Scan Day

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As we approach the one year anniversary of the end of Em’s treatment, I imagine there will be a lot of thoughts bubbling around for both of us.  Already, Em has upped the ante in her two most recent blog posts, the earlier of which represents yet another example of her intense and direct writing style.  I urge you to read ‘Pinning Jell-o To The Wall’ right now.

As part of the whole thing, it is now time for her first scan, this one is a CT, which means she rides through the doughtnut after drinking some nasty barium and getting jacked in to an IV.  Considering how everything else has been going so far, we’re pretty confident that there is no nastiness to be discovered, but it’s nerve wracking to go into the hospital and deal with needles and machines and what not.  So we will go together this morning and give that doughnut the old Beckerantz karate chop – HIiiiY-YAH!!

I think I dreamt about last month’s Planet Cancer Couples Retreat.  It was classic dream stuff, like the ‘real’ thing but not at all.  I was sitting at a table and we were playing silly games with strangers, not our newly found cancer posse, but some dream version.  I don’t remember much else, but it isn’t hard to put one and one together this morning.

One last thought about all this.  I’m on a trial list from yesterday in Camden, NJ.  I had to tell the Judge’s assistant that I can’t start first thing today (if they’re ready) because I’m taking Em to her appointment.  The level of understanding I got was refreshing – clearly this woman ‘get’s it.’  That was nice.

Crossposting not working anymore?

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hmmm…

What a pain in the ass – I think I’m just going back to the old cut-and-paste mentality. It seems like this crossposting thing should be easier, but everybody’s got different tables and things. Blogger doesn’t want to talk to WordPress; CrossPress only works from the admin account and then doesn’t transfer categories or tags; and to have comments appear on two blogs at once, well you can forget it.

Decemberists at the Tower last night

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Em and I made our way to Upper Darby via the Market-Frankford elevated train to see the Decemberists at the Tower Theater.  This is a lovely old venue that I find to be somewhat inconvenient becuase it’s outside the center of town, but parking is still very difficult.  Fortunately, SEPTA goe right there.  The upside – no need for a designated driver.

So I’m working off a hangover at the super hip coffee shop in Collingswood, NJ, while Em meets with a new yoga instructor.  What, you’ve never heard of Collingswood?  My point exactly.  The hope had been to prepare a Blogerantz entry with a tasty tidbit from the Decemberists promo tour for Hazards of Love, namely a stop at KCRW to play some of the best bits from the album.  Unfortunately, upload capacity is capped pretty low here, so it will have to wait.

It was a great show.  They performed the entire album front to back, a-la Genesis with The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 74-75.  That portion of the program was absolutely uninterrupted performance for about an hour.  Highlights came from the guest performances of Becky Stark and the incredible Shara Worden, who are both on the record, even though they have bands of their own.  We were particularly taken by Worden, who stole the show with her intense vocals and outrageous dance and movement.

Both guests stepped away for most of the second set, and that took some of the air out of the balloon, but they came back for a rousing rendition of Heart’s ‘Crazy on You’.  I try not to get caught up with gimmickery of the BIG COVER.  We’ve paid a good bit of money to see what this band can do.  Can they bring the energy and originality of their studio work to the stage.  The cover is often a cheap shot, especially for a band that has several albums worth of material.  But it did feature the girls on vocals, so it was nice to have them front and center again.

This is not to take anything away form the Decemberists-proper.  These guys have probably taken a lot of heat for the excessive literary nature of their lyrics.  Here’s the Village Voice from 2006:

Tonight demarcates the other side of the hipster spectrum: the familiar world of self-pitying white people looking for reasons to be unhappy, or at least suspicious, despite incalculable birthright advantages. The Decemberists look down from the top of this mountain, trying to make a living off of blasé malaise.

And that’s not the nastiest of it.  I wouldn’t be suprised if that was a pervasive criticism, but, you know what?  After a large cup of coffee, I feel like telling The Village Voice to STFU.  Better than that, however, is the fact that the band has become better, tighter, more focused and more adventurous in its dark tone.  If the Voice didn’t like it back in ’06, I’ll be they really hate it now.  The show hits Radio City on June 10.  We’ll see what they have to say then.

The music is tremendous – direct and simple.  There are no highly technical flourishes that often burden concept albums.  That means that the band can concentrate, not on getting it right, but on bringing the passion and the power.  And that’s just what happend.  The cresendo of ‘Won’t Want For Love’ came across about two hundred times stronger live.

Nurse Jackie – TV show might be pretty good?

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Heather Havrilevsky at Salon seems to have liked it, but is not optimistic about the show’s future.    This is from Heather’s review:

Imagine if Carmela Soprano woke up this morning, got herself a gun, and blew Tony Soprano’s head off.

Nancy Franklin at the New Yorker definitely liked it.  I guess I liked it too – the first episode, that is.  Go figure.  Let’s see how it goes from here.

Time Turns Elastic – not Beard, not Fish, but Phish

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I was encouraged by a good friend to give the 13 minute ‘single’ from the forthcoming Phish record.  I’ve never been a big fan of their music, despite the fact that there is a serious prog side to this jam band institution.  Anyway, they’ve got their first studio album in five years coming out this summer, they’re back on tour, fans are eating it up.  So after getting all salty about what they do, I took some time and actually listend to the song.  Here’s the pertinent portions of my explication:

For a different band, the first two minutes could be a chart-topping pop single.  How crazy is the crowd going to get when they hear “I’m a submarine”?  Now comes a very small meandering and then we get more lovely and heartfelt pop.  The sound of the acoustic piano and the electric guitar is really simple but rich and textured.

At about 4:35, things start to go a bit wrong for me.  ‘Melody, shelter in the darkness.  Take hold of me now.”  Even at the first go-round (and without having a strong contextual understanding of the band in general) I knew this was going to introduce a long instrumental section.  But the lyrics give it away.  We’re ‘in the darkness’ and we need some ‘melody’ to make it – I guess – not so scary.  OK, let’s see what you got.

This starts by sounding like the more recent versions of Brand X with the alternate picking and harmonics.  Then we have the build-up to the long middle portion.  It’s a little rocking, then it’s a little quiet.  Then it starts rocking again.  The piano is leading the charge and it’s pretty happy until we get to about the 8 minute mark.  Now it’s back to those harmonics and melody in counterpoint.  Not so happy now with the sky bleeding and the world turning upside down.  It’s a bit fusion-y for the next minute or two – almost reminds me of Chic Corea and Return to Forever, but less hysterical.  My problem, is that it’s just a bit of meandering, almost trying to be a bit off, a bit atonla, to set up the BIG ENDING.

Now, you know that no one likes the big ending more than I, but did we need seven minutes (from about 4 to 11) to get there?  It’s OK if there’s some hot stuff in that intervening period, but it seems to be kept at a moderate to low energy intentionally to set up the big classic rock finale.  I just wish they would do more with that middle period.

But the ending is exceptional and it rocks and I know that it will go over great live.  It is prog because it’s very composed and it requires a lot of attention to get all the ins and outs.  And while not all prog is automatically good music, I always appreciate the effort.  It makes the world safer for Beardfish, Elephant9 and other rockers coming on the scene.

I know that is some cheap, cut-and-paste, blogging, but its along the lines of what happens here, as far as content.  The same individual who encouraged the above email is now pushing for collaborative music blogging.  Hmmm…  As always, I’m all ears!

I take it back…

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ReadAir sucks.  I’m going to stick with Google Reader until there is some native app that (a) notifies me when I have new items to look at, and (b)  syncs with Google Reader so that I don’t have ‘unread’ items to look at if I check online from another machine.

It was a good idea, but it didn’t update, it didn’t hide cleanly, it was just too tough.