Dancing about Architecture

My girlfriend and I went to this last night.

I’m not up to writing a full review, but:

“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face”, as performed by Paul was great. (And touching as hell under the circumstances—Laurie was wiping tears from her eyes and clearly she didn’t know ahead of time that Paul would be playing it.)

(Musicals were a recurrent theme of the evening. Besides “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, “Till There Was You” from The Music Man was performed (by John Eller).)

Also great was some song with the lyrics “she’s a goddamn angel” and something about her “husband in Hell”. Is this a new Westerberg song? (A Gram Parsons song??)  The lyrics are kind of like an inverted version of the lyrics of the Tim version of “Can’t Hardly Wait”: “I’ll be sad in Heaven/You won’t follow me there”.

Paul and a bunch of others played an awesome (extremely awesome) version of the Stones’ “Loving Cup”. (Paul’s left hand seems to have recovered from the screwdriver-candle-cleaning incident—he played some decent guitar solos on “Loving Cup”.) Paul was totally getting into this song and John Eller played really good keyboards on it.

The Zuzu’s Petals songs were excellent. Laurie was completely happy performing, Linda is an awesome drummer (she played drums for almost everyone that night), and it was fun watching Coleen bop around.

Other than P.W. and Zuzu’s Petals, the main musical highlight was an amazing vocal performance by Lori Barbero (of Babes in Toyland) on some song that I don’t know the name of. Whatever song it was that she played, it was an amazing minimalist arrangement: just distorted, feedbacking guitar, Lori’s vocals, and Lori’s foot slamming down on the bass drum pedal.

Also great was the closing performance of “Daydream Believer” by everybody.

I had my copy of Petal Pusher signed by Laurie after the show. I didn’t want to reveal myself to her as some kind of “Paul worshipper”, so I didn’t say much to her, which I now regret. I could have at least told her that I loved the book.

Click here if you’re a trombone player.

Does the barber who shaves those and only those people who don’t shave themselves shave himself? Only Zen master King Tubby knows the true answer.

Alex Ross is right when he says it’s hard to think of a great Hollywood film score written for a comedy.

Bernard Herrmann did the score for Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry, which is definitely a comedy. I watched the movie on TV in Madison, Wisconsin one afternoon when I was going to school there, but I don’t remember much about the score. All I remember is that the movie was quite funny and Shirley MacLaine was quite young and attractive in it.

Of course, The Simpsons isn’t a movie, but the music by Alf Clausen (and the theme by Danny Elfman) is quite good.

I’ve never seen Airplane!, but, if the music by Elmer Bernstein is one-eighth as good as his score for To Kill a Mockingbird, then it’s quite good.

Which brings up the question: Could a brilliant score for a total screwball comedy ever really be accepted as being brilliant? As brilliant as the score to Vertigo or Psycho is considered to be? A lot of comedic film scores really only show their brilliance when listened to in conjunction with the film. A good example of this is the hard-sync scores for Who Framed Roger Rabbit (by Alan Silvestri) and Carl Stalling’s brilliant work on the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes shorts.

Riding your bike and reading books from the public library.

This morning I finished reading Laurie Lindeen’s beautiful and moving (in parts) and laughing-so-hard-milk-snorts-out-your-nostrils funny (in other parts) new book, Petal Pusher. I wanted to quote some of the funny parts, but I gave my copy to my girlfriend, as a gift, immediately after finishing it and it’s over at her apartment right now (and I’m not), etc. But, anyway…

You’ll probably get your own ‘message’ from the book, because it’s about a lot of things (and the author’s writing is too intelligent for it to be the type of book that would overtly have a single ‘high-concept’ message, anyway). But, to me, it was about the fact that maybe you can go home again. Maybe home is just things like reading books and riding your bike around with a friend, and not doing the things that make you feel bad in the long run. Maybe home is the things you did when you were a kid when you were happy (more or less, relatively speaking (relative to the complicated, messy, decidedly non-happy corner you might have painted yourself into now as a so-called adult)).

But, that’s not exactly what the book is about. It’s about a lot of things and it’s not something some moron blogger (my name is Paul) can summarize in 500 words. So, just read the book for yourself, because it’s super good.

Automatous Monk jamming with his great-grandnieces. Click here to listen.

Here are my top five songs that are missing from Rolling Stone’s list.

• “No Fun”/”Push It” by Iggy & The Stooges/Salt-N-Pepa and 2 Many DJs
  The best of the mash-up world.
• 4′33″ by John Cage
  Sometimes silence is golden.
• The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
  How come riots never happen at any of the concerts I go to?
• “Police and Thieves”, “White Man in the Hammersmith Palais”, or “White Riot” by the Clash
  How come everybody’s afraid to throw a brick in this country?
• Any song by the Replacements
  Actually no song by the Replacements ever changed the world, but many of them changed individuals.

Alberto Gonzales doesn’t recall. Click here to listen.

Here’s a good article by Cary Tennis: “I’m dying to be a musician”.

And while we’re on the subject of punk: “Death and glory” and “Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer”.

Every 1000 years, all the abandoned, forsaken, and neglected dogs in the world meet at Salisbury Plain and lift their inarticulate, damaged voices in song to praise their God. This isn’t the song they sing, but what I imagine it might sound like.

Click here to listen to “Salisbury Plain”