Dreaming of the Masters

Sonny Rollins' East Broadway Run Down from 1966.  Rollins is backed on this record by John Coltrane's rhythm section (Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums) and accompanied by Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, but it's mostly Rollins sound on tenor sax that you'll probably remember most from this recording, evoking as it does the sound of syncopated taxi horns and downtown NYC traffic.  

The review on AllMusic by Steven McDonald describes it nicely: 

Around the ten-minute mark of the title track [actually the 10:50 mark], things get very interesting indeed -- moody and spooky as Jimmy Garrison hangs on a single note, making his bass throb along while Elvin Jones widens the space and fires drum and cymbal hits in all directions. . . it's a supreme moment of tension-building, one that gets repeated after Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard restate the theme in unison. This is the sound of Rollins' group working in unity. 

Later in the piece, it sounds like Rollins is blowing through just the mouthpiece of his instrument, bypassing the tenor sax altogether for something more direct and immediate. 

East Broadway Run Down is arguably Rollins most avant, free-jazz recording, and also the last record he released before taking a six-year hiatus from music.  During that break, he visited Jamaica for the first time and spent several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies at an ashram in India.  Rollins is probably most famous, though, for an earlier break from recording that was memorably documented in a television commercial for Pioneer music that aired frequently in the late '70s.  The Pioneer commercial was almost all most people knew about Sonny Rollins at the time ("Yeah, that Brooklyn Bridge guy"). 

As of this writing, Sonny Rollins is alive and well and living in Woodstock, New York, one of the few remaining Masters of jazz still among us.

From The Sports Desk

The other desks have conspired to keep the Sports Desk quiet, even going so far as giving us our own little Tumblr to post about sports to our heart's content.  But there's a game coming up on Saturday that has such globally significant ramifications that they've given up today's spot on WDW for us to talk about it.

On Saturday, December 1, at 4:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the No. 4-ranked University of Georgia Bulldogs (11-1) will play an internationally televised football game against the No. 1 University of Alabama Crimson Tide (12-0) for the SEC Championship.  The two teams met last year in the national College Football Championship game, so Saturday's game is essentially a rematch of the Championship.  Georgia led that game at the half, but Alabama switched quarterbacks, tied the game up by the end of regulation, and won it with a field goal in overtime.  

It was the hardest day of our life. It was the worst day in Georgia history since General Sherman left the state in ashes.  Grown men openly wept, women tore their hair, and children - we pity the poor children the most - had to face a whole year without a Bulldog championship. 

But that was then and this is war.  The Bulldogs want revenge, and someone has to spoil Alabama's ambitions for a perfect season.  Usually, that's Auburn's job, but this year, the Dogs have to roll up their sleeves and do the job themselves.  

We're no fools - Alabama is heavily favored to win, and nobody sounds confident about the Bulldog's chances.  But Georgia has won its last five games, each by 17 or more points.  What worries us is the one loss of the season was a 36-16 beating at LSU and a mere two weeks later, Alabama went to the same stadium and beat LSU 29-0.  

Side note:  Last Saturday, LSU played a seven OT game (!) against Texas A&M, eventually losing by a score of 74-72. That's 146 total points. There are college basketball games with fewer total points than that. There's no point here and it has nothing to do with this Saturday's game, but wow!, seven OTs! 

This Saturday's game will be played in Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, a mere four miles south of our home. As we've pointed out before, the U. of Alabama is a three-hour drive southwest of here and the U. of Georgia is a 90-minute drive northeast of here.  Another side note: We were in Athens today for a 3:30 meeting and didn't leave here until after lunch and got back home before 6:00 p.m.  Again, no point, other than to emphasize how close Athens, Georgia is to Atlanta, and that we live at ground-zero of football superiority. 

But there is an overall point to this post and that is to remind everyone not to call us or email us or otherwise distract us between 4:00 and 8:00 on Saturday. We won't be returning telephone calls, we won't be responding to emails or text messages or Tweets, we won't be off meditating somewhere, and we won't even be playing Fallout 76 - we'll be cheering the Georgia Bulldogs on against the hated Crimson Tide in the biggest game of our lifetime - the biggest game, that is, that doesn't include the Red Sox beating up on the Yankees.  

Go Dogs!

Chattahoochee Brick

Graffiti/mural/urban art observed in Northwest Atlanta near the former Chattahoochee Brick Works.

The Chattahoochee Brick Works represent a most deplorable period in the history of Atlanta. In the history of America.  Chattahoochee Brick was owned by Civil War veteran and one-time (1881 to 1883) Atlanta mayor Capt. James English.  The company manufactured many of the bricks used to construct Atlanta's streets and some of its oldest neighborhoods, achieving high levels of productivity and realizing huge profits in the process. However, the productivity and profits were the result of leasing convict laborers from the city and subjecting them to brutal discipline and cruel deprivation.  Most of the convicts were black, and many were arrested for petty crimes like vagrancy. 

Guards reported that at the brickyard, prisoners were forced to work under unbearable circumstances, fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens.  One guard estimated that 200 to 300 laborers were flogged each month.  

Captain English denied that he or any member of his family had ever directed an act of cruelty against any convict and insisted he only used convict labor to do "work that a white man cannot and will not perform. " Yet he routinely violated the law by buying and selling the leases on convict laborers and transferring them as if they were slaves. A witness reported, "On Sunday afternoons, white men frequently met in the yard of the English brick factory to swap or buy black men, little changed from the slave markets of a half century earlier."

“Chattahoochee Brick was a place of absolute horror,” said Douglas Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name.  There’s an overwhelming body of evidence, said Blackmon, “that this was essentially a death camp.”

The story of Chattahoochee Brick and Reconstruction-era convict labor are sad, tragic chapters in America's history of racial relations.  At least things aren't like that anymore, right?

Puddles Pity Party

We Lost A Pair

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, directors Nicolas Roeg (top) and Bernardo Bertolucci (bottom) both passed away, in London and Rome, respectively.  Both had influenced us immensely.

Back in the 1970s, we took four years off between high school and college.   In retrospect, it was the wisest thing we could have done at the time. But when we finally decided it was time to continue our education, we wound up enrolling at Boston University as a Film & Broadcast major.  Our decision was largely based on the impressions films like Roeg's Walkabout, Don't Look Now, and The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Bertolucci's The Conformist and Last Tango In Paris had made on us.  If that was the kind of art that could be created on screen, we wanted to be a part of it.  Sure, there were Americans who were doing some interesting things at the time too (e.g., Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver), but it seemed to us that it was the Europeans who were really blazing a new trail.  If we couldn't be directors like them, if after trying our hand it turned out we didn't have the talent, then we wanted to be screenwriters or cinematographers or at the very least literate critics like The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, and BU seemed like just the place to get started.

Or so we had thought.  As it turned out, in those post-Watergate years, BU's School of Public Communications was more interested in turning out print and television journalists than in artsy film directors, and what we really wanted to learn was being taught over in the Theater and Drama program at the School of Fine Arts, but we weren't interested in all the stage plays and theatrics that program entailed.  Don't get us wrong, we're not criticizing the School of Public Communications - it turns out our freshman classmates included Howard Stern and Geena Davis (although we never knew or noticed either of them).  If we had stayed there, we would probably have been right at ground zero when the burgeoning punk-rock scene intersected with videography and the rock-music video was invented, and who knows where that would have taken us (probably to rehab, eventually).  But disillusioned with the Public Communication curriculum, we eventually wound up making the unlikely transfer from a Film & Broadcast major to majoring in geology, probably the first and only time that's ever happened.

Anyway, this isn't about us, it's about the loss of two of the titans of art cinema, two provocateurs who made movies unlike anyone before them or after, and the unlikely proximity of the dates of both of their demises (November 23 for Roeg and November 26 for Bertolucci).

That's not the only pair that we lost today (warning, awkward segue coming up) - this morning we lost a pair of teeth.  All throughout the Thanksgiving holiday and all throughout the whole long weekend, we were dreading the appointment we had made with the dentist to have two teeth extracted first thing Monday morning.  It was hard to feel thankful with that sword hanging over our head.  But Monday morning came, we went, and they're gone.  Two less teeth in our head.  It was relatively painless, although one tooth put up more of a fight than the other, and we're home today recovering with ibuprofen and Tylenol.  The only solace we can find is that with our self-extraction a couple weeks ago and with one other tooth extracted about ten years ago, that's now four gone out of 32, so this process can't go on forever.  The thought "four down, 28 to go" has crossed our mind, but we're not buying into that.

Anyway, tough way to start a week - two of our cinematic heroes gone and two teeth yanked out of our heads Monday morning. We should name the new gaps in our smile "Nicolas" and "Bernardo."

The long Thanksgiving weekend is drawing to a close.  By design, I didn't accomplish much, unless you count a borderline obscene number of hours spent playing Fallout 76 as "doing something." 

The weight of real life and the real world falls back onto my shoulders tomorrow morning.

I believe I'm ready.

There's A New Fallout

There's a new Fallout game out.  As I described last Monday, I finally downloaded the new Fallout 76 from Bethesda.net after a great many adventures and misadventures, most of which were probably user errors by this technology-challenged old man.  But I finally succeeded and wisely decided not to open it or start playing right then and there, as I knew it would likely have me up to whatever hour on Monday night.  I instead vowed not to open it until Wednesday, so that I can stay up as late as I wanted and play to my heart's content over the long Thanksgiving-holiday weekend. 

It turned out to be a wise decision.  I started the game around 5:30 p.m. Wednesday and was up until 4:30 a.m. that night playing.  I don't have Steam statistics to account for my actual playing hours (the game is not yet  available on Steam and can only be downloaded from the infernal Bethesda.net site), but my rough estimate is that I probably played for 14 to 15 hours each on Thursday and Friday.  All this on top of the fact that 76 is clearly the worst Fallout game yet (well, Fallout Shelter might actually earn that dubious distinction, but I hardly even consider that a video game).  . 

Bethesda has gone out of their way to emphasize that 76 is not Fallout 5, that is, not the next chapter in the Fallout series after the enjoyable 4.  It's a side-story, although there really isn't much of a story here - your character awakens in the titular Vault 76, leaves, and then has to survive in a post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear West Virginia.  That's pretty much it.  Sure, there are some quests and missions that come up, but there is no overarching storyline tying them all together, other than your character trying not to die.

What is different and unique to Fallout 76 is that it's the first multi-player Fallout game.  Unlike the previous Fallout games which were populated by computer-generated Non-Playing Characters (NPCs) and you played alone, every person you encounter in this game is actually another player sharing the game with you.  That guy running through the streets of downtown Charleston?  That's an actual person, someone somewhere in the world playing at the same time as you.  At your discretion, you can wave to that person, talk to that person, decide to hunt together with that person, or take on a monster together.  Or you can kill that person.

But this is not a battle royale, zero-sum game like Fortnight.  The goal is not to be the single last survivor.  The goal is to actually restore West Virginia from a battle ravaged wasteland to an actual vibrant community.  Game theory states that you're better off cooperating with the other players you meet than by opposing them, but my concern was trying to explain that to a 15-year-old playing the game somewhere out there in the world.  My fear was that adolescents would try to just be punks and run around shooting everybody and breaking everything they could find, including and most especially the encampments you spent hours setting up and stocking.  My worry was that while I was playing a mutually-cooperative game of Fallout 76, others would be playing a nihilistic game of Grand Theft Auto.  There's even an option, or so I'm told (I haven't gotten there yet), to acquire nuclear bombs and launch them at other encampments should you so choose. What teenager could resist that option?

What surprises me in a most pleasant way, and gives me renewed hope for humanity, is how cooperative and pleasant most people are that I've met so far in the game.  No one's shot at me yet and no one's tried to kill me.  A couple times, we shared encampments and I've let several players come into my carefully constructed encampment (more on that in a minute) and use my campfire to cook or my shop benches to repair their equipment.  Several people have offered me their unneeded gear (there's a weight limit on how much you can carry, and no one needs to lug around five pipe rifles) and when I offered to trade something in return, they were just "Nah, we good." 

Is this really the milk of human kindness manifested in gameplay, or is it just a self-serving kindness that rewards the player for good behavior and discourages the bad?  I forgot to mention, if you do actually kill a player in game, a bounty appears over your head and wherever you are on the game map, and lets others know they can earn extra caps for killing you.  So that's one incentive to behave, but is that really enough to discourage a rebellious adolescent from trying to kill and blow up everything they find before they get killed themselves?  You know, just for the lulz?  Apparently it is, and those who argue that video games foster violent behavior in real life need to look carefully at this example, where people are actually far more cooperative in gameplay than they are according to the newspaper accounts from the real world. 

So that's the good side.  The bad side is the game is really a chore to play - you're constantly having to forage for food and water, not to mention arms and ammo - even if you're not shooting other people, there is plenty of wildlife out there ready to attack you (and that makes good meat if you kill them first), as well as renegade robots, mutants, and feral ghouls.  

In the previous Fallout games, you had to monitor your Health Point, or Hit Point (HP), meter, and if it fell to zero, you'd die.  To restore points and not die at zero, you needed to eat, drink, sleep, or take a med, and try to avoid getting shot or hit by enemies.  Fallout 76 still has the HP meter, but it also has a thirst meter and a hunger meter.  When those fall to zero, you don't die, but you have so little energy and mobility that's it's easy for pretty much anything to come along and kill you - you're left essentially defenseless.  So to keep up your thirst meter, you need to constantly find water, and as most water and wells are contaminated by radioactivity and will make you even sicker if you drink without boiling first, you're also constantly foraging for wood to fuel the fires to boil the water. What's more, unlike the previous games, food perishes if stored for too long.  As a result, you can't stockpile food which means that instead of following the quests, which are of so-so interest to begin with, you spend a lot of your time looking for old, leftover rations or fresh meat (i.e., wildlife).  Just like real life, and just as in real life, pretty tedious and boring.  

Also, you can catch diseases in the game from bad food, from sleeping on the ground, or by getting too close to some monsters, and I've already caught dysentery (which makes you have to drink clean water almost constantly), "swamp itch," and something called "snot ear" (don't ask).  These are all annoying but can be cured with the right, hard-to-find medicines or harder-to-find natural herbs. 

We're playing games to escape from real life, not to recreate real life!  We want to pretend we're superheroes who can carry 100-pound machine guns on our backs while climbing up the sides of a building, or who can kill dragons with a shout and two strikes of a sword, not a camp dweller with dysentery huddling in the rain and praying that the scorchbeast on the other side of the hill doesn't smell your food cooking.

Anyway, I solved that later problem by building an encampment high up on a ledge on a cliff where it's difficult to approach me without giving me ample time to first determine if you're a friendly gameplayer or a monster or robot that needs to be killed.  It's pretty secure up there and easy to get to once you've figured out the path.  Also, the views are spectacular (I can see Morgantown from here!) and I've luxed it out with a brass bed, a state-of-the-art (such as it is in Fallout) cooking stove and several specialized workbenches for ammo, arms, and armor.  I've got a water well (still need to boil the water first) and even planted some fruit trees and veggies for food.  I'm not quite sustainable yet - I still need to forage for meat and wood - but I'm getting close.

The problem is I like my encampment so much I'm hanging around there all the time and not completing the game quests.  Instead, I've become something of an in-game hermit, helping out other game players in the area.   The camp is within earshot of a mutant-infested railroad depot, and when I hear gunfire I head over there and help out the outnumbered player (at this point, I know all the vantage points at the depot to shoot the mutants from without getting hurt myself), and invite the player to my encampment so they can repair their gear and restock their supplies if they want. There's even a pair of comfy chairs up there from which we can enjoy the scenery while trading tips about the game.    

So that's nice, and writing about all that makes we want to go back right now and play some more, so even though it's a boring and tedious game, even though the characters aren't developed and there's no overarching story arc, it's still the new Fallout game and I suspect it will dominate my time for at least the rest of the holiday weekend.

Dreaming of the Masters

Easily one of the most beautiful pieces of music we've ever heard, composed by Harold Budd, produced by Brian Eno, and released in 1978.  The interplay between the musicians is outstanding, each instrument accentuating the beauty of the others.  Budd is on piano, Gavin Bryars is on glockenspiel, and there are no less than four marimba players, including Michael Nyman.  The standout sound, though, is the incredible alto saxophone of Marion Brown. 

Marion Brown was born here in Atlanta.  Although he released several albums of his own, he is probably best known as a sideman in Archie Shepp's band, and as one of the monsters in John Coltrane's Ascension.  But his interest in music was eclectic, and in Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim he takes the saxophone into a new dimension, far from the fire and fury that marked the free jazz movement.  Brown passed in 2010 from complications of several surgeries.

We imagine that if there was a heaven, this is what it would sound like. 

We've been a fan of Harold Budd since 1980, when Eno first introduced him to the world in Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors.  We don't remember the exact year this exquisite song first entered our life, but we're pretty sure it was '80 or very early '81, after Plateaux but before we moved to Atlanta in March 1981 (we distinctly remember listening to this in Boston with our post-collegiate g.f.).  

Budd has been continually composing new music and releasing albums since this '78 recording, and even though his discography includes at least one live recording (from the Lanzarote Music Festival), we've never heard him perform live or even seen him listed as performing live anywhere.  So can you imagine how excited we were when we saw that he is going to be one of the featured composers in next year's Big Ears Festival?

Do yourself a favor and give this recording your full attention.  It truly is one of those "it'll change your life" compositions. 

Thanksgiving Traditions

Talking with some of the millennials in my office, I realized that none of them had ever heard, or heard of, Alice's Restaurant.

For the uninitiated, Alice's Restaurant is the name of an 18-minute talking blues song recorded by Arlo Guthrie (Woody's son) in 1967.  The song tells the comic tale of events on a Thanksgiving Day in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts and the unexpected results of the events of that day.

It was a pretty big hit when it was released and Arthur Penn even made it into a movie.  Despite its length, it got a lot of airplay on FM radio and throughout the 1970s, Alice's Restaurant was a consistent staple of their Thanksgiving Day programming.  I stopped listening to commercial radio by the mid-80s, but could only assume that Alice's Restaurant was still being played every Thanksgiving Day, at least on classic rock stations.

And it might very well be since, like yours truly, millennials by and large don't listen to classic rock radio (or radio at all). But since practically no one remembers the song anymore and since after over 10 years of posting William S. Burroughs' cynical Thanksgiving Prayer every Turkey Day, I'm in the market for a new tradition, here's Alice's Restaurant Massacree (the full title that nobody uses) as performed by Arlo Guthrie in 1967.

Enjoy!

  

Nothing To Say

I was all set to make some scathing remarks here regarding Cheating Brain Kemp's gubernatorial campaign and his recent decision to include the disgraced former cabinet member Tom Price in his transition team, when I heard that Pumpernickel has taken to praising Saudi Arabia for lower oil prices in order to justify his recent decision to overlook the Kingdom's cold-blooded murder of a U.S. resident in return for arms sales.

But then I thought, "What difference will what I say here make anyway," and who comes here for opinion on current events? (Answer: no one.) 

So for once, I have absolutely nothing to say. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday, everybody, and cheers!

Puddles Pity Party

Democracy Failed In Georgia

According to gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, she has not conceded the race to her Republican opponent, Cheatin' Brian Kemp, but instead recognizes that she simply has no further legal recources for her bid for office.  She received an amazing 1.9 million votes, more than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ever got in Georgia, but the carefully orchestrated, categorical disqualification of minority votes by the Secretary of State (and opposing candidate) prevented her from winning.

We'll hear a lot more from Ms. Abrams in the future.   But who's got time to think about that?  We've been trying for days now to download the latest video game, Fallout 76, with very little success until tonight.   

One of the things we like about video games is solving the various puzzles imbedded in the content of the games. In the course of a game, you come across, say, a building or a fortress and you can't for the life of you figure out how to get in, or how to beat the boss-level enemy guarding the entrance, or where to find whatever it was that had you at that location to begin with. These are puzzles to be solved, and you need to apply logic and deduction to figure them out.  Sometimes they're frustrating, but you almost always feel a sense of accomplishment when you finally solve them.  These puzzles and challenges give us the most satisfaction in game playing.

Bethesda, the published of the Fallout series, has taken the puzzles to a whole new level, and have made procuring the game itself a challenging enigma.  They decided for whatever reason not to make Falllout 76 available through the popular PC game distributor Steam, but instead from their own website or a handful of big-box retail stores.

We tried to download the game from Bethesda.net but after several attempts were unable to create the online account required to do business with them.  We then tried purchasing the game from Best Buys, but realized before we completed the transaction that they wanted to sell us a BluRay disc of the game, not a direct download.  We didn't want to wait for a disc to arrive and besides, we don't own a BluRay drive.  We were able to successfully purchase a download from Game Stop, but to our disappointment found that the download we had just purchased was available for us over at Bethesda.net, where we had started and where we were previously unable to create an account.

Back over at Bethesda.net then for a second time, we tried again to create an account for the already purchased game, but every time we tried to finish the registration, an error code popped up that simply said, "Something Went Wrong."

No shit, Sherlock.  We can see something went wrong, but an error message that doesn't tell us what went wrong isn't very helpful.  Was the problem on our end or their end?  Was it hardware related or a connectivity issue?  Or is it just that they don't care if we can access the game we had paid them our hard-earned money for?  YOU'RE NOT BEING VERY HELPFUL HERE, DUDES!, we screamed at the computer, but the computer didn't seem to care.

A Google search told us that the enigmatic error message "usually" meant that the screen name we selected had already been taken and all we needed to do was choose another screen name and try again, and if that didn't work, delete all cookies, clear out our cache, and erase our web history, and then close the browser, reopen it and try again.  We did all that, several times, but every time got that goddamned "Something Went Wrong" message.

Okay, just like in a game, we kept trying different things and different combinations of things to see what might work.  After about our eighth choice of screen name and erasing our history all the way back to grade school, we tried hitting the button "Forgot My User Name" just to see what would happen and when we did, we got an email saying that our account had been successfully created.  We're in!  Success!, although we had no idea what we finally did correctly in order to "win."

But now the problem was that with all of the screen names that we had tried out, we couldn't tell which one actually created the account.  We eventually got over that hurdle, and started the download, which is still running in the background now even as we're writing this.

But who's got time to dwell on that?  Today, we spent a lovely day doing field work at The Goat Farm, our favorite Atlanta art colony and work site.  The fun part today is that for the first time, our field sampling actually took us into the pen where they actually do keep a small herd of goats, as well as a couple of llamas and one loud, braying jackass (picture above).  It was a nice day - finally not raining and temps in the 60s - and we enjoyed the work and the company of the livestock, but we're old and tire out easily and right now we are exhausted.  

After being outside and on our feet all day, we're ready to turn in early tonight, and what's more, the Fallout 76 download just ended, so we're off now to complete the game installation and then off to bed. Note to self: DO NOT start up the game tonight, or you will be up to 2:00 a.m. playing (you know it's true).

We'll talk tomorrow.

of Montreal at Terminal West, Atlanta, Nov. 17, 2018

Last Wednesday, after six weeks of not going to a show at all and six months of not going to a show that wasn't at a stuffy, seated venue like The Fox or Symphony Hall, we finally got out to The Earl to see Thor & Friends and Wye Oak.  Last night, a mere three nights later, we were out again, this time at Terminal West seeing the Athens, Georgia band of Montreal.

We saw of Montreal two years ago, appropriately enough on a Halloween night. In 2016, the fine Brooklyn band Teen opened for them; last night, it was a Portland band called Reptaliens.

We could see why Reptaliens were selected to open for of Montreal.  Probably the most interesting thing about Reptaliens, the thing we're sure most people will remember, was a member referred to as "The Actor" who came on stage at various times during the set dressed in outrageous costumes, not unlike the backup dancers for Kevin Barnes and crew.   

    

Otherwise, Repataliens performed a set of energetic indie pop, fronted by singer and bassist Bambi Browning.  She was clearly the best musician in the band and it could be interesting to see what, if anything, she chooses to do post-Reptaliens. Between songs, there was some ambient science fiction apocalyptic dialogue played in the background, so that was cool.  Overall, though, it wasn't really our thing but most of the audience seemed really into it, and Bambi's boundless energy and enthusiasm had her dancing in the audience throughout of Montreal's following set.

Repaliens started their set at 9:00.  of Montreal took the stage at around 10:15, and played a 90 minute set.

of Montreal, for the uninitiated, are a psychedelic rock band fronted by the gender-fluid frontperson Kevin Barnes.  Their shows feature the band's glam rock songs, reminiscent of early David Bowie, Barnes' ever-changing outfits, exotically costumed backup dancers, and an aggressively psychedelic light and video show.  All in all, it's quite a circus, and an exhilarating, immersive experience.  

    

The band is fairly prolific and Barnes is a talented and witty lyricist.  However, they have so many songs at this point that we can only recognized a handful, Let's Relate (probably because the refrain "Let's relate" was plastered across the screen in big Peter Max fonts), and our favorite It's Different for Girls.

As you can probably tell, the whole night was about having as much non-judgemental, open-minded fun as possible, and each stage set, each outfit change, each backup dancer seemed determined to top whatever had just happened last on stage.  It was a blast, and the audience was deliriously dancing and cheering along.

Not that it would be possible to capture the ebullient anarchy of the set with words and pictures, or even video for that matter, but here's the close of last night's encore, the grand finale with all the band, the dancers, and most of Reptaliens on the stage with of Montreal.

Basically, it was a party and everyone had fun and no one got hurt.  What more could one want from a Saturday night?

RIP Roy Clark

Roy Clark, the greatest country-music guitarist, if not one of the greatest guitarists ever, passed away at the age of 85 at  his Tulsa home.  Cause of death was complications from pneumonia.

Clark was most famous for hosting the television program Hee Haw from 1969 to 1993.  When the show first premiered, it seemed to this Long Island teenager like some sort of transmission from another planet.  It seemed so out of touch with the revolutionary, acid-rock zeitgeist of the time that we found it nearly unwatchable. . . until Roy Clark performed his weekly featured song. Whatever we thought about the cultural and political implications of Hee Haw, we knew for sure that Mr. Clark could play himself some guitar.  We liked Buck Owens (1929-2006), too.

To paraphrase the last words of the Japanese poet Sohoku:

Silent now
The sounds of strings . . .
Moon above magnolias.  

Dreaming of the Masters

Listening to Thor & Friends Wednesday night reminded us that the music we listened to back in the '70s wasn't restricted to only free jazz. Here's a video of a 1968 performance of Harry Partch's Daphne of the Dunes, with the composer Partch himself present.  

The LP The World of Harry Partch was one of the touchstone records for us that opened our ears and our minds to a whole new world of the possibilities of music. 

If this music sounds "different" to you, it should - this is a completely invented form of music.  Partch came up with his own microtonal scales and used impossibly intricate time signatures, and even designed and built the only instruments that could play this music.  This is what genius sounds like. 

Wye Oak and Thor & Friends at The Earl, Nov. 14, 2018

Last evening was a cold, wet, traffic-clogged, cluster-fest of a rainy night, but despite it all we headed out anyway for a show at The Earl.  We hadn't been to The Earl since we saw the Austin, Texas band Loma there back on April 26.  That was 6 1/2 months ago, probably the longest we've been away from The Earl in years.  We shan't let that happen again.  Coming back in felt like coming back home again, and happily another Austin band, Thor & Friends, were the opening act to greet us back.

Got to love the vintage Jimmy Carter sticker and the Woodie Guthrie tribute.

Thor's music is closer to neo-classical minimalism than to rock or pop, and we really, really like what he's doing.  It brought back memories of Steve Reich concerts and long-forgotten Harry Partch and Terry Riley albums, and if you don't understand that this is what we like, then you probably have no clue why we're so excited about next year's Big Ears Festival (where Thor & Friends should be honored guests) or even who we are for that matter. This is right up our alley.  This is what we live for.  

The nucleus of Thor & Friends is, of course, percussionist extraordinaire Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater) as well as Sarah “Goat” Gautier (left) and rhythmic gymnast Peggy Ghorbani (center), who worked a toothpick between her teeth the entire set.  The three create most of the ensemble's sound on marimbas and other mallet instruments, but last night they were also backed by Aisha Burns on violin and by Wye Oak's Andy Stack on alto sax. There was also an accordionist back there behind them all as well.  They started promptly as 9:00, played one extended 45-minute composition, and the entire audience was spellbound throughout. During the quieter passages, the often chatty Earl audience was nearly silent, a rarity for the frequently noisy club.  

Here's a little taste for y'all:

Bonus points: Thor ended the set with a shout-out for Stacey Abrams.

Thor's set would have been enough to have let us leave satisfied and alone would have justified heading out on such an awful night.  But the headliners were Baltimore's Wye Oak, who played as sincere and charming a set of songs as one could possibly hope for.    

Wye Oak is fronted by guitarist/singer/keyboardist Jenn Wasner, with Andy Stack playing drums, usually with just one hand, leaving the other free for additional keyboards and electronics.  It's pretty impressive how full the duo's sound can be for just two people, and for this tour they brought along a bassist to save Andy from at least one additional chore. Wasner has a clear, bright voice that can rise up above the instruments and at this point they've written a pretty good back-catalogue of well-crafted songs.  There's really nothing here to dislike, and the evening had a special charm to it as Wasner charmed the audience and the audience charmed her right back.

We've seen Wye Oak many times before, going way back to 2011, and we've also seen Wasner's side project Flock of Dimes on a couple occasions.  But last night, it felt as if we had forgotten how good they can be - or maybe just how much we enjoy listening to a live band.  We did remember we liked Wye Oak enough to head out on a night as wretched as last night, and for Wye Oak repaid our effort a hundredfold. It was hands down the most enjoyable Wye Oak performance we've seen to date.

We didn't do a "30 Seconds" video, but here they are in a studio session in Seattle. If anything, Jenn's voice sounded even clearer last night than in this studio session, and she did manage to hit some of the high notes at The Earl that she seems to struggle for below.

Why Shaky Knees? Why Big Ears? Why Here? Why Now?

As you probably guessed - because we just about said as much - we didn't make it out last night to see The Orb at Terminal West, but we will make it out tonight, even though it's an absolutely rotten, rain-soaked, traffic-bound bummer of an evening, to see Thor & Friends and Wye Oak at The Earl.

As expected, the lineup for Atlanta's 2019 Shaky Knees Festival was announced today.  This will be the festival's sixth year of existence, and over the years, we've managed to attend every day of every year of the festival.  We're close to claiming every hour of every day of every year of the festival, but if we're being honest here, we did sleep in late a few of those days and got there late, and we were discouraged by the big crowds for the so-so headliners a few times and left early.  But by and large, our attendance has been near perfect.

To repeat what we said yesterday, when we left the last day of the festival last year, that is, when we finally dragged our sorry, old-man butt home after three-days on our feet watching a seemingly endless parade of bands, we had a suspicion it might have been our last Shaky Knees.  We might not go in 2019, we thought, unless the lineup was an absolute killer.

The lineup came out today, and to be honest it's pretty darn good - it's certainly better (in our opinion) than Coachella and it's arguably the best festival lineup announced yet this year, but despite all that it's still not looking good for us getting back out into the crowd again.  Let's break down that lineup:

Tame Impala. Good band.  Great band, in fact a killer band, and absolutely qualified to be a headliner.  But. . .  they headlined Shaky Knees just a couple years ago (been there, done that) and although what they do is great, they're not likely to do anything new or different this time around.  In fact, most of the audience will probably be perfectly satisfied if they played the exact same set as their last appearance here. But anyway, we typically don't go to festivals for the headliners (although a bad headliner can keep us from going) and at this point in their career, Tame Impala fall into the "neutral" territory - not an attractant, but not a repellant, either.

Beck. Another eminently qualified headliner.  We've never seen Beck perform, but that says something right there - he's been around for well over 20 years now, we've probably had scores of opportunities to see him, and yet we were never motivated enough to actually get up and go.  Another "neutral"  - not a repellant, not an attractant. Part of the draw of a festival is the chance to scratch a couple names of our bucket list, but at this point, we've apparently grown pretty comfortable with Beck being in the bucket. 

Cage the Elephant.  We don't like them.  There, we've said it.  We saw them headline at Music Midtown a few years back, and couldn't even last through their entire set.  I know they have fans, loyal fans too, but they're not for us and as a headliner, they serve as a repellent.  Unless, of course, they're on Sunday night, which would give us a good alibi for heading home early to get a jump start on Monday morning.  .  .

Incubus.  Yeah, right (sarcasm).  It's still 2001.  Pass.

Tears for Fears.  Yeah, right (sarcasm),  It's still 1991.  Pass.  . .  Okay, if we're still being honest, several of their songs are among our guilty pleasures and sound great on soundtracks, but live at a festival?  We don't think so, and can only imagine the number of boomers crowding the stage for their set.  

Gary Clark, Jr.  Nice guy.  Saw him at the inaugural Shaky Knees in 2013.  Been there, done that.  Pass.

Interpol.  Nice guys.  Good band  Have they done anything lately?  Don't get us wrong, we don't dislike them, but they're not enough to make us overcome our reluctance to attend this year's festival. Pass.

Foals.  Nice guys,  Good band.  Saw them at an awesome show at The Goat Farm a few years ago. Been there, done that.  Pass.

Father John Misty.  Love him.  Listen to him all the time.  But for some reason, we passed on seeing him when he played The Tabernacle last summer here in Atlanta.  This is part of what we'll be regretting if we don't go to Shaky Knees next year.

Tash Sultana.  Literally, who?

Grouplove.  Meh.  They have their moments and they have their fans, but we're pretty assured we won't have pangs of regret missing them if we don't go. Pass.

Phosphorescent.  Put on a terrific show at Center Stage a few years ago, played Shaky Knees two years back (we think two, or was it three?).  They can be a little too laid back for a festival setting, though.  Pass.

The Struts.  Literally, who?

Tyler Childers.  See above.

By now, we're down to the fifth line of the poster.  This is usually around where our interests really kick in - those obscure, left-of-center bands we've come to know and love.  Dashboard Confessionals and Liz Phair certainly fit that bill, in very different ways, but we don't feel our hearts breaking if we pass.

Sharon Van Etten - Our favorite, our indie sweetheart.  We love Sharon and are extremely psyched over the couple of songs we've heard so far from her new record, her first after a few years' hiatus. If we do wind up going to Shaky Knees, Van Etten will be a large part of the reason.  If we don't, she will be what we most regret missing.

Deerhunter and Oh Sees - See?  It is a good lineup after all.  But both of these bands tour a lot and play Atlanta frequently.  We've seen them both several times.  Do we need to stand for three days under the Georgia sun to see them again?  That's not a rhetorical question.  That is literally what we're mulling over in our minds.  Along with Ms. Van Etten, they're reasons for going.

The Dandy Warhols and Honne - Meh, and then literally who?  

After that, we can start cherry-picking through the remaining lineup.  Sure, Atlanta's Black Lips always put on a great show, but they play here all. the. time. (including a previous year's Shaky Knees) and we're not going to either night of their two-night stand next weekend at The Earl.  Japanese Breakfast, Mark Lanegan and Soccer Mommy would all be interesting, they're exactly those middle-of-the-poster kinds of bands we love, but after that, it's The Joy Formidable (Shaky Knees 2013), Foxing, and The Nude Party, and that's about it.  After Low Cut Connie, the rest of the bands on the poster are all literally who's.

So anyway, all that sounds pretty negative, but you still might be surprised and find we're there anyway for the seventh straight year (we do love our traditions here at WDW).  You only live once - you might as well hear as much live music as you can.  

If we do go, it will be to see Father John Misty and Sharon Van Etten, but there's a variant of Murphy's Law that says if you go to a festival for only two bands, they will both be performing at the exact same time. That being the case, we'll restate it and say that if we do go, it will be for Father John and Van Etten, as well as Deerhunter, Oh Sees, Japanese Breakfast, Mark Lanegan, Soccer Mommy, Foxing, and if time permits, The Joy Formidable and Liz Phair.  The crowds will keep us away from Tame Impala, but that's still not a bad lineup, and possibly even stronger than the last Shaky Knees.

But anyway, all that took us a lot longer to write down than for you to read, and we have to go and get ready for tonight's show at The Earl.  Sorry if we offended anyone with our blunt assessments of the bands, and hope we didn't discourage anyone else thinking about attending this year's festival from going.  For the record, we're still very pro-Shaky Knees and we hope that it keeps on keeping on, but we may be finally recognizing that we're now too old and our musical taste too idiosyncratic to really enjoy the festival as we did in years past.   

Music News

As some of you may have noticed, we haven't been to many shows lately.  That's probably been confusing for some people who've come to think of this as a "music blog," just like the music posts once confused those who once thought of this as a "Buddhist blog." But hey, life is change baby, and we blog about whatever's on the minds of the various desks making up the editorial board of this blog.  We are legion . . .    

We're not sure why we haven't been to many shows lately, but that will change soon, if not tonight with The Orb at Terminal West.  But in case you're betting money, we're actually more likely to miss tonight's show than to make it.  For starters, we don't have tickets and even though the show's not sold out and tickets could probably be easily purchased at the door, the absence of tickets removes one compelling motivation to go.  Plus we've seen The Orb a couple of times already - it's a good show but like we've said, we've seen it - plus it's raining out (it's been dreary all day) and we had a meeting with some downtown clients today so we're tired.  We haven't completely thrown in the towel yet, but we wouldn't place any money on our making it tonight.

We'll definitely make it to The Earl tomorrow night, though.  We do have tickets for that one and others are counting on us to meet them there.  Besides, the show is Thor & Friends, with Wye Oak headlining, which should be great in the relatively intimate confines of The Earl.   But the very fact that we'll be at a show tomorrow night is another reason why we probably won't make it to tonight's show - back-to-back weeknight shows can be exhausting.

But after a few nights of recovery after Thor and Wye, we've got tickets to a Saturday night of Montreal show at Terminal West, and you can rest assured that we will be there.

We're also pretty sure we'll still be making it out to shows next year.  Today was a big day for festival announcements, including Knoxville's Big Ears Festival, and we like what we're seeing.  The full lineup for Big Ears in March 2019 includes:

Just like last year's Big Ears Festival, this incredible lineup is so completely up our alley it's almost unbelievable.  Who else could this festival be targeted for if not us?  Who else is a fan of both The Art Ensemble of Chicago (who we haven't seen since 1979 at Jonathan Swift's in Harvard Square) and Avey Tare (who we haven't seen since last July with Panda Bear performing Sung Tongs)? Who else likes both the Zen vocalist Meredith Monk and the all-woman folk trio Mountain Man? Speaking of folk, our favorite banjo player Bela Fleck is back again as well as Rhiannon Giddens (they both played last year).  And then there's Carla Bley, the composer of Ida Lupino, who we missed at Big Ears two years ago, but is coming back again this year.  We won't make the mistake of missing her twice - we last saw Bley perform at an outdoor set in Boston's Copley Square in 1978.  Speaking of 1978, we've been collecting Harold Budd records since he first started recording with Brian Eno back then, but we've never seen him live and there he is in the Big Ears lineup.  And who wouldn't be excited about Richard Thompson, Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Frisell, and Lonnie Holley.  Many of the rest we've never heard of, but they're in good company and we look forward to discovering them.

We've already spent a small fortune on VIP passes for Big Ears 2019, as well as a room at the downtown Hyatt right in the middle of the festivities.  Money well spent, but there were more announcements today as well.  Here's the lineup for Savannah's Stopover Festival:

A pretty strong lineup, but part of the reason that we haven't gone to Stopover before and probably won't this year either is that as the name implies, these sets are mostly by artists on their way to Austin's SXSW "stopping over" in Savannah for a gig and most of them schedule their next stop for Atlanta, so we can catch many of them right here at home without having to rent a room in Savannah.

But if we did want to go down to the Low Country for a show, we could always go to Charleston for High Water, which also announced its lineup today: 

That's an even stronger lineup than Stopover.

The strongest lineup of all may be announced tomorrow, when Atlanta's Shaky Knees Festival announces its lineup for May 2019.  For five years now, Shaky Knees has pretty reliably been putting on the best indie rock festival in the nation, and I have absolutely no clue who they will be announcing tomorrow.  But last year's festival, although exhilarating, left us exhausted and we suspected then that 2018 might have been our last Shaky Knees - we'll leave it for the kids to celebrate - unless the lineup is so overwhelming convincing that we simply can't refuse to go.  We'll see tomorrow. 

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, Jonathan Richman will return to the Avondale Towne Cinema on February 19.   He has a new album out, a dronish set of songs featuring former Talking Head Jerry Harrison on keys, but as always he will be touring with Tommy Larkins on the drums.  You can listen to the new album on the widget below - we recommend Track 3, which he previewed the last time he played the Avondale Towne back in '16, which seemed especially relevant that evening, coming as it was just a few days after Pumpernickel's election.

   

Racism. Voter Suppression. Why Here? Why Now?

Racism.  Voter suppression.  Why here?  Why now?

We've given this some thought and we've come up with another one of our crack-pot theories. Voter suppression, we propose, isn't simply just another expression of racism any more than racism is a result of voter suppression.  They're both twin symptoms of a deeper disease.  The evils of racism and it's wicked cousin voter suppression - as well as most other forms of intolerance - aren't necessarily endemic to one region or one ideology more than another.  Sure, they may be more widely practiced right now in the American South than in, say, the Bay Area or the more liberal enclaves of New England, but we propose that when the right conditions are present, racism and it's inbred stepchild voter suppression will arise, whatever the locale.  Look what's happening right now with the rise of the far right in formerly ultra-progressive northern European nations like Denmark and the Netherlands.  

Racism, antisemitism, and other forms of xenophobia are the products of economic inequality.  When one group in a society are aware that they have fewer commodities, a diminished lifestyle, a shorter life expectancy, than others in that society, they look for culprits, someone to blame, and usually they don't look toward those who have more than they do as the culprits, but instead look for scapegoats and culprits who have even less than they do, people they think of as freeloaders taking advantage of the system and taking out more than they put back in.  It's only radicals who blame the wealthy for their poverty - most people seem to think there are too many other people around to share what's left over and blame their peer class or those below them on the social ladder for their problems.

"If I'm not succeeding, it's not because those above me are preventing me from rising up, it must be those below me that are dragging me down," some people seem to think.  Wage stagnation, underemployment, the crass indignities of economic inequality - all of these force people to look for culprits, and immigrants, followers of other religions, and people with different skin tones are easy scapegoats.  "I'd have more if I didn't have to share with them," many people think, without even recognizing that the wealthy are thinking the exact same thing about them.

When times are hard, racism, bigotry, and intolerance all come out, and are expressed as hate crimes, segregation, and voter suppression.  So the first point we're trying to make here is that economic inequality isn't the result of racism and bigotry, but racism and bigotry are the result of economic inequality.

To peel back another layer of the onion, we propose that the root cause of economic inequality is egocentricity.  The wealthy hoard the resources - accumulate commodities as Marx puts it - because egocentricity tells them that they are not others, and it's better for them to have wealth than for others to have it.  If we were free of ego, or at least self-identified as "us" instead of "me,"  there would be no egocentric hoarding, and then no economic inequality, and as a result of that, no racism or voter suppression.     

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, said much the same thing last weekend, only holding up me-first nationalism as an example of egotistical folly instead of economic disparity.  

"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism," he said. "Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first, who cares about the others, we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values."

If you go to a pot-luck dinner, where everybody brings a dish of their choice to a communal feast, there's always one person looking over the smorgasbord on the groaning table and thinking that whoever brought that particular dish contributed less than they did with their dish, and judging all the other attendees by how much or how little they contributed.  I guess what we're trying to say in this post is don't be that person.