Sunday, May 12
It's…late and getting later (3:41 now), but I'm feeling okay, so I think I'll just write this thing here and listen to this music. Right now it's Spiderland by Slint, which on first listen isn't as life-altering as all that, but is pretty nice I'll the same. I'm toying with the idea of opening up another album I just bought, Scott Walker's Tilt, and turning off the lights and listening to it, but I think I'll have to finish writing first, since I want to give it my full attention. Just look at what some folks at amazon have to say about it. Pretty intense. We'll see whether or not this is really the night for it. Ahhhhh. Funny that we spell relieved sighs "ahhh" and screams "aaaah," when it could conceivably work either way.
Where was I last? Oh yeah, I went to campus. Sat on the grass with Jenny and Stef and Al and others, and came home laden with material possessions: a roll of photos, including some of InFlight practice, Joel's birthday at TJs, me before Sager; and $200 dollars (I was going to get half of it in two fifties, and then give one each to Rae and Joel, but no), and Spike (x2) and the Slint thing and also Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, which I have loved and not owned for too long, and also the comments from my jury, which were encouragingly quite positive, some almost glowing, only one critical (but in a constructive way) but markedly varied in what they mentioned. Amy came over pretty soon, as I was eating a mango-cream-cheese-bagel and talking to Joel about Paul and about him coming to Rochester before Ohio, and we chatted a bit about something, too long before we left; made dinner reservations and got inadequate driving directions. It was gorgeous and sunny, a perfect day for a drive except that driving's not as good as really being outside. We listened to the new Blackalicious, which is pretty silly but also good, as far as I can tell so far. It samples "Me and My Arrow" from "The Point," that children's thing from the 70s. Amy and I, it turns out, are both pretty incompetent with going places. No, actually I don't think I am, I just didn't realize that it would all have to be on me. Anyway. We got a late start and there was traffic and we missed an exit, so we would have got to the PMA at 5:30 or so and had to get to Chinatown by 6:30. So we decided to save Barnett Newman for another time (we're definitely going though - say if you're interested), and just to go to the park for a while instead. Fairmont Park, which is big and unkempt and sort of arbitrary, in the way that large urban parks seem to be. We just stopped the car somewhere and climbed up a path up a little hill that got us back to a road, and then we followed that past a sign about Daughters of American something, a pavilion (not a gazebo), and across a field with a horse and buggy to a little playground. We climbed on an unusual abstract concrete/ceramic jungle-gym thing and talked about childhood, or more about the future; relationships with siblings, post-graduation, marriage, clubbing, long-distance relationships (her bf, as she writes it, is in SF), and music. We made it to Chinatown without much fanfare, except an exciting moment on Callowhill, which switches the direction of its "one" way in the middle of the city, not in a very well marked way. And we even found a parking spot around the corner from Penang, and down the block from the Troc, but of course we had to walk around a few more blocks before I figured out that it really was on 10th even though I hadn't seen it.
Rae, Benjamin, and S?rah, Ben's friend from Bryn Mawr, were standing outside the restaurant. Our reservation for six got the five of us (no alyssa…) an eight-seater circular table which is hard to talk around - that's a problem with that place, because I've sat there before. Two meat-eaters and three veggies (a better ratio than I'm used to, mind), and I only ordered an appetizer (roti, mmm) and a dish (singapore rice noodles w/ etc. etc.) (oh, and a pineapple juice), and somehow there was just a ridiculous amount of food on the table. The vegetarians ordered three or four entrées to share, plus some soup that ended up being served to all of us. Yeah, basically there was way way too much food, and now there's a bag full of it in my fridge that could feed four for dinner, generously. I got an ABC for dessert, and tried to share it. (Not as good as chendol, but ok, i was just too full I think.) A nice talk about radio, I think, and other stuff, and R&B slow jams, which Sarah said are her favorite type of music.
We rushed over to get tickets, but it was hurry-up-and-wait, because the doors didn't even open until eight; we got in fine, and there was almost nobody there for the (first) opener, a long-haired mister Jeffrey Lewis (no relation to my first drum teacher of the same name) along with some friends, Abby the electric-drum-pad player with a striped sweater, a bassist, and a guy from a band called the guitar situation (good name). He sang cute songs, "Smiles Make People Happy" - but not cute like that, like a very cleverly written song about striking up a conversation with a girl on the street about a Leonard Cohen song about oral sex in the Chelsea Hotel, and the title track to his album "The last time I did acid I went insane." And a song about zombies - "shoot the head, kill the ghoul." We stood around talking about globalized hip hop culture, and what elements of it would be worth studying on a Watson, and Caitlin from bird class came over and said hello. Nicola Wells was there too. And there was a like 6'2" guy with white-blond hair and a leather jacket and sunglasses, who we called rockstar, behind us, talking about some video with Joy Division and New Order and using the word "fantabulous." We were right in front of the stage, but the Troc stage is so terribly high, and they had big monitor wedges that made it hard to see things. The second opener was Smokey (Hormel, guitarist from Beck's group, who was very clean-looking and hip and played classical-style) and Miho (Hatori, one of the most adorable performers I've seen), along with another singer (who I recognized from the CM show), a percussionist (who played loops, congas, and an awesome contraption of rototoms and mechanically controlled brushes that they called the tamba-rim tree, or something), and a red-haired guy who played fluegelhorn and alto horn. They played authentic bossa nova, including mostly pieces by Brazilian composers, as well as some slightly more modern-sounding stuff of their own. Really great. I would have bought their 5-song ep, but they wanted $10 for it. It's neat to see Yuka going off and doing her experimental-jazz-electro thing with Zorn's people, and Miho exploring this Brazilian thing.
It took quite a while for Cornershop to get on, but Alien Lanes was playing to keep us entertained (Love had been on earlier), and we crouched down and wondered about rockstar, as he talked about seeing the 'shop in Vegas, and waved to some of the bandmembers as they came on stage. They entered one by one as "Heavy Soup" played over the speakers, and joined in as best they could - normal-looking bassist; (obligatory) bald drummer, who was more animated than most of them; close-shaved lead guitar guy, who looked like Pete Townsend or the guy from New Order, and had his classic-rock blues hammer-ons note perfect; lengthy-haired third guitarist, who seemed somewhat superfluous except when he went to play the tamboura (maybe 1/3 of the songs) or the little Korg device that was too small to be a keyboard and was hard to determine which sounds were coming from; female sitarist, the only Indian member of the band besides Tjinder, and looked like she was pretty into the music, but she was practically hidden behind some amps; and then with utter lack of fanfare, Tjinder and a percussion got on stage last, at the same time. Tjinder (whose name rockstar pronounced "tuh-jinder" - that's not right, is it?) looked like the "cowboy indian elvis," as one of the girls said - complete with thick sideburns and a purple snap-shirt. He was the most uninspiring, lifeless, rather-be-anywhere-besides-here-on-stage frontman I've seen. Even Stephin Merrit made cocktail talk with the audience. Tjinder just stepped up to the mic, sang his piece (finely sung though it was), and stepped back, looking bored. I talked to rockstar afterwards (turns out he was just a big fan who'd seen them a bunch of times) he said that he's always that "laidback" was the word he used. So that wasn't what I had expected. Furthermore, they used a surprising amount of prerecorded material. I'm pretty sure that "Staging the Plaguing," their real "opener" after jamming on "Soup" for a while, had the record going in the background, and I thought I heard the childrens' voices. And they did things like play "Butter the Soul" by just playing the sample with scratching and everything. They didn't have anyone DJing, although according to the liner of When I was born Tjinder scratches. And the harmonium on "Sleep on the Left Side" was prerecorded. Sort of weird. Also, the set was quite short: only three tunes from the new album ("Rocky" was the closer, and "Spectral Mornings" the encore), just select highlights from the last one ("Good Shit" second, "Sleep," "We're in Yr Corner," "Norwegian Wood," penultimate "Brimful"), and "6am Jullander Shere," which was sort of fun. A lot of them sounded really similar - particularly "Spectral" like "Jullander" and "Rocky" like "Hong Kong Book of Kong Fu" or something - funny to think that they'd be moving back in the direction of the early stuff. Almost every song ended with two minutes of competent but fairly aimless jamming, which was starting to get old but was more fun after I started dancing more energetically (I stood beside rockstar and mimicked his movements along with him, and I think he was too oblivious to notice). They were sortof like hippies. Hey, it was fun, I had a good time, it just wasn't all I was expecting, you know. Rae really liked it.
After, we ran into a V2 street team merch guy who gave us Moby postcards and Elbow matchboxes and Mercury Rev tiny cds, and Sarah missed her train, and we went to a chinese restaurant to get scallion pancakes to kill the time, even though they weren't on the menu. They were crispy and chewy and duck sauce made them more dessertlike, along with tea and weird singalong Chinese theatrical karaoke thing on the TV. People ordered drinks because they felt bad that we weren't getting anything. We picked Nori up at the train station at 1:15. I was glad that I got shotgun, because we ended up in the car for nearly two hours before we got home. A bizarre insistence from the backseat drivers that we should follow 76 East in order to get West wound us up in New Jersey, driving around in a residential neighborhood in Camden. I switched from Blackalicious to Goldberg. We found a strategic place to make an illegal U-turn, which landed us back on 76 West, although we still had to pay a $3 toll. It was almost as difficult getting to Bryn Mawr to drop Sarah off. That took about an hour. St. Joseph's University? God. But we made it home. Okay.
I'm going to stop writing now.
Mar mar o’sharle(h)
Ekuh. Oshart mar mar
Mar mar o’sharle(h)
Ekuh. Oshart mar mar
Raja Rani, Ek kahani
Shorti o’shari mar
Eh mar mar o’shaaaaarrrlllllll
Shorti shorti o’shari mar — hanji
Where was I last? Oh yeah, I went to campus. Sat on the grass with Jenny and Stef and Al and others, and came home laden with material possessions: a roll of photos, including some of InFlight practice, Joel's birthday at TJs, me before Sager; and $200 dollars (I was going to get half of it in two fifties, and then give one each to Rae and Joel, but no), and Spike (x2) and the Slint thing and also Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones, which I have loved and not owned for too long, and also the comments from my jury, which were encouragingly quite positive, some almost glowing, only one critical (but in a constructive way) but markedly varied in what they mentioned. Amy came over pretty soon, as I was eating a mango-cream-cheese-bagel and talking to Joel about Paul and about him coming to Rochester before Ohio, and we chatted a bit about something, too long before we left; made dinner reservations and got inadequate driving directions. It was gorgeous and sunny, a perfect day for a drive except that driving's not as good as really being outside. We listened to the new Blackalicious, which is pretty silly but also good, as far as I can tell so far. It samples "Me and My Arrow" from "The Point," that children's thing from the 70s. Amy and I, it turns out, are both pretty incompetent with going places. No, actually I don't think I am, I just didn't realize that it would all have to be on me. Anyway. We got a late start and there was traffic and we missed an exit, so we would have got to the PMA at 5:30 or so and had to get to Chinatown by 6:30. So we decided to save Barnett Newman for another time (we're definitely going though - say if you're interested), and just to go to the park for a while instead. Fairmont Park, which is big and unkempt and sort of arbitrary, in the way that large urban parks seem to be. We just stopped the car somewhere and climbed up a path up a little hill that got us back to a road, and then we followed that past a sign about Daughters of American something, a pavilion (not a gazebo), and across a field with a horse and buggy to a little playground. We climbed on an unusual abstract concrete/ceramic jungle-gym thing and talked about childhood, or more about the future; relationships with siblings, post-graduation, marriage, clubbing, long-distance relationships (her bf, as she writes it, is in SF), and music. We made it to Chinatown without much fanfare, except an exciting moment on Callowhill, which switches the direction of its "one" way in the middle of the city, not in a very well marked way. And we even found a parking spot around the corner from Penang, and down the block from the Troc, but of course we had to walk around a few more blocks before I figured out that it really was on 10th even though I hadn't seen it.
Rae, Benjamin, and S?rah, Ben's friend from Bryn Mawr, were standing outside the restaurant. Our reservation for six got the five of us (no alyssa…) an eight-seater circular table which is hard to talk around - that's a problem with that place, because I've sat there before. Two meat-eaters and three veggies (a better ratio than I'm used to, mind), and I only ordered an appetizer (roti, mmm) and a dish (singapore rice noodles w/ etc. etc.) (oh, and a pineapple juice), and somehow there was just a ridiculous amount of food on the table. The vegetarians ordered three or four entrées to share, plus some soup that ended up being served to all of us. Yeah, basically there was way way too much food, and now there's a bag full of it in my fridge that could feed four for dinner, generously. I got an ABC for dessert, and tried to share it. (Not as good as chendol, but ok, i was just too full I think.) A nice talk about radio, I think, and other stuff, and R&B slow jams, which Sarah said are her favorite type of music.
We rushed over to get tickets, but it was hurry-up-and-wait, because the doors didn't even open until eight; we got in fine, and there was almost nobody there for the (first) opener, a long-haired mister Jeffrey Lewis (no relation to my first drum teacher of the same name) along with some friends, Abby the electric-drum-pad player with a striped sweater, a bassist, and a guy from a band called the guitar situation (good name). He sang cute songs, "Smiles Make People Happy" - but not cute like that, like a very cleverly written song about striking up a conversation with a girl on the street about a Leonard Cohen song about oral sex in the Chelsea Hotel, and the title track to his album "The last time I did acid I went insane." And a song about zombies - "shoot the head, kill the ghoul." We stood around talking about globalized hip hop culture, and what elements of it would be worth studying on a Watson, and Caitlin from bird class came over and said hello. Nicola Wells was there too. And there was a like 6'2" guy with white-blond hair and a leather jacket and sunglasses, who we called rockstar, behind us, talking about some video with Joy Division and New Order and using the word "fantabulous." We were right in front of the stage, but the Troc stage is so terribly high, and they had big monitor wedges that made it hard to see things. The second opener was Smokey (Hormel, guitarist from Beck's group, who was very clean-looking and hip and played classical-style) and Miho (Hatori, one of the most adorable performers I've seen), along with another singer (who I recognized from the CM show), a percussionist (who played loops, congas, and an awesome contraption of rototoms and mechanically controlled brushes that they called the tamba-rim tree, or something), and a red-haired guy who played fluegelhorn and alto horn. They played authentic bossa nova, including mostly pieces by Brazilian composers, as well as some slightly more modern-sounding stuff of their own. Really great. I would have bought their 5-song ep, but they wanted $10 for it. It's neat to see Yuka going off and doing her experimental-jazz-electro thing with Zorn's people, and Miho exploring this Brazilian thing.
It took quite a while for Cornershop to get on, but Alien Lanes was playing to keep us entertained (Love had been on earlier), and we crouched down and wondered about rockstar, as he talked about seeing the 'shop in Vegas, and waved to some of the bandmembers as they came on stage. They entered one by one as "Heavy Soup" played over the speakers, and joined in as best they could - normal-looking bassist; (obligatory) bald drummer, who was more animated than most of them; close-shaved lead guitar guy, who looked like Pete Townsend or the guy from New Order, and had his classic-rock blues hammer-ons note perfect; lengthy-haired third guitarist, who seemed somewhat superfluous except when he went to play the tamboura (maybe 1/3 of the songs) or the little Korg device that was too small to be a keyboard and was hard to determine which sounds were coming from; female sitarist, the only Indian member of the band besides Tjinder, and looked like she was pretty into the music, but she was practically hidden behind some amps; and then with utter lack of fanfare, Tjinder and a percussion got on stage last, at the same time. Tjinder (whose name rockstar pronounced "tuh-jinder" - that's not right, is it?) looked like the "cowboy indian elvis," as one of the girls said - complete with thick sideburns and a purple snap-shirt. He was the most uninspiring, lifeless, rather-be-anywhere-besides-here-on-stage frontman I've seen. Even Stephin Merrit made cocktail talk with the audience. Tjinder just stepped up to the mic, sang his piece (finely sung though it was), and stepped back, looking bored. I talked to rockstar afterwards (turns out he was just a big fan who'd seen them a bunch of times) he said that he's always that "laidback" was the word he used. So that wasn't what I had expected. Furthermore, they used a surprising amount of prerecorded material. I'm pretty sure that "Staging the Plaguing," their real "opener" after jamming on "Soup" for a while, had the record going in the background, and I thought I heard the childrens' voices. And they did things like play "Butter the Soul" by just playing the sample with scratching and everything. They didn't have anyone DJing, although according to the liner of When I was born Tjinder scratches. And the harmonium on "Sleep on the Left Side" was prerecorded. Sort of weird. Also, the set was quite short: only three tunes from the new album ("Rocky" was the closer, and "Spectral Mornings" the encore), just select highlights from the last one ("Good Shit" second, "Sleep," "We're in Yr Corner," "Norwegian Wood," penultimate "Brimful"), and "6am Jullander Shere," which was sort of fun. A lot of them sounded really similar - particularly "Spectral" like "Jullander" and "Rocky" like "Hong Kong Book of Kong Fu" or something - funny to think that they'd be moving back in the direction of the early stuff. Almost every song ended with two minutes of competent but fairly aimless jamming, which was starting to get old but was more fun after I started dancing more energetically (I stood beside rockstar and mimicked his movements along with him, and I think he was too oblivious to notice). They were sortof like hippies. Hey, it was fun, I had a good time, it just wasn't all I was expecting, you know. Rae really liked it.
After, we ran into a V2 street team merch guy who gave us Moby postcards and Elbow matchboxes and Mercury Rev tiny cds, and Sarah missed her train, and we went to a chinese restaurant to get scallion pancakes to kill the time, even though they weren't on the menu. They were crispy and chewy and duck sauce made them more dessertlike, along with tea and weird singalong Chinese theatrical karaoke thing on the TV. People ordered drinks because they felt bad that we weren't getting anything. We picked Nori up at the train station at 1:15. I was glad that I got shotgun, because we ended up in the car for nearly two hours before we got home. A bizarre insistence from the backseat drivers that we should follow 76 East in order to get West wound us up in New Jersey, driving around in a residential neighborhood in Camden. I switched from Blackalicious to Goldberg. We found a strategic place to make an illegal U-turn, which landed us back on 76 West, although we still had to pay a $3 toll. It was almost as difficult getting to Bryn Mawr to drop Sarah off. That took about an hour. St. Joseph's University? God. But we made it home. Okay.
I'm going to stop writing now.
Mar mar o’sharle(h)
Ekuh. Oshart mar mar
Mar mar o’sharle(h)
Ekuh. Oshart mar mar
Raja Rani, Ek kahani
Shorti o’shari mar
Eh mar mar o’shaaaaarrrlllllll
Shorti shorti o’shari mar — hanji
