of course everyone went crazy with it. Ben and I had a great little space for ourselves - enough room to dance a bit, and a dynamite unblocked view of the stage - although we had to defend a few times, when the crazy dancers (and later a belligerent drunk or two) came barging through. The next song was, I guess, "Music:Response," but the next one I recognized was "It Began in Afrika," for which the visual was just the scrawled title. It was far better live - they stuck with the hip-hop section for longer, although they did hang on to the spoken bit perhaps too much. Some more stuff, and eventually - I think I guessed it before most people, because there was a very distorted version of the "darude" riff without the correct pitches - Star Guitar. By this time curtains at the back of stage had drawn aside to reveal another huge screen for projections - and this time they had kalaidescopic images of stars, with the two-faced woman silhouette from the single cover. This was great, very high energy, although they never really kicked the opening "dee-dee-dee-dee-dee" riff, just looped the other sections and played with them. They made good use of the handclap rhythm, fitting a bassline to it and adding a whole other groove to the song. And then the vocals came in, and we were charmed. They didn't do my dream cut-off, instead one more like the record, and then things kind of died down for a while. Was that it? I wondered briefly, as they did some lackluster noodling with the dials. But no, they kept on going, for what amounted to a second set. Starting with Ben's fave (which I have to admit is incredibly seductive) "Sunshine Underground," with lovely red sunrises in the background, and then when the beat kicked in big and they went crazy for what must have been ten minutes - faces of children and adults with bizarre color patterns and designs - kind of creepy. There was a lot of stuff I didn't really know, including "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" and more from Surrender, and they played short riffs on, I think, "Setting Sun" and "Denmark." "Electrobank" was good and went on for a while. All of these were brilliantly mixed together - the transitions were long and flawless and tons of fun, as they kept you guessing what would come next. Somehow all of this faded into a pepped up "The Test" (not as good as they think it is) with cool visuals that looked like a girl swimming through Orbitz. Some more noodling, and they left the stage. Of course, in this day and age, the encore wasn't far behind. And since they left all their sequencers and drum machines running, the noise didn't even stop while they were offstage. But they returned and launched into "My Elastic Eye" from the new one, with cool glockenspiel stuff, which was fun and goofy. Nice beat. That kind of faded out too, before what I had been expecting as the encore: "Private Psychedelic Reel," maybe their best tune ever. Started out with a round stained-glass panel picture of Christ on the saucer thing, and then a kaleidescope of religious stained-glass images, then rows and rows of eyes, then greasepainted clown mouths. The tune went on forever, it felt like, and I just flung myself around, clinging to the railing which by this point we had regained. Awesome awesome. They never did the stuttering breakdown, just kept pausing and then kicking back in with the full fill and beat. Then some more noodling that didn't lead anywhere, although Ben thought it was going to. And that was it. Ben stood around to shake the lighting guy's hand, and we followed the hordes along 34th, picking up LP-sized posters of the album cover: one from the ground and one begged from a guy who had four of them. We sat in the metro station chatting with a sexy Bucknell grad and his English girlfriend, who it turned out were friends with one of Ben's acquaintances. That meant we were on the wrong train, but it was okay - as we got out to walk a bit further than necessary, Ben stopped a guy that he recognized from somewhere, and he turned out to be an artist from something-or-other. Mostly ignoring "Tony Macaroni"'s request for ticket money back to Buffalo, we made it to 3rd and 11th, called Jesse from the phone downstairs. He came to sign us in, and led us to his charming if disgustingly messy little suite, with artist-roomate, canvases around the walls and tables, dishes piled up in the sink, ashtray on the couch, sticky floor. We were able to filter some water through a Brita, which I was in dire need of. Jesse played us a few cuts from "Hasidic New Wave," and we dozed off.
Less than five hours later, at 7:00, the alarm rang, and we dragged ourselves up and out, bid Jesse goodbye, sorry to crash and run, and made it back to Penn with enough time to grab some breakfast at a croissant shop - egg and cheese roll, mango sweet snapple. The 8:10 to Trenton fed directly into the 9:something to Philly, and Ben and I both slept almost the entire way, me resting on my throw pillow and he on my shirt. There was a gap at 30th street, where we waited about half an hour, so I went back to the FYE and bought another 200-CD organizer (I'm going to need at least that to handle all the new acquisitions this year), which was on sale for $12.99 (marked down from $40 - not bad at all, thanks for the tip Ben.) The 11:11 got us back on campus before 11:45, immediately behind Lela and Rebecca (coming back from Ed obs), and well-rested enough (in my case at least) to get on with the day. I showered (aah), changed, churned out a decent Music 48 paper in under an hour, e-mailed stuff, and headed out again. Printed in Beardsley (mine is a fool), picked up the Dewey from Ali, Yim still not in, and waited in Whittier 3+5 for Kari. Admired the Math dept. kitchen, complete with "observations" sheet on the microwave ("minute * n = n minutes on high," "2 *beverage = really hot cup of coffee.") Sweltery. Magic Eye books in her office; and she referred me to a paper about VP-deletion that promises is fun and lucid. Sounds good. Then to Lang, handed in paper ("a step in the right direction, sweetie") and a somewhat frustrating (for me - although he's still on his happy-with-me kick) lesson; this not practicing is causing technique and progress to suffer, although I pulled off a halfway decent memorized Allegro. I will get there. Must practice for real this week - I should hopefully have the time for it. Back here, sitting and sweating, listening to Led Zep I and Come with Us and now Rings - the Superfurries are coming the TLA next week!! Ohkay, well some real catchup later, maybe, after dinner and rehearsal, and Dewey in there somewhere. Mark is a sweetie-pie. I was in New York last night and I barely noticed it, although I did enjoy the late night/early morning walks around. This weather is novel for now, but I'd like something else soon, if you don't mind.
you've got to tolerate
some of those people that you hate
i'm not in love with you
but i won't hold that against you
It was a Tuesday morning on less than six hours of sleep, wrapping up with Hume, writing a few pages in un petit livre bleu before checking out of class early, and syntax syntax. Sharples lunch with DJ Mark Angelillo ("only if you're willing to sit outside") enjoying the frustratingly good Sharples menu (too much good stuff - I didn't even get to the pierogies) of chef salad, chicken bbq sandwich, and lattice fries (unfortunately they weren't the usual kind, they were "savory," which apparently means "deep-fried.") Not great, you know, but good summer food, and talking about party. Jenny Yim was not in her office, which frusts, nor did I talk with Goundie about this new outdoor party stipulation (!?), but picked up a valentines red course catalog, paged through for ideas. Not much stuck out as appealing (what is Discourse Analysis again and do I want to take it?) except the things I already had my eye on - culture stuff: Dada & Surrealism, Bach, ModAmerComposers, Film Studies (conflicts with the Arth Seminar - please someone else take the seminar with me.) Vague options - stuff I may want to take sooner or later: Foundations, CompSci 21, P+P, Intro to Spanish Lit, French 3 (?), nah.
Thinking I was going to have a nice long afternoon to write here and stuff like that, I set to work on music 48-ness, googling for Bartók and so on. I got about four sentences down when Ben called and gave the go ahead. The previous night he had been pretty pessimistic about wanting to make the seven-hour roundtrip for a concert that would be no boon to his flagging health, so I had resigned myself to not going. But now he was up for it, he decided. The right choice. For him especially. "There's a train in three hours." So my mission was clear - I typed up the two record reviews you see below (not my finest work, but hopefully they're hyperbolic enough to get the point across that these albums freaking rule) and sent them off to Duffy-Greenburg-land, changed my clothes (adidas, loonshirt, scruffy stuff), stuffed a pack (throw pillow, lightweight longsleeve, toothbrush, earplugs, cloudsplitter, and headed to meet him at Sharples. Couldn't find him, so I sat with Louisa and octet splinter group, which made for hysterics as usual, esp. latest developments in the Fiona saga ("usually I would have said no, but since I fell in love with someone I hated, then maybe"). But it was too hot to eat - just picked at Caribbean bar (I thought it said "Canadian") and a lemon-meringue pie. Many trips back to the water-cooler to fill up for the train ride, and I grabbed some bagels and fruit. And then we took off, leaving Kate and pal, en route to Paul "celery-cruncher" McCartney concert, at 30th street.
Just missed a train that left a few minutes after we arrived, so we scrounged the Amtrak gallery FYE music store for accessory bargains. Bits of reading (Petit Prince-okay, can I just say? should this be underlined and italicized?) but mostly talk, as we missed the 7:40 from Trenton because of slow ticket machines, caught the 8:20 instead, and walked a few blocks from Penn to our destination: about Worthstock, SAC, and WSRN. Frustration and hope.
The line outside the Hammerstein Ballroom seemed ridiculously long, with multiple gaps allowing access to the lobbies of buildings further down the block, but they herded us through quite quickly, gave a cursive glance through Ben and my bags, clicked their clickers, and we were inside. What an awesome venue. A huge open floor, and several layers of spacious seated balconies. A lighting setup in the center of the room projected swirling patterns on a flying-saucer shaped holographic disc hanging vertically above the stage. Following Ben's footsteps, I made our way to the front of the venue, about five feet behind the metal railing that created a five-foot gap between crowd and stage; for a while I was standing right at the railing, with our backpacks stashed at its foot. Then a big one-time frat guy barged in to me with his mini-handbag girlfriend, they complained about driving seven hours to find themselves not on the guest list after all. They shared space pretty well - actually, considering it was a sold out show, it didn't feel terribly crowded at all. I would have expected more rabid Chems fans pushing up towards the front, but things were pretty chill. It was an older crowd - probably fans from '97 - not surprising given the ticket price. Opener was DJ Pete Tong, who had presumably been spinning for a while when we showed up (start time 9:00, our arrival about 10:15), and I was enjoying it, particularly a fuzzed out "I Would Die 4 U" and later on the vocoder track from "Harder Faster Better Stronger" over some straighter funky stuff. In general his choices were nice and varied and danceable, although his transitions were pretty standard, and he pulled some cringe-moments like a Martin Luther King speech over some blase trance. Towards the end of his set (last half hour?) his equipment started screwing up, which was especially weird because he didn't even seem to care. He kept doing the same things over, and it seemed like everything he touched screwed something up. It definitely wasn't intentional. He slipped on something which Ben first recognized and then I confirmed as David Byrne - then I remembered hearing about a house single he collaborated on. It's called "Wicked and Lazy," and it's awesome, I'm trying to figure out how to get a copy. Then he had some weird rock guitar house a la Apollo 440 with "God Save the Queen" lyrics over it, which went on for way too long, then he cut it off abruptly. Weird.
A synth-washed version of "Tomorrow Never Knows" flooded the arena, as smoke machines started blasting away and spotlights scanned all over the place. The tune looped the line "surrender to the void," and the mob of techies on stage left to reveal a gleaming white platform for the brothers with high sloping walls that looked like a bathtub or the prow of a ship. The disc-shaped thing flew up to be perpendicular and over top of it. Both of those turned out to be the fields for visual projections. They got on stage and screwed around a bit, headed towards what I had predicted would by "Come With Us." It was much more interesting live, after the first few minutes when they started changing things up, and the projections showed cutout figures of businessmen, dancers, and gunmen. A spoken loop announced the next number - "Block Rockin' Beats" (pictures of buildings) and of course everyone went crazy with it. Ben and I had a great little space for ourselves - enough room to dance a bit, and a dynamite unblocked view of the stage - although we had to defend a few times, when the crazy dancers (and later a belligerent drunk or two) came barging through. The next song was, I guess, "Music:Response," but the next one I recognized was "It Began in Afrika," for which the visual was just the scrawled title. It was far better live - they stuck with the hip-hop section for longer, although they did hang on to the spoken bit perhaps too much. Some more stuff, and eventually - I think I guessed it before most people, because there was a very distorted version of the "darude" riff without the correct pitches - Star Guitar. By this time curtains at the back of stage had drawn aside to reveal another huge screen for projections - and this time they had kalaidescopic images of stars, with the two-faced woman silhouette from the single cover. This was great, very high energy, although they never really kicked the opening "dee-dee-dee-dee-dee" riff, just looped the other sections and played with them. They made good use of the handclap rhythm, fitting a bassline to it and adding a whole other groove to the song. And then the vocals came in, and we were charmed. They didn't do my dream cut-off, instead one more like the record, and then things kind of died down for a while. Was that it? I wondered briefly, as they did some lackluster noodling with the dials. But no, they kept on going, for what amounted to a second set. Starting with Ben's fave (which I have to admit is incredibly seductive) "Sunshine Underground," with lovely red sunrises in the background, and then when the beat kicked in big and they went crazy for what must have been ten minutes - faces of children and adults with bizarre color patterns and designs - kind of creepy. There was a lot of stuff I didn't really know, including "Hey Boy, Hey Girl" and more from Surrender, and they played short riffs on, I think, "Setting Sun" and "Denmark." "Electrobank" was good and went on for a while. All of these were brilliantly mixed together - the transitions were long and flawless and tons of fun, as they kept you guessing what would come next. Somehow all of this faded into a pepped up "The Test" (not as good as they think it is) with cool visuals that looked like a girl swimming through Orbitz. Some more noodling, and they left the stage. Of course, in this day and age, the encore wasn't far behind. And since they left all their sequencers and drum machines running, the noise didn't even stop while they were offstage. But they returned and launched into "My Elastic Eye" from the new one, with cool glockenspiel stuff, which was fun and goofy. Nice beat. That kind of faded out too, before what I had been expecting as the encore: "Private Psychedelic Reel," maybe their best tune ever. Started out with a round stained-glass panel picture of Christ on the saucer thing, and then a kaleidescope of religious stained-glass images, then rows and rows of eyes, then greasepainted clown mouths. The tune went on forever, it felt like, and I just flung myself around, clinging to the railing which by this point we had regained. Awesome awesome. They never did the stuttering breakdown, just kept pausing and then kicking back in with the full fill and beat. Then some more noodling that didn't lead anywhere, although Ben thought it was going to. And that was it. Ben stood around to shake the lighting guy's hand, and we followed the hordes along 34th, picking up LP-sized posters of the album cover: one from the ground and one begged from a guy who had four of them. We sat in the metro station chatting with a sexy Bucknell grad and his English girlfriend, who it turned out were friends with one of Ben's acquaintances. That meant we were on the wrong train, but it was okay - as we got out to walk a bit further than necessary, Ben stopped a guy that he recognized from somewhere, and he turned out to be an artist from something-or-other. Mostly ignoring "Tony Macaroni"'s request for ticket money back to Buffalo, we made it to 3rd and 11th, called Jesse from the phone downstairs. He came to sign us in, and led us to his charming if disgustingly messy little suite, with artist-roomate, canvases around the walls and tables, dishes piled up in the sink, ashtray on the couch, sticky floor. We were able to filter some water through a Brita, which I was in dire need of. Jesse played us a few cuts from "Hasidic New Wave," and we dozed off.
Less than five hours later, at 7:00, the alarm rang, and we dragged ourselves up and out, bid Jesse goodbye, sorry to crash and run, and made it back to Penn with enough time to grab some breakfast at a croissant shop - egg and cheese roll, mango sweet snapple. The 8:10 to Trenton fed directly into the 9:something to Philly, and Ben and I both slept almost the entire way, me resting on my throw pillow and he on my shirt. There was a gap at 30th street, where we waited about half an hour, so I went back to the FYE and bought another 200-CD organizer (I'm going to need at least that to handle all the new acquisitions this year), which was on sale for $12.99 (marked down from $40 - not bad at all, thanks for the tip Ben.) The 11:11 got us back on campus before 11:45, immediately behind Lela and Rebecca (coming back from Ed obs), and well-rested enough (in my case at least) to get on with the day. I showered (aah), changed, churned out a decent Music 48 paper in under an hour, e-mailed stuff, and headed out again. Printed in Beardsley (mine is a fool), picked up the Dewey from Ali, Yim still not in, and waited in Whittier 3+5 for Kari. Admired the Math dept. kitchen, complete with "observations" sheet on the microwave ("minute * n = n minutes on high," "2 *beverage = really hot cup of coffee.") Sweltery. Magic Eye books in her office; and she referred me to a paper about VP-deletion that promises is fun and lucid. Sounds good. Then to Lang, handed in paper ("a step in the right direction, sweetie") and a somewhat frustrating (for me - although he's still on his happy-with-me kick) lesson; this not practicing is causing technique and progress to suffer, although I pulled off a halfway decent memorized Allegro. I will get there. Must practice for real this week - I should hopefully have the time for it. Back here, sitting and sweating, listening to Led Zep I and Come with Us and now Rings - the Superfurries are coming the TLA next week!! Ohkay, well some real catchup later, maybe, after dinner and rehearsal, and Dewey in there somewhere. Mark is a sweetie-pie. I was in New York last night and I barely noticed it, although I did enjoy the late night/early morning walks around. This weather is novel for now, but I'd like something else soon, if you don't mind.
you've got to tolerate
some of those people that you hate
i'm not in love with you
but i won't hold that against you
