Music for Your Feet April 4, 2008
Posted by KG in Music, Running.add a comment
The Cherry Blossom is in three days, and my biggest fear right now is the lack of music. 10 miles, sans iPod – what am I going to do when the adrenaline ebbs? Maybe I’ll ask a neighbor to sing for me, or find one who can passably mimic gangster rap.
So, fellow Cherry Blossom runners, here’s five songs that are current workout favorites. Know them? Love them? Find bib number 10319 around mile 7. You’re also welcome to suggest your own songs — we can have a race singalong!
Peter Gabriel — “Shock the Monkey“; Dolly Parton — “Jolene“; Santa Esmeralda — “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood“; MOP — “Ante Up“; TV on the Radio — “I Was a Lover“
(alternately, I can just picture this video the whole run.)
U2 3D GR8 February 4, 2008
Posted by KG in Etc., Music.add a comment
It must be incredibly difficult to not think of oneself in messianic terms when day after day, night after night, thousands of screaming fans who may or may not speak the same language as you sing along to your songs.
That’s probably one of the more clichéd ledes for anything written about Bono (a Google search of “Bono messianic” comes up with 22,000+ hits — and how’s using Google search stats for cliché!), but the thing about it is that it’s true. Take U2 3D. Even better, take how I felt before, during, and after watching U2 3D. It’s been about 14 years since I first bought Zooropa, but songs like “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Bullet in the Blue Sky” (!!) still make my inner adolescent pop out, ready to spout bumper sticker epithets about becoming the change and so on. That welling up of idealistic emotion probably hits a select segment of the population; what is startling is how large, heterogenous, and fervent that swathe of people can be. Even more surprising is the fact that I’m only slightly embarassed to admit that my dormant fanboyishness is alive and well. (After seeing U2 3D on Saturday, I loaded most of The Joshua Tree and War onto my shuffle.)
The best part of seeing U2 on an IMAX screen is that you get most of the fun of the concert experience at near-perfect sound quality and without the $100 price tag. Of course, the IMAX experience also magnified the drawbacks of the concert film medium: you get to *see* an amazing concert, but the 3D photography amplifies your separation from the chanting Argentinians who watched Bono do his best Pavarotti impression during ”Miss Sarajevo” (!!). “Amplify your separation” is just my artsy-fartsy way of saying “I felt jealous.” It takes quite a lot for me to desire standing in an enormous stadium, sweaty and sore, singing at the top of my lungs. In fact, I doubt I’d want to do that for any band currently active — with the exception of U2. Not that I’m a superfan, but the IMAX film shows you that unlike many stadium bands, U2 makes the unpleasantness of the experience worth it.
The Natural History Museum isn’t the best place in the world to see U2 3D, but it is the only place in town. I would advise buying tickets in advance online and showing up early for a good seat. The chattering museum-goers, expecially those of the younger than Zoo TV variety, may get on your nerves, but this weekend they were quick to quiet down by the first bars of “New Years Day.” That leaves you about 73 minutes of U2 wowing what looked like 80,000 Argentinians. And you wishing you were there with them.
All I Ever Say Now April 30, 2007
Posted by KG in Food, Music.1 comment so far
Saturday night, I saw The Dismemberment Plan. My first show in forever, and it was worth it. It’s difficult to avoid piling on superlatives (trust me: awesome), but predictably the show left me feeling nostalgic. In the “remember the show when…” sort of way, where other concert-goers gathered outside afterwards, ears still ringing, trading Plan moments like baseball cards. And in the “I wish I could go back to…” sort of way, remembering other shows, missing days long gone and friends unseen for far too long.
This morning, Eastern Market burned down. Just a couple days earlier, I’d bought my usual haul there, the fixings for my week’s lunches and dinners. Again, nostalgia, but in a more general key: trudging home with arms full weekend after weekend, with whatever looked fresh and delicious; free samples from the grumpy-but-congenial Cheese Guy; walking from meat counter to meat counter, trapped in the best kind of indecision.
There are bands out there that are much better than The Dismemberment Plan. There are markets out there that run laps around Eastern Market. But none are a part of me in quite the same way.
Luckily, I doubt this weekend marks the last time I’ll spend time with either.
Memories of High School, or My Horsehair Shirt April 12, 2007
Posted by KG in Books, Music.add a comment
1. My Favorite Author from 1994-1996 or so was Kurt Vonnegut, and I think he’s an ideal Favorite Author for anyone going through that horrible time of life known as adolescence. Vonnegut’s propensity to boil down many of his stories to koan-like phrases is both seductive and reductive; when you’re searching for identity, they make sense in a bumper-sticker kind of way. That isn’t to denigrate Vonnegut as a writer, but complexity and nuance were never his strong suit. I’m pretty sure he’s okay with that. It doesn’t make him a worse writer than any other — just an ideal writer for certain times in your life.
Despite an overall love for Slaughterhouse-5 as an introduction to his oeuvre, my favorite Vonnegut novels are Mother Night and Bluebeard. Neither compare to Welcome to the Monkey House, which, all criticism aside, is one of the finest collections of short stories ever written.
2. By the time my violin teacher handed me Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (age: 17), my attitude was pretty poor. I started playing the fiddle when I was 5, and never really took to the whole “practice” part of it. Better to play what I wanted, and not Suzuki etudes, or so I figured. These are the things that attitude got me: poor violin posture, a crappy arm vibrato, and a perpetual seat as lead 2nd violin or 3rd chair. It didn’t help that there were seriously talented violinists ahead and behind me in school, and that other things (that litany is very, very long) often got in the way of learning to play in fifth position. So after hacking away at the 2nd movement of Partita #2 for months, I got tired of trying. It’s precisely when I decided to give up the violin.
To this day, I maintain that I had no natural or innate musical talent. I can parrot pretty well and I have a fairly decent ear, but I have no real skills. There’s a causality question buried here: was I unable to nurture innate talent because I was lazy and unfocused? Did I realize I was lazy and unfocused early enough that I never gave the violin my all? I’m not sure. I’m fortunate that those Sunday morning violin lessons gave me an ongoing appreciation of classical music. That doesn’t make it any easier to admit that I gave the violin up primarily out of self-centered laziness. That Partita — and I remember it well, in the yellow book, staring back at me, mocking my fingers and their lack of grace — was a breaking point, and it wasn’t long before I put my violin in my bedroom closet and stopped thinking about it. Well, sort of.
Sunday’s Post magazine had a heavily blogged article about Joshua Bell giving an impromptu violin performance in L’Enfant Plaza. The results of the “sociological experiment” (no spoilers — read the article!) were entirely unsurprising. Some of the corrolary observations (Children like music! People recognize beauty!) were painfully banal. But the article struck — ahem — a chord. That’s probably because a large part of it was devoted to the violin, and specifically to the Chaconne, the fifth movement of Bach’s Partita #2. Maybe I’d have stopped and listened to Bell that morning, and maybe not. But the article did inspire me to get some more classical music in my collection, for the sake of reminiscing (if not outright self-flagellation).
