Thee Oh Sees at Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, 09-06-2017

It's Rocktober, that magical time of the year between Labor Day and Thanksgiving when Atlanta annually seems blessed with a far greater than usual number of good to great bands playing in town. This year's Rocktober started off with a set last night by Bay Area band Thee Oh Sees.

Atlanta sludge-grunge band All The Saints opened with a loud set of grunge and sludge.  They aren't bad, but they're not nearly as good as their constant posturing and on-stage preening suggests they think they are.  They sound at times like a shoegaze take on Nirvana and their drummer certainly has promise, provided, of course, he finds a better band to play in.  Meantime, he and us have All The Saints.  Also, as long as I'm complaining,  their set lasted too long (nearly 45 minutes) for an opener, especially one with a sound as limited as All The Saints (all the songs sounded about the same after 10 minutes).

The same (all the songs sound about the same) could also be said for Thee Oh Sees, but in their case, that sound is so good you don't want it to change, and they know this and they deliver on that premise.  Thee Oh Sees have an instantly recognizable style but one that's hard to classify - a sort of garage band approach to a combination of psych- and punk-rock, played at a frenetic breakneck speed reminiscent of rockabilly or its cousin, psychobilly.  There's occasional lulls where they quiet things down a bit, but only so that frontman John Dwyer can hoot his trademark "Whoo" into a mic and launch another excursion into an adrenaline stratosphere.   They're so energetic it's almost comical and sometimes they remind me of some sort of Mad Magazine caricature of a punk rock band, or something that Ed "Big Daddy" Roth might have imagined being played on the stereo of one of his comically over-accessorized hot rods.

They constantly have the dial on the "Fun Meter" turned up to 11, and everything they do, every gesture, every note, every word of every song, seems determined to be and to have as much fun as humanly possible.  They don't seem to believe in preludes or long suspenseful introductions to their songs, they just barrel-dive right into the fun parts and then hop from one peak to the next.  Life's too short for them to bother with verse-chorus-verse song structure when they can just unleash a sonic blast attack at will.

They're also incredibly prolific, which makes it hard for anyone to be familiar with all of their songs, but they did open with Dead Man's Gun from last year's excellent An Odd Entrances, and they managed to fit The Dream from 2011's Carrion Crawler somewhere later into their set.  I recognized some other songs but couldn't tell you a single additional title.

Oh, by the way, did I mention yet that they now have two drummers? They both played in perfect unison most of the time, but definitely doubled the propulsion.  With the only other musicians being Dwyer on guitar and vocals and a bass player, half the god-damned band are drummers.

The show kicked ass.  The crowd was whipped into a frenzy and there was near-constant crowd surfing. All that and I got home by 11:15.  Not bad, not bad at all.   

Time & Place

Macon, Georgia, 10:35 a.m., September 6, 2017

What did you do last weekend?

Down here, we kicked off the weekend over beers with a few friends, watched Georgia and Alabama win their season-opening football games, and pretty much wrapped up playing Skyrim, which we've been playing since August 15.  We've completed all the main quests, killed many a dragon, sacked many a castle, and defeated a good number of wizards, and there are still a few side quests left to complete.

I think at this point, my list of titles goes something like Shokai, the Dragonborn, Bard, Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold, and Thane of Whiterun, Riften, and Morthal, although I might be forgetting a few honorifics here or there. 

Surprisingly, given the above, we didn't go to DragonCon last weekend.

Death and Cars and Rock 'n' Roll

Please don't be alarmed.  Please don't take this the wrong way.  I'm not suicidal.  Far from it - I'm probably the opposite of suicidal, whatever that is.  And this isn't a cry for help or a threat or a warning or anything like that.

But sometimes I wonder that if I were going to commit suicide, how would I do it?  And most every scenario I come up with involves some combination or another of my car and music.

I'm not into guns, and any method of suicide that involves either burning, freezing or strangulation sounds too scary and/or painful.  Overdosing seems popular but you always run the risk of not doing it right and winding up some sort of vegetable or in a psychiatric hospital and worse off than you were before.  

But there are three methods I've come up with that sound intriguing.  Here they are, in order of decreasing probability (which in my case are all exactly zero, because as I said, I'm not suicidal). Also, don't try any of these at home, kids:

1. Slam-Dancing With a 18-Wheeler - In this fantasy, I'm in my car (just like I am in the other two fantasies), and in this case I'm listening to music.  Loud.  Very loud.  And something fast and aggressive, like the SF psych-punk band Thee Oh Sees.  With the music blaring full blast out the open windows, I find a way to jump into the wrong lane of traffic on an Interstate Highway, usually I-85 in Atlanta, and try to swerve and avoid as many on-coming cars as I can while I accelerate to full speed and drive head on into the first 18-wheeler truck I can find.  We're both going well over 60 mph and the end, at least for me, is fast and certain.


2. Thelma & Louise - This one is a lot more specific and will take a lot more planning, but at least it doesn't involve taking other people out with me like the previous fantasy probably would.  I find a spot on the rim of the Grand Canyon where I can drive my car off the edge and into the abyss like in the movie Thelma & Louise.  Once the spot is found, I very carefully measure the precise distance away that I need to be so that I can start driving as fast as I can while playing the Swans' song Into The Sun and arrive at the edge (and the end of my existence) at the exact moment that the song hits its climactic crescendo and the chorus is singing "Suuuuun!" for the last time (you have to know the song to understand that reference), and my car and I boldly leap into the afterlife.  If I can time this to also occur exactly at sunset (or sunrise if I'm driving from the west), so much the better.


3. The Comfy Way - This one's a lot less violent than either of the previous two fantasies.  I simply park my car in a snug garage, open the windows, leave the engine running, and let the carbon monoxide fill my lungs while I listen to my favorite folk-rock and indie songs on the stereo.  Since I don't myself actually own a garage, a variation involves attaching a hose to the exhaust pipe and running it into a partially open window but leaving all the other ones shut tight so that the car itself fills with carbon monoxide to take us to the other shore.  If I do this at home, I can leave a message in the mailbox politely informing the mail-person not to be alarmed but if she finds this message it means there's a corpse in the car in the driveway, and to call 911 or whatever before some innocent passerby is traumatized by finding a dead person in their neighborhood.  Also, she can help herself to whatever she wants in the house before the police arrive - I won't mind as I won't be needing any of it anymore.

So to repeat, these are just fantasies, morbid meditations on the unthinkable, and not anything I'm planning to do.  But if I were . . .  it obviously would involve my car, which I probably should just go ahead and rename Charon now for the ferryman in Greek mythology who transported the dead to the underworld.     

Taffy Burns

It's my Mom's birthday!  Wish her a happy one, everybody, and wish her many more to come.  She's survived raising four children, a World War, a Cold War, innumerable smaller wars, conflicts and skirmishes, several Republican administrations, the suburbs, a marriage, a divorce, a career that paid for my college education (thanks, Mom!), and dramas, traumas, and tragedy that I probably don't even know about. And she's faced all this with her humor and kindness intact, and can still beat me any day of the week in a mean game of Scrabble (my theory is that she cheats, but I haven't yet figured out how).

Anyway, happy birthday, Mom!

While my heart goes out to the poor, suffering people in and around Houston, I have to admit that the massive low-pressure cell southwest of Atlanta has brought down some cool Northern air, and temperatures and humidity have been nicer these past few days than they've been for a while.

But what I was going to say is that when the heat's back on - and it will return, I assure you ("summer is coming") - there's probably no better game with which to escape the temperatures than Skyrim.  Set in a medieval Nordic fantasy realm, complete with Alpine mountains, glaciers, and lots and lots of snow (and even the occasional walrus, polar bear and saber-tooth tiger), it just feels cool and refreshing if you let yourself get pulled into the fantasy.  It feels like the room temperature drops 10 degrees when you fire up the game.  

I can't imagine what it's like playing in the real winter, on a cold day, when you can see your breath.   

For Once, Good News

In this time when many American cities are grappling with the issue of Civil War monuments and statues of openly segregationist politicians and wondering whether to leave them up or take them down, Atlanta today unveiled a new statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.   

Today.

At the State Capital.

At the high-visibility intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Capitol Avenue.

I agree with Trump that we should preserve these "beautiful statues and monuments," at least in this particular instance.

Fela 76

According to the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, "The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension of opposites."  Neste vídeo capa vou mostrar a música Mister Follow Follow do album Fela Kuti Zombie (1976).

Return

I took the back roads home from Jekyll Island today.  Above is an abandoned apiary in Gardi (Wayne County), Georgia, and below is an abandoned gas station in Brunswick.

The land was flat and the roads straight as an arrow for long stretches.

A last shot of the overly landscaped grounds of my hotel on the island.

If you're wondering why I headed home on a Friday when the weekend was just beginning, I was on Jekyll for an environmental conference on Wednesday through Friday.  By Friday - today - I had sampled enough of what the island had to satisfy me, and besides, it was too hot and humid to even sit out by the sea. 

Impressions of Jekyll Island and the Primitive Georgia Coast

Let's Go To The Beach!

It's 325 miles from Atlanta to Jekyll Island, or roughly the distance from Boston, Massachusetts to Wilmington, Delaware, but I made the trip this morning in about five hours and spent what was left of the day at the Jekyll Island Convention Center and the restaurant at the Westin.

Another fun-filled day awaits tomorrow.

All things have potential. Potential existed before the cosmos came into existence and potential will exist after the collapse of the cosmos.  Potential is independent of space and time.

In potential, there is no understanding of what potential is and no one to understand or not understand potential.  In potential, the universe itself is eternal, peaceful, selfless, and whole, and while the nature of existence is impermanent and interdependent, in potential the universe is eternal and unchanging. Given all that, potential is: 

Neither existent nor nonexistent,
Neither that which has been created nor that which has not been created,
Neither something sacred nor something profane,
Neither matter nor anti-matter,
Neither that which is named nor that which is unnamed,
Neither phenomenal nor non-phenomenal,
Neither "is" nor "is-not",
Neither substantial nor insubstantial,
Neither cause nor effect,
Neither opposite nor identical,
Neither bright nor dark,
Neither appearing nor non-appearing,
Neither eternal nor temporal,
Neither disruptive nor non-disruptive,
Neither beginning nor without beginning,
Neither past, present, or future,
Neither logical nor illogical,
Neither of the realm of the senses nor beyond the realm of the senses,
Neither caught in the web of interdependence nor free of the web of interdependence.

It's as if I said that outside right now I have the last thing you'd expect. In that case, whatever you think it might be that I have outside would not be the "last" thing you expected, as another guess would always follow, if not immediately then as soon as I said, "No, it's not that thing either."  The more you keep guessing, the further away from knowing what it is you'll be, and the Zen-like nature of this is that as soon as you quit and stop trying to guess what it is, as soon as you no longer care, then there will have been a "last expectation" and you'll know what it is.

As soon as you stop trying to understand potential, potential will understand you.