« July 2009 | Main | September 2009 »
Yes I know a lot of you have moved past the whole "ownership" thing when it comes to music and movies. But for those who still like to buy DVDs, you seriously have to visit Big Lots! once a month.
Today I bought BRICK (pictured) for $3.
And John Ford's THE HORSE SOLDIERS for $3.
And NIGHT COURT Season One for $6.
All brand new, remaindered by the studios who ditching inventory as fast as they can.
Hey all, I forgot to list the details for Casper Land's Troy Night Out event in today's issue. Emar and Mr. Eggz will be performing 8-Bit Nintendo dance beats (on Game Boy's, I think) at 7 PM, in Casper Land's front room (469 Fulton St., Troy). Free.
Mayor Jennings interviewed for the Working Families Party endorsement, even though he must have known he wouldn't get it. This is an endorsment that Jennings certainly would have wanted, and maybe even expected.
A solid win for the Ellis campaign, not only because the Public Employees Federation is the second largest state-employee union with hundreds of members working (and living?) here in Albany but also because, according to Corey Ellis spokesman Justin Milkulka, the union will be making available volunteers to assist the campaign with phone banking and so on.
Read the press release after the jump.
In a pretentious display of rock-critic bluster, I wrote well over my allotted word count when reviewing this weekend's Phish show at SPAC (I got excited, OK?). The first part can be found in print or on our site. The rest is right here.
“Cavern,” the early-'90s Rosetta Stone for Phish’s empty-metaphor absurdist lyricism, pushed the first set toward its climax, and the line “in summing up, the moral seems a little bit obscure” still tends to describe the band’s polylingual defiance of easy classification (a fact that posits them at a terminal point in rock history, after which instrumental rock became “post-rock”—but that’s another dissertation). A parade of animals closed out the set, with Mike “Cactus” Gordon’s bluegrass “Possum” leading to the new loping groove of “Ocelot,” which seems to simultaneously mock sloth while playfully demonstrating it. Shifting to a properly high gear, “Run Like an Antelope” closed out the uncommonly monstrous set (even by their standards).
“Onanistic” and “histrionic” are often terms levied against Anastasio’s playing on songs like this, and in his darker, strung-out days, they may have been appropriate. But with sobriety has come a returned sense of generosity in Anastasio’s soloing, such that every reaching note and ecstatic squall is as much an offering as it is an indulgence. I know, it sounds trite. But it’s for this reason that the band will continue to sell out any venue they play for the rest of their lives (see also Fenway Park 5/31/09), regardless of how aesthetically dated their music may become (and, yes, it does still for the most part sound like New England in the ’90s.) It’s probably safe to say that the halcyon days of band/audience chess matches and “big ball jams” are over, but the degree of synergy that took place between the stage and the floor Sunday night (and, notably, Hartford two nights prior) recalled, for the first time in a decade, that which launched the band to prominence early in their career. It's enought to give old-timers the chills.
Oh, and there was a whole ‘nother set. (I promise I’ll rein this one in.)
Relative to the prolonged barrage of the first set, the
second set unfolded with patience and a little bit of early wandering.
“Backwards Down the Number Line,” from the band’s forthcoming album Joy, worked its way into 20 minutes of
abstract Moog-driven space that segued seamlessly into the bluesy pop of
“Twenty Years Later.” “Halley’s Comet,” a goofy tune featuring Gordon’s vocal
bassline seemed to focus the group for the meat of the set. Then the Velvet
Underground’s “Rock and Roll,” a long-time staple, followed, complete with the
geographically resonant lyric about a “New York
A momentary note: When Phish disbanded in 2004, they did so
having conspicuously neglected to rehearse “Fluffhead,” an early epic that
still stands as one of Anastasio’s most ambitious compositions, for performance
at their send-off festival, Coventry
Given this set-up, you can imagine where said fans ended up stuffing their feet.
The song isn’t especially intricate, but here’s the shtick:
Every version has a different improvised narrative that leads to an
interpolated cover song. The most infamous version featured the entirety of
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. This
time, Anastasio set the scene whereby the song’s protagonist Jimmy had fallen
into a “blue” time in his life. He needed guidance, and just when he needed it
most, his spiritual guide came down out of the sky. He was a “small middle-aged
man wearing a dress.” At this point, Anastasio took a seat at the drum set as
drummer Jon Fishman, a short man wearing his infamous “reinforcer” dress, came around to the front of the stage.
The spiritual advice he offered was a putrid, off-key version of Katy Perry’s
“I Kissed a Girl.” As Anastasio later commented, before the concluding section
of “Harpua,” it “didn’t work on so many levels” that it worked just fine.
Closing the second set was the Holy Grail composition “You Enjoy Myself.”
Just like the show opener, the encore is something fans
guess at in futility, and I’m willing to bet no one in attendance saw this one
coming. After the barbershop quartet “Grind,” during which the band calculates
exactly how many days they’ve each and collectively been alive, Anastasio gave
a pretty clear indication that, while this is the end of the return tour, it’s
far from the end of the band’s touring. For Halloween, they’ll be throwing a
three-day festival outside L.A.
Recent Comments