I've been incredibly slack about updating lately, but I do still exist. Here's a brief taste of what's been going on ( Read more... )

...were great. And this time I actually got to see them with friends-- niwandajones and narose picked me up and we headed up to campus together. Shows are always so much more fun with friends!

Of the two opening acts, I dug the hell out of Loch Lomond; they're Celtic-influenced indie folk/rock, and the music is just gorgeous. We missed the beginning of their set ( Read more... )

I don't think that statement is hyperbole, either. Watching him in concert tonight, my Emergency Backup Date elspeth1 and I each thought of the passage in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach where he talks about the implausibilty of Bach having improvised a fugue-- the complexity being comparable to playing five games of chess simultaneously and ( Read more... )

Indulge me for a moment. Or, you know, not.

It is easy to forget, in light of their past decade and a half of output, that U2 used to be really amazingly fucking good. Boy and October and War and The Unforgettable Fire are such phenomenal albums-- everything that is good about rock stripped down to its basics and performed with passion and ( Read more... )

...but enough about my parentage, let's talk about my age. (Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal, it's extra cruel ( Read more... )

MAN that was a good show.

This afternoon, singulargirl showed up, having driven out all the way from the Valley because she is crazy about Okkervil River, and it just so happened that they were playing a show here tonight with my second favorite band, The New Pornographers. I gave her a brief tour of downtown Ithaca-- Restaurant Row, the Commons, the deWitt ( Read more... )

In honor of a recently renewed friendship-- lord love teh facebookz-- with one Mr. Jim Bishop, late of Auburn, Maine and now of Reno "Shoot A Man Just To Watch Him Die™" Nevada, a man-- nay, not merely a man, a graduate student of English-- who writes full sentences on a regular basis in a real live non-LJ blog, I shall make a brave attempt to add ( Read more... )

I admit, I got totally spoiled for music in Northampton. So coming out to Ithaca, as much as I do love it out here, was definitely a step back in that aspect. There are indie bands that tour in this general direction, but usually the closest they stop to us is Buffalo, which is still three hours' drive away ( Read more... )

It really does pay to get to Pearl Street shows right when they open the doors. Elvis Perkins In Dearland and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah put on an excellent show Wednesday night, and I was close enough to both Elvis Perkins and Alec Ounsworth to have grabbed them by the ankle had I wished to do so. I did not wish to do so, as it wouldn't have been ( Read more... )

So, yes, it is awfully lonely with darwins_fox out of town, but I managed to have quite the killer evening anyway, at least after I got out of work. To wit ( Read more... )