Four Tet Et Cet. at Big Ears

One of the highlights of the Big Ears Festival for us was probably the late night set by English electronic musician Four Tet.  He didn't take the stage until midnight after we had been on our feet and watching various live sets since 12:00 noon that day, but the music he played transported us beyond our physical limitations and complaints and his 90-minute set passed quite pleasantly. 

Although considered by many an EDM performer, Four Tet foregoes the extravagant light and video shows featured by many EDM performers and concentrates instead on the music.  We think that in his mind he's an electronic musician, not just a beats producer or a DJ for a dance party.  In fact, he played in the dark, his equipment illuminated only by two table lamps, and he let the audience dance, sway, or just stand there in awe in the dark as they so chose.  Here is a sample of his set that I found on YouTube, and as you can see, while he makes great music, it's somewhat less than visually compelling.

For contrast, here's a clip from Kelly Lee Owens, who was up before Four Tet and entertained the crowd with her singing, dancing and psychedelic projections as she performed her trance-like music.

Don't get us wrong, though - we're not complaining about Four Tet's lack of razzle-dazzle - as a matter of fact, we admire him for sticking to the music and letting his artistry speak for itself, rather than striving to constantly entertain a bunch of ADHD kids on ecstasy.  And we're not alone - unseen to most of the audience but visible from our position right up on the stage, Kelly Lee Owens herself was dancing backstage throughout almost the entirety of Four Tet's set.  Here's another little taste of Four Tet:

But the point of this post is that as great as the Four Tet set was, the next day, Four Tet performed an improvisational duet under his real name, Kieran Hebden, along with Mats Gufstasson, Norwegian sax monster from the jazz band The Thing.  The pairing of an English EDM musician with a skronky Norwegian jazz musician might seem like an odd arrangement and perhaps it was, but the two are both skilled improvisers and played off each other beautifully, and as it turns out not only was their set our favorite of the festival, it was one of the top five performances we've ever seen in our long life of listening to live music.  Ever.  Life-time top five (no shit).  As before, here's a small sample.   

The first half of their set, which was just one long improvisation, was led by Kieran's ambient soundscapes and textures, with Mats filling in odd, like-minded sounds between the synthesized notes, and the second half of the set was most definitely dominated by Mats, who built up to an epic free jazz rant, with Kieran hanging on to his coattails for the ride. As I recall, this is around the mid-point of the set, the transition from one lead to the other.

And here's Mats as he started taking over the set, exploring the upper stratosphere with Kieran's electronics the wind beneath his wings.

Here's our own video of Mats at full-throated intensity near the peak of his performance.  We were initially reluctant to post this because it could be misunderstood out of context, but if you've watched any of the videos above, we think you're ready for this.

We were literally speechless after the set.  Kieran and Mats were both triumphantly jumping around the stage together and embracing because they both knew that they had just nailed it.  

The videos don't really do justice to the set due to their brevity (you kind of have to be along for the whole ride to get it) and the limitations of YouTube's sound compression compared to that of a live performance, but trust us - this was truly an astonishing thing.  

These are the moments you go to live shows to experience.  This is what it's all about.

A few more photos of the set to close out this post before we embarrass ourselves with our gushing enthusiasm.

Dreaming of the Masters

We've posted Alice Coltrane here before, but after seeing members of her ashram perform last Sunday at Big Ears, it just feels sort of natural to post her again.

Alice's journey is a remarkable story.  The widow of arguably the most towering of the titans of jazz music, she kept John's legacy alive for several years before developing her own jazz sound featuring harp, piano, and frequent guest collaborator Pharoah Sanders.  But somewhere along the line, before departing this mortal coil in 2007, she formed an ashram in Southern California and adapted spiritual singing and chants into her own music.  Here's a vastly different version of her classic Journey to Satchidinanda.  

Naturally, it was members of her ashram that performed at Big Ears and not the late Ms. Coltrane herself, but still - the ashram of the widow of John Coltrane - it was a rare opportunity to get so close to one of the departed masters.

Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn

Tonight, live in Atlanta, Georgia, newgrass-bluegrass musicians extraordinaire Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn will perform at the venerable Variety Playhouse.  They're the only act listed on the lineup and doors open at 7:00, so there's a good chance we could get home from the show before 11:00.  If, that is, we were going - which we're not, not because we don't like the musicians (we do) but because we just saw them at Big Ears last Saturday.

Sure, tonight's set will be a great show, but is Grammy-winner and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Rhiannon Giddens singing with them, like she did at Big Ears?  No, we didn't think so. Is the adventurous new-music string quartet Brooklyn Rider playing with them, like they did at Big Ears?

 
No, we didn't think so.  But will tonight's set include pregnant clogging?

Probably. Sure.  We'll grant you that much. Abigail's almost certainly still as preggo as she was on Saturday, and probably no less inclined to clog when the set calls for it.  Still, not to sound like snobs, tonight's show at the Playhouse should be a great set, even without Giddens and Brooklyn Rider, especially for those who can appreciate the intersection of traditional bluegrass and Americana with innovative, eclectic improvisation.

We had been wanting to hear Bela live ever since we first heard his debut LP way back in 1990, and it sort of amazes us that it's actually taken this long to finally get the opportunity.  Here's Sinister Minister from that long-ago LP, featuring the outstanding Victor Wooten on bass.

And finally, as long as we're unpacking the Big Ears experience and all, here's a nice profile of Bela and Abigail that aired on CBS' This Morning in 2015.

Incidentally, Washburn also did a set at Big Ears with Chinese zither master Wu Fei which, unfortunately, we missed.

Algiers at Big Ears

Tonight, live in Atlanta, Georgia, native sons Algiers perform at the venerable Drunken Unicorn. They headline a great lineup that includes Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires, Omni, and Mourning, featuring A Blkstar.  It's such a good lineup, in fact, that we're not going - too many bands for a weeknight and the doors don't even open until 8:30. We'd be lucky if Algiers even takes the stage before midnight, and we wouldn't get home until well past 1:00 a.m.

 

Not to worry, though - we just saw Algiers perform at Big Ears, a full-capacity, SRO performance at The Standard, a repurposed industrial space along the Knoxville railroad tracks.  

It wasn't the best Algiers performance we've seen, TBQH.  The band suffered from a poor sound mix at the club, and frontman Franklin James Fisher had to appeal several times to the soundman to turn up his monitor.  Also, bassist Ryan Mahan wasn't able to play on this tour, reportedly being detained in London, England for some undisclosed reason, and despite the able assistance of a guest bassist, the band seemed somehow off their usual game.  Still, an Algiers performance, even on an off day, is a special set and something to behold, as I could tell by the blown minds of many in the audience around me after their set was over.   

Today, we stumbled across this video of Algiers from Big Ears.  This isn't the performance that we saw at The Standard, but a "secret show" they performed the next day at The Pilot Light, a tiny, hole-in-the-wall space a couple blocks from The Standard and not announced to the public until an hour or so in advance of the show (we were at Bela Fleck and then later John Medeski during their secret show). Still,the set list and the performance are much the same, and if anything, they seem to be suffering fewer technical difficulties than they had to endure at The Standard.  So if, unlike us, you weren't able to attend Big Ears 2018, or if, like us, you're not going to their Drunken Unicorn set tonight, here's perhaps the next best thing - a faithful video of their secret show performance at the Pilot Light.

Laziness

Milford Graves (r) and Jason Moran (l) at the Bijou Theater, Big Ears 2018

My dear friend L. sent me a link to an NPR article reviewing this year's Big Ears Festival.  Not only was it a good read, but it gave me a night's respite from posting, because instead of further unpacking the festival experience, I can just post the link right here and let you read it for yourself while I take a night off.

G'night, y'all!  Happy reading!

The Five Greatest Songs of All Time (Bands We Never Heard Before Last Weekend Edition)

We said we were going to have to spend some time unpacking last weekend's Big Ears Festival, and what better way to begin than to recognize five new (to us) acts that we hadn't heard before last weekend?  Part of the fun of any festival, especially one as esoteric as Big Ears, is discovering new music, and we spent no small amount of time talking to other festival-goers on the street and at the venues, giving and receiving tips about performers worth seeing, and making and taking recommendations about upcoming sets.  So here are five acts that weren't on our initial schedule, but based on word of mouth, we went and caught anyway.

We didn't get to Knoxville until about 5:30 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, the first day of the festival, and by the time we arrived, the Norwegian singer Susanna had already performed earlier in the day - much earlier, 12:00 noon to be exact.  Thursday night, some people at the beautiful Tennessee Theater before Michelle N'degeocello's set were raving about Susanna's earlier set to us, and one guy admitted it literally brought him to tears.  The next day, another person told us Susanna's Friday-night set was one of his must-see shows, so we changed our plans and rearranged our schedule to see her Friday-night collaboration with Cheyenne Mize and folk-music legend Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Giovanna Pessi, who's on harp in this track, was also at Friday's set.  Here's a taste of what we heard.

After a day or so at the festival, we started to recognize a lot of the same faces in the audience at different shows, and one particular group that we saw at several different sets that we liked (e.g., Godspeed, Roscoe Mitchell, and Arto Lindsey, among others) told us on Saturday that they were off to see minimalist composer Jon Gibson next, and since we'd come to trust their taste in music and loved minimalism anyway, we joined them at Gibson's set at St. Mark's Cathedral.  Here's a perhaps over-explained video of a younger Gibson playing music very similar to what we heard when we got to St. John's.

Everybody, everywhere at the festival was raving about jazz drummer Milford Graves and there was even a documentary film shown about him and his life.  To be quite honest, now that we've heard him and read about him on line, we're actually kind of surprised we hadn't heard of him before - he's played with a lot of the free jazz artists we've admired over the years.  Saturday afternoon, we were part of the capacity crowd at Knoxville's Bijou Theater, where Graves performed a set of duets with jazz pianist Jason Moran. 

A name like "Nief-Norf" kind of sticks in the mind, and although we remember hearing the name before, we've never heard the musicians or had  any idea what exactly it was that they did.  We still don't have a full answer to the latter question, but we saw them perform a live score on Friday for a documentary film about Mexican fireworks manufacturers (of all things). It wasn't a set recommended to us by others, but we were passing by their venue at a rare moment when we had a little time on our hands, so we stopped in.  That night, Nief-Norf was a much, much larger ensemble than appears in this performance, making us suspect they're more of a educational and performance collective than a solitary, individual band.

Like Nief-Norf, we had also heard of Norway's The Thing, but we'd never actually heard The Thing until this weekend.  In fact, we still haven't - The Thing's performance time conflicted with the Susanna set (I said we had to rearrange some things to see Susanna), but we did manage to catch Thing drummer Paal Nilssen-Love's collaboration with guitarist Arto Lindsey, and Thing saxophonist Mats Gustafsson's set with electronic musician Four Tet was not only a highlight of the festival, but was one of the best sets we've ever heard in our lifetime.  Here's the full Thing band with a 2015 cover of a 1990 song by English psych-rockers Loop.  

More about the festival will follow this post, I'm sure.  Until then, enjoy the silence, amigos.

Big Ears - Day, The Last

In comparison to yesterday, today was cakewalk. Sadly, it was also the last day of the Big Ears Festival, which I can now say unreservedly is the best music festival in the country. 

We started the day relatively late at 1:00 p.m.; the past two days started with 12:00 noon sets. Today's first set was by Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend).  He sang fairly traditional pop-rock songs, including the third Nick Drake cover we heard this weekend, and was backed by a string quartet.   A nice, easy-going way to start the day.

The next set was considerably more challenging - a dense, psych-rock set by Montreal's Suuns.  Their loud, sludgey, shoegazey sound was great, but it's more what one expects to hear at a late-night set at some small club, not at 2:00 in the afternoon on a pleasant Tennessee afternoon. 

The next set was a real mindblower - a duet between Kieren Hebdan, aka Four Tet, who we saw last night, and Norwegian saxophonist Mats Gustafsson of The Thing (more Norwegians).  I can truly say that, having gone to shows and concerts since at least 1972, this was one of the best sets I've ever seen.  It's hard to describe how Mats' sax skronk managed to merge with Four Tet's shimmering electronics, but it worked and Mats' intense playing lifted the set into another dimension. It quite literally took me over a half hour to recover and regain my senses. 

It didn't hurt that the next set was by the late Alice Coltrane's former ashram, singing spiritual songs and chants from the recent Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda LP.  It would have been unworldly any other day of the week, but on the same stage that Four Tet and Mats Gustafsson just tore up, it seemed very down to earth. 

Today was nothing if not eclectic, after Rostam's lush pop, Suuns' psych-rock, Four Tet and Mats whatever-that-was, and Alice Coltrane's Hindu chants, we heard the Bang On A Can All-Stars celebrate 30 years of performance, including among other pieces, Closing from Philip Glass' Glassworks LP.

So how do you end an eclectic day like today and a world-class festival like this week's?  What better way than with Lightning Bolt, arguably the loudest, scuzziest, scariest noise-punk band in the world? It was unrelentingly intense and the moshing was intense. The death of music.  There's really nothing that could follow up their set, so it's an appropriate enough coda for the festival, the weekend, and the day.

As I said in earlier posts, I'll follow these daily reports with some more detailed posts about the individual performances.  Tonight, I need to get some sleep - I leave to go back home tomorrow, back to work and responsibilities, and I need my rest. 

We now return to your normal posting.

Big Ears, Day Three

Sometimes it's fun to push yourself a little, test the boundaries of your stamina and endurance and see how far you can go.  We know it's fun, because that's exactly what we did today.

At one low-energy point of the day, while walking back from a performance at The Standard in the pouring rain, making that 0.9-mile, mostly uphill hike from the venue to the next performance, the thought crossed our mind that since we were going to be walking right past our hotel anyway, instead of going to the show feeling all grungy in our wet clothes, why not stop in the hotel, change out of those wet clothes into something dry and comfortable, go to the hotel bar and order a negroni, get on social media and tell anyone who asks that "Sure, we went to all of the performances."  Who would know?

But we didn't.  We figured we didn't come all this way, spend money for an all-access VIP pass and a ritzy hotel right on the main strip, just to avoid hearing live music.  No, we came for the experience, damn it, and that's what we'll do, so we pushed on and despite looking like a pile of wet laundry, we found ourselves a seat in the fabulous Tennessee Theater for Diamonda Galas' incredible performance, and then - get this - walked right past the hotel again without stopping in, made the 0.9-mile trek back to the previous venue for a late-night EDM set, knowing full well that we'd just have to walk back again when it was all over, and watched a 90-minute performance by the stellar Four Tet.

But we've started this post with the end of the day.  We're tired and it's late, so here's just a brief listing of who we saw today and what we did.  We'll unpack the full experience in later posts.

We started the day with an ass-kicking performance by Arto Lindsey, who played angular, loud, dissonant guitar in some unclassifiable genre, backed only by break-neck drumming by Paal Nilssen-Love of Norway's The Thing (there's a lot of Norwegian musicians at this festival for some reason).  It was a kick in the ass to get the day started and it worked better than three cups of cappuccino.  It wasn't pretty, but it was fun and it felt good when it was over.

Next, we went to the opposite extreme.  British composer Jon Gibson performed in St. John's Cathedral, playing solo saxophone, then piano, then flute, then sax again. Each minimalist piece was lovely, meditative  and thought-provoking, and he even employed some circular breathing on the last piece.  It was not unlike meeting a very polite English clergyman, and discovering that he incidentally played world-class minimalist music on the side.  

The next performance was pure Americana  - banjo maestro Bela Fleck performing a set of bluegrass-tinged traditional songs with his wife, the banjo maestro Abigail Washburn.  They were backed by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider.  See?  I told you I was going to see Bela Fleck and Brooklyn Rider play together.

Next, it was back to St. John's Cathedral again, where John Medeski of Medeski Martin & Wood played a set of solo jazz piano.  It was a highlight of the day, not least because Medeski included not one, not two, but three Sun Ra songs in his set.

This was followed by more jazz piano, this time at the Bijou Theater and performed by Jason Moran, accompanied by master drummer Milford Graves. Another transcendent set.

Who has time to eat?  I'll eat when I'm dead.  But I did grab some shrimp rolls at a food truck and ate them while walking to the next performance, this time a loud, raw, confrontational set of political protest songs and a long rant by guitarist Marc Ribot and his band Ceramic Dog.  Very cool.

After Ribot, we were soothed again, this time by a lovely set of electronic music by Laurel Halo that ranged from ambient soundscapes to dreamy, meditative songs.

After the long walk in the rain alluded to at the beginning of this post, we saw legendary singer and pianist Diamanda Galas.  She sang, she screamed, she distorted her voice into unrecognizable, sometimes scary sounds, and we secretly suspect she might actually be a vampire-wraith.  She did very little to dissuade our suspicions.

Then it was back across town again, where we caught the end of Kelly Lee Owens' electronic dance music set. What we heard was good, but we didn't catch enough to give an honest appraisal of the full performance.

And finally, at midnight, EDM producer extraordinaire Four Tet gave a masterful demonstration of the possibilities and ranges of the genre, mixing in everything under the sun but never letting the beat drop.  It was both music to dance to as well as an enjoyable listening experience.

Four Tet's set lasted until 1:30 a.m., so we had basically been watching and hearing music for 13 1/2  hours today.  According to our iPhone, we walked a total of 4.1 miles marching up and down So Gay Street.  We are exhausted, and now it's time for bed.

Thanks for your interest.  We'll update you on the final Day Four of Big Ears tomorrow.

Dreaming of the Masters

Difficult Music Hour continues, only this time with an in-person, live performance.  No, the video above isn't it, but this morning (okay, actually 12:00 noon but after being out until 2:00 a.m. at Godspeed last night, noon felt like the morning), we actually saw Roscoe Mitchell perform live and in person.  It was our first time seeing him since an Art Ensemble of Chicago show in Harvard Square back in 1978.

Not surprisingly, Roscoe blew the roof off of The Standard (the venue he was playing in), and included some circular breathing in his set (we didn't know he did that).  He didn't perform Odwalla, but we did hear him running through the melody while we were waiting outside during the soundcheck.  

Who else did we see today at Knoxville's adventurous Big Ears Festival?  After Roscoe's set, we stopped at the lovely, Fox-like Tennessee Theater and saw large ensemble Neif-Nort playing a live soundtrack to a documentary film.

We're going to need some time to unpack this whole festival, not to mention this one day, but we also saw the bizarre Norwegian musician Jenny Hval, who consistently surprised us from one moment to the next - there literally was no telling what she was going to do next or even what precisely she was doing any given moment.

So that was cool, and then next we had native Atlanta firebrands Algiers who completely filled the venue (The Standard again).  They had to turn people away, but we got there early enough to be near the front of the stage.

And then Arto Lindsey, former New York No-Wave legend and now Rio native playing happy tropical-sounding songs with lots of dissonant guitar parts.

Who else?  Oh yes, a stellar ambient electronic set by Jessica Moss (Silver Mt. Zion).

Somewhere in there, we managed to squeeze in a set by groove-meisters Medeski Martin & Wood.

We ended the day with another Norwegian, this time the singer Susanna, collaborating this evening with folk icon Bonnie Prince Billy.

So all that was exhausting.  We managed to log some 4.6 miles marching up and down Knoxville's So Gay Street from venue to venue.  Okay, it's actually "South Gay Street," abbreviated on all the street signs as "So. Gay Street," but if you drop the period you get "So Gay Street" which makes us smile, until we consider what the same process does to North Gay Street.  

Some shows are still going on and there's a Laurel Halo d.j. set that's running until 2:00 a.m.) but I'm an old man and am calling it a night now, but it was worth it if for no other reason than to see Roscoe Mitchell again after a 40-year hiatus.

The Big Ears festival goes on for two more days, but with 100% chance of rain forecast for tomorrow just to make it more interesting.

Tennessee

Apparently, I'm in Knoxville, Tennessee,which is a bit more urban than I anticipated. Nice city, and I mean that unironically.  Here's some of the lovely views from my hotel window (okay, that part was meant ironically).

I've only been here a few hours, but already I've seen Michelle N'degeocello perform at the lovely, Fox-like Tennessee Theater.  It's apparently the first time she's been to Knoxville and it's also the first time I've seen her perform.  Good set and really nice vibes from the performer.

It's my second time seeing avant-garde cellist Okkyung Lee.  Two years ago, we saw her open for the post-rock band Swans in Atlanta. 

Tonight she opened for the post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who played an epic, two-hour set.  I was front-row, right up at the stage.  It was very loud.

I'm here for the Big Ears music and arts festival.  This was a great first day after a three-hour drive from Atlanta and I'm looking forward to the rest of this weekend.

“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” - Stephen Hawking (1942-2018).

Note From The Sports Desk

Okay, we here at the Sports Desk get it now. It's taken us a couple of years, but thanks to the teachings of the Rev. Andrew Young,  social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt, slugger David Ortiz, and Tom, the physicist who jogs through our neighborhood and occasionally tries to explain quantum entanglement to us by the mailbox, we think we're finally starting to get it.

But first, we have to acknowledge that our NCAA basketball bracket, although off to a good start, completely collapsed on Sunday.  We were doing fine Thursday and Friday for the first round, even with Virginia's historic upset loss, and we still held our own in the second round on Saturday, but when Xavier and North Carolina and Auburn and especially Cincinnati (who we had picked to win it all) went down on Sunday, we were out.  As it stands now, we only have one team (Villanova) left in the Final Four, and our predicted champion won't even be in the Championship game.  It's over for us. 

But meanwhile, the question we here at the Sports Desk are just now starting to understand has actually been bugging us for a long while now - namely, how can otherwise intelligent people say with a straight face that they support Donald Trump?  We mean, c'mon, really?

But we get it now.  It's not an intellectual position or one arrived at, say, by side-by-side comparisons of foreign and monetary policies, the way good liberals like to imagine they've come to endorse the candidates of their choice.  We understand now that it's not unlike the way we've come to identify with our preferred sports teams. Here at the Sports Desk, we're not Red Sox fans because we've crunched the numbers and determined that statistically they've fielded the best teams over a certain relevant period of time.  It's not because their epic struggles and subsequent redemption, although we do like that.  No, we're Red Sox fans and will always be Red Sox fans because at some certain pivotal moment in our lives, we've come to identify with the team and began labelling ourselves as "Red Sox fans" and it's part of our tribal identity to always cheer for our chosen team, no matter who they field in any given year, no matter who's coaching, no matter how bad - or how good - their record is.   

So it is, we imagine, with conservatives.  They've come to self-identify with "Team Republican" and their tribal custom, just as it is for sports fans, is to support their own tribe, no matter who takes the field any given year, no matter who is selected to lead.  So, like it or not, some years they're cheering Abraham Lincoln or Dwight D. Eisenhower, and other times they find themselves defending some truly reprehensible human beings, from Newt Gingrich to Ted Cruz to Donald J.Trump, if that's who's taking the field for their team.

Dr. Haidt tells us that loyalty to one's own group is a common and highly-ranked moral value among conservatives.  Liberals put value in that too, but it's just not prioritized as highly for them as it is for conservatives.  Liberals are suspicious of loyalty because at its worst it can devolve into xenophobia and racism, but on a less toxic level it's, well, supporting the home team, and if this year's Republican presidential candidate is a venal, egomaniacal, lying, womanizing narcissist, well, at least he's not a Democrat, and so they vote for their team and support their team and, if necessary, defend their team. If you didn't observe the core value of loyalty, then you're not really a conservative.

Rev. Young reminds us that many of the president's core supporters are among the poorest of the poor with the least prospects for any improvement - the coal miners and steel mill workers barely hanging on to outdated jobs in outdated technologies, the small farmer trying to compete with global agro-business.  It seems to them that year after year, decade after decade, nothing gets better for them no matter who's in Washington, Democrat or Republican, so after a while, why not vote for the non-politician, the not-politically-correct outsider who's not afraid to say what they've been thinking all along ("Mexicans are stealing our jobs," "blacks just don't want to work," and "the Chinese are laughing at us").  How could it be worse for them than the last 30 years?  How could someone who secretly believes that Ivy League elites just want to tell them what to say and do, and that Jewish bankers are hoarding all the money and good-paying jobs for themselves, ever hope that salvation will someday come from the marbled buildings of Washington, D.C.?  So now they have a new head coach, and no matter how dysfunctional the team is under his leadership, loyalty requires them to suppress all doubts.  At least he's not Hillary!

Tom the jogging physicist confirms to us that there is no intellectually defensible basis for supporting Trump-brand conservatism, which is not to say that there's not an intellectually rigorous school of conservative thought, it's just that Trump, with his abject lack of curiosity and limited problem-solving capacity, probably couldn't find that school with a Garmin GPS.       

We'll complete the analogy this way - if one year the Red Sox fielded an entire team who were, well, dim, we wouldn't suddenly start cheering for the Yankees (shudder to think).  We'd still cheer for the Sox and consider ourselves part of Red Sox Nation, even if we didn't have high hopes for the team that particular season.  It doesn't matter what Curt Schilling ever subsequently says or does, he still pitched that one epic playoff game with a bloody sock, and there's nothing he can say or do that will make us love his team the less for it.

Even if he demands that Mexico pay for a wall.