Please do not weed wack the hosta's and grasses

in our art garden.

Why is it that schoolteachers are obsessed with the "pre-teaching" of cultural experiences? Like, if a young women's chorus will be singing in the cafeteria, why must the children be shown a YouTube of the group beforehand? If the K kids are getting bussed to Merrill Auditorium to watch a children's musical, why must they first be read the book from which the musical has been adapted? I mean, I know the answer—I'm sure every tanning-booth bimbo from state teacher's college mostly remembers that there's "research" that shows that kids retain more information from a presentation when the material's been pre-taught. Isn't it kind of clear, though, that narrating someone's experience in advance, planting in their brain a script to frame and shape and ease the processing of the event when it finally happens, that this going to preempt the sort of shocking, transporting encounter with difference that is the whole point of experiencing artworks, even when that artwork is Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical? (The research summarized in this recent article from the Economist suggests that kids disengage from novel objects more quickly when they've been told in advance what the thing is and what to do with it.)

What is the city, as pictured by the music of Weather Report?

"It is not that we are not allowing music or loud sound. It is that we are also allowing quiet, which isn’t automatic in this city."

The best way to listen to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is to be so absorbed in the verse and the mysterious, swirly parkscape it presents that you fail to anticipate what's happening next, so that the metaphysical departure of the chorus is experienced not as an inevitable part of the song's structure but as a spontaneous and extremely lucky accident. Of course, you can't will yourself to hear the chorus this way, any more than you can throw a surprise party for yourself; it just sneaks up on you sometimes. But here's something you can do on purpose: try to hear each of the three performances of the chorus as distinct event with a unique interpretation of time. I'm pretty sure the second one is the slowest and heaviest. Moreover, each chorus seems to be deeply rhythmically undecided within itself; maybe it's an epiphenomenon of the flanging, but it seems to me if you follow the drums you can hear it like a hip-hop recording where the sampled drumbeat not only understands something different about 16th notes but is oddly matched to the song's primary tempo, speeding up over the course of the bar and synchronizing again on the downbeat. Such effects are more evident on the mono mix, which, because slower, does less to blur anomalies of time, as pounded out by animals, into the evenly divided continuum of geometry.

When you go to a movie or play or concert, do you consistently prefer to sit on one side of the theater, as though one side more reliably allowed passage into the realm of fantasy, while the other encouraged vigilant real-time monitoring of the theater itself? Why is this? (And in view of the fact that the seat a 1L chooses at the beginning of the term becomes his for the rest of the term, should he prefer a leftward or a rightward view of the lecture hall?) With reference to nothing but the image of the painting on the screen, one can tell immediately if the slide is backwards in the carousel. Why is this? (And in view of our biases toward particular visual asymmetries, their fittedness to the different ways the halves of our divided brains present the world, does perfect symmetry somehow represent a radical imbalance of our natural forces of cognition?)

Looking at reproduction 19th century American wallpaper this afternoon, in particular at a pattern of interlocking twists whose forms, both biological and abstract, seemed to present a simplification of sea-weeds or lichens, in which one white twist overlapped and seemed to be holding hands with one black twist in such a fashion that the white twist was apparently the agent or initiator of this conjunction, I felt that I again understood the essence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or rather, that I saw the figures in the wallpaper as he might have, and that I had access to his quite particular form of vision.

Strange Maine 4/3/11

When I stepped into the shop this afternoon, Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air was on the turntable, and "holy shit this is awesome" quickly gave way to "no way am I playing this for my baby at home." If she can't have electronic cause-and-effect toys, why should she be allowed to listen to this sort of music? Riley's aesthetic innovation is formally parallel to my pre-teen discovery that I could ball up and eat the crustless middles of slices of white bread. This record was released in 1967, and Paul certainly put it on for his friends; he may have even walked home from some mod boutique with it under his arm. The blueprint for 1000 modern-day touring acts, many of them from Baltimore.

I was pleased to find a copy of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name (1971). I don't usually buy records solely on the basis of their appearing on Top Ten lists, but I made an exception for #2 on the Vatican's Top Ten Pop Albums of All Time. With Revolver as #1 and Dark Side of the Moon as #3, one can surmise only that the criteria called for expressions of morbidity. But unlike those records, which, by summoning and organizing energy into improbable artistic forms, enact life's battle against entropy, If I Could Only Remember My Name accelerates the decay of once-rich musical structures into increasingly generic rhythms and modes, enacting death rather than representing it, approaching the final heat death of the California sound. The harmonies of "Tamalpais High (At About 3)," the album's best song, help us imagine how McCoy Tyner might have sounded to himself while taking LSD with Trane. Once we've overlistened to all the best and second-best music of an era, we must become archaeologists of garbage.

Chris Weisman at Higher Ground, South Burlington, 3/19/11

Set One (acoustic, with Kurt Weisman singing backup): The Beatles, Mr. Man, Hand Sign, Climb on the Grassland, Camp Studio

Set Two (with electric band): New Americans, Doing Donuts Till You Die, Hardcore Experimentation -> Makachi -> Lake of Fire, Bicycle, The Ghost Part of It -> Coconut Feeling (incomplete; whistling solo extends into off-mic group whistling improvisation); encore: Give My Regards to Capeman

Funk Siren

_{"Forme is Power"—Thomas Hobbes}

The centerpiece of 9/29/99 (Pyramid Arena, Memphis, TN) is an extended second-set "2001," widely known as the "Pyramid 2001." It is relevant that the Pyramid Arena is a pyramid (it is the world's sixth largest). And unlike the Grateful Dead's 1978 concerts at the Great Pyramid of Giza, this performance takes place inside the pyramid. The phrase "Pyramid 2001" is almost too overladen with symbolism to begin to discuss: Phish as an art object built over decades by hundreds of thousands of slaves; blockheaded geometrical minimalism as an analog for Phish's aggressive formal obviousness; a pyramid/monolith/rhombus connection; the pyramid as a kind of spacecraft; pyramids as containing, in a sort of transdimensional way, infinite starry space; Phish, in their capacity as archeologists of their own childhood and adolescence in the 1970s, revisiting the King Tut-mania that swept America as the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" took up a three-year residence at the Met; "2001" as another name for 2012; the darker jams of 1999 as a form of automatic reading of the hieroglyphics briefly glimpsed while nodding out; serious drug use as a form of Egyptology; the sounds of Trey's self-embalming and -immuration and subsequent passage through the underworld; the feeling you get as you look out through newly powerful eyes that your face has become that of a jackal-headed god; and so on.

***

The first time I saw Phish (1993), I remember being impressed by Trey's giant white hightops. He didn't strike me as unaware of what puffy sneakers might mean, fashionwise. But neither did he seem to be making a negative move at the expense of oblivious white sneaker-wearers. It was ironic, but sincere. Like, I absolutely love being weird in the world. Or consider Trey's striped shirt in this video from 1994; it's too big, and untucked, and a dress shirt. And listen to (at least) the first minute of his solo, say, :32 through 1:37. He starts out doing this muted-string thing, and it seems like a bad joke at first, like, "I am playing annoying guitar," but he keeps doing it, and the way he's swinging his hair he seems to be saying I am absolutely in heaven and could do this forever.

It's hard to say what exactly happened to Phish in 1997 (and this has been the subject of an amazing thread at Phantasy Tour, what was it like when phish funked out in 97), but part of it was that Trey no longer wanted to be a jazz brainiac from Vermont. It's like he got embarrassed. Trey makes a belated grunge turn, steering his weirdness toward underachievement, both in his appearance (no cardigans, but often the t-shirt-over-a-thermal-undershirt and the winter-hat-indoors; gone are the Colin Baker-esque baggy yellow pants of the Billy Breathes era) and his playing (willfully unstudied, aggressive and humorless, no longer overstuffed with pseudo-jazz altered notes). This video features not the eccentric-honors-student Trey of old, but schlubby-dropout Trey (Fishman's self-care seems to have declined, too). I suggest tuning in at 6:52. I'm in hell, but I'm going to act like I belong here.

***

I first heard of Phish during a Peace Walk across the Memorial Bridge in Augusta, Maine, in January 1991. Candle wax dripped onto my mitten. This adult-seeming guy with long hair wore a blue windbreaker that looked like serious outdoor gear. I confused the band he was telling me about with the Rhythm Fish, a high school band I had gone to see at a Battle of the Bands in Waterville; the bass player was my friend Chris's math tutor. I was surprised to learn that they now had a large following all over New England. The man clarified: "Phish" with a "p-h." The Gulf War went ahead as planned. Hiking boots were cheap and plentiful. Making Sense of the Sixties was on PBS. "Phish"-with-a-"p-h" circulated by word of mouth. Some friends saw them on a package tour that came to Portland and came back with their first LSD, "Spaceships." When I finally saw the famous Phish, the high-register laser-gun guitar hurt my ears and I wished it would stop. The music on their early CDs seemed to be about experiences of water, swimmy crosscurrents of overlapping arpeggios, whereas Rift seemed to be about experiences of ice and snow, moon- and streetlight-lit drifts and banks of modernist winter. "Phish" was the name of the substance the band produced, the wobbly refracting swim, glowing and finny and seaweed-swept, something you felt in the many-particled whip of seaspray standing on the bow of some research vessel blasting into the Atlantic, and clearly you were wearing a blue windbreaker.

Kind of preoccupied with this quadrant of the cover of Native Dancer. What is this hill? What is on it?

From the liner notes: "WHEN THE ALBUM WAS NEAR TO COMPLETION WE ALL KNEW AUTHENTICITY AND HONESTY HAD WON!"

Chris Weisman, Transparency, Autumn Records

DISC ONE

Round is, and is about, a shared world. Against Assange and Zuckerberg and their vulgar ideal of what sharing and transparency and togetherness might be—radical homogeneity of content, translation without remainder, minds freed from bodies and arrayed in a standing reserve—the togetherness here is always togetherness-with-difference, respect for what is withheld, openness to someone who is allowed to remain other, must remain other. Like the way we'd share a pie—you would have some, and I would have some, but we wouldn't be eating the same bites of pie, probably. I find the opening chords incredibly relaxing.

Music in the Line expresses ambivalence toward the power of art to redeem moral error, whether personal or world-historical. The "where did the magic go?" riff is beguiling, one of the album's many programmatic acoustic guitar cartoons. And what is the music in the line? Weisman: "Line cognition is backwards. The vague finger-pointing of 'phrasing'. Isis."

The Winning Blues pits the humiliating non-being of near success against the infinite value of not competing. One win away from a trip to the Super Bowl, Chicago's Jay Cutler took himself out of the NFC championship before halftime, complaining of knee pain, and watched the remainder of the game from the sideline, bundled in a black cloak. The feeling was widespread that he had bailed not just on himself and the Bears but the whole Windy City. Although the MRI confirmed that he had indeed suffered a sprain—an injury many veteran players regarded as trivial, especially in a playoff situation—it could not reveal exactly what transpired in Jay Cutler's soul as he made the decision to walk off the field, whether it was cowardly self-preservation or something nobler, some state of conscience invisible to the value system of the National Football League. (Consider also the strange case of Denver's Jake Plummer.)

Bicycle is an instrumental but you can hear the word "bicycle" uttered musically throughout. Based on a verbal description of jazz understood in isolation from actual music—as much jazz must have been in the early days of the form. The "Wild Honey Pie" of the double record. A "corporation" in the Weismanian sense: a music-body. Rob Martin shredding rock n' roll piano, piano scarf flying. Fearless; three times as long as you expect. I admire Chris's faith in this composition; the faith kind of is the composition: I can make this bicycle fly!

The moralizing Weisman of B.O.A.C. returns in Symbols and Signs, a jaunty 6/8 romp with a coasting chorus. It's worth wondering whether the premise of the song is even true. We occupy a place in semantic and economic systems we did not choose and might not find flattering, and beginning to cognize this enmeshment ("beginning" because the webs go so far out that beginning to begin is the most you can hope) can make us giddy and vertiginous; yet it would be crassly reductive to insist that cipher-being is all there is. Language rebuilds the world in its own likeness, then congratulates itself that the world seems to conform so miraculously to its requirements; but it mistakes this power for its own inevitability. Wide tracts of our lives can live only outside it, even if these open spaces of the spirit are increasingly difficult to access, and can be expressed only indirectly. But when by some act of grace we find ourselves opened to Being, we ourselves are revealed as a different sort of being. Is Linkin Park now considered classic rock? This guitar solo (the reeling triplets over muted strumming) takes a revolutionary attitude toward music; please jam it out forever. And when the band comes back in, it's this amazing monophonic oasis, an incomparable momentary timbre mirage, and you realize that you've been experiencing stereo-fatigue from the endless double-tracking, which over time can have the effect of draining the humanity from Chris's voice, turning it into a representation of itself.

Number 2 Man recalls the many disappointments of the recently concluded NFL postseason, as we watched great heroes—Brees, Manning, Brady, Vick, Roethlisberger, each a colossus of the sport—fail on the gridiron. One thinks also of the endless slow-motion replays of Brett Favre getting sacked and concussed after taking what would be the final snap of his NFL career. The tobacco-chewing, Southern-drawling endorser of Wrangler jeans brought the Vikings tantalizingly close to the Super Bowl in his second final season, then came out of retirement yet again to give it one more shot, only to suffer a succession of legacy-destroying disappointments. The lesson of Feathers: quit while you're ahead, retreat into the infinite. Save your brain. This song has such a supernaturally relaxing flow that the recorder countermelody, brilliant though it may be, arrives like an intruder. The pace and delivery and accenting of syllables during the first harmonized verse must be one of language's top ten appearances in music.

I wish I could see Almost a Mood in The Real Book, with "All the Things You Are" on the facing page. I wish Chris would go on a Rhodes-only tour and jam this one out (another fantasy of live Weisman allowed to flourish under the condition of his non-touring). Under the sway of a flan—Chris has more food lyrics than any songwriter I can think of. The Robyn Hitchcock narrative voice that completes the rhymes dares to become uncomfortably intimate. The opening notes suggest a song that never materializes: the meaning of curtains.

The Radial Spoke is a peep into the glamorous world of a small peer-group of elite academic composers. Nostalgia for the days when Weisman, Stillman, Longstreth, and Panaccione were all assistant professors at a large midwestern state university, buddies despite knowing that only two of them would be tenured. Got an alarm clock on my face—sometimes I feel like that's how I must appear to people. This lyric is a likely source of recent comparisons to Elliot Smith. Fleece-power: Clark at the copier in the basement of Dimond Library.

Money Madness is another foray into social reality, this one with a kaleidoscopically tumbling, continually self-recontextualizing Rosenwinkelesque guitar figure. The chorus floats us joyously away, though its story presages our extinction.

Transparency develops further the aesthetic theory proposed by "Bicycle." The doubling—masterfully held in reserve then deployed—has the function of asserting that the melody is intentional, and that the changes in tempo are knowable. From the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, 7th c.:

xvi. Glass (De vitro) 1. Glass (vitrum) is so called because with its transparency it transmits light to one's sight (visus). Anything contained inside other minerals is hidden, but any sort of liquid or visible thing contained in glass is displayed to the outside; although closed up, in a certain way the contents are revealed.

The aggressive, judging Chris is showcased again in Feel the Houses. I don't believe in the Eastern Seaboard. Me neither! I've been waiting for someone to try to articulate this non-belief! I got the emptiest feeling when a school chum once came back from a few weeks of travel claiming he had been "following Phish up and down the Eastern Seaboard." The phrase signals phoniness. Only a mariner could use it authentically. Speaking of phoniness, one reviewer cites Chris's "talk of eating magic mushrooms" in a list of cred-earning cultural reference points, which seems needlessly reductive and counter to the spirit of the song, which is that you feel powerful and awesome when you transcend normative interpretations of social reality, and sick and ugly when you force yourself to repeat their banalities as truth. The lyric in question goes: I'm eating your house like a mushroom. I think the suggestion is that I am consuming your house and it is transforming me, not I am consuming a mushroom and it is transforming your house. Drugged or not, narrator has become again a roving hunter-gather for whom all is spirit-food.

I love the dopey voices on the chorus of Anybody's Time, and the spooky keyboard melody.

Fire and Flame is one of the songs rescued from Chia, Chris's ill-fated follow-up to Fresh Sip. The neverending organ guitar reminds me of raindrops I once watched on a car window.† I like collecting in memory the nodes of its melody and listening to the big shape move. I believe the shape is a Zome. While the lyrics seem to suggest that potsmoking may be wrong, the music suggests that it may be very right.

†The car was the Jetta in which my friend drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

Rosenwinkel Vertigo poses an important question—why is it that reviewers draw comparisons to the Beach Boys, the Magnetic Fields, Beulah (?), etc., while ignoring Kurt Rosenwinkel, the hero he directly names? Is the reason the same reason Weisman is still somehow totally unknown? The anxiety of influence: "I guess you'd say it's pretty tough/not to just play Kurtish stuff." Weisman vs. Longstreth: Polytone vs. Jazz Chorus.
Metheny on Phish:

I have a friend that's got a lot of live tapes of them, and I'm totally knocked out with their flexibility and ambition to play all this wildly different stuff... and he's a really, really good guitarist too. And I'm sorry they broke up. They really opened up so many people's imaginations as to what music can be, and again, there's something that happens when you're playing for groups of your peers -- people your own age that kind of look like you and can really relate to you that's different than when it's a bunch of older guys playing. And I think that they really served a very important place, actually, I don't think, I know it for a fact, that they turned people on to what improvisation is and what it can be.

Longstreth:

You've been compared to the jam band Phish; Do you like that?
I don't see that. I think Phish is...I don't think that music is very good.

Weisman:

"I feel I've never told you the Story of the Ghost". We make our money in vacancy. Tonight we seem to live in a field of low lying pink and grey clouds. Minimal piano. Minimal synth. The maximum power in the minimum energy: the Energy of Absence. The ice cream scoop is loose, it keeps its ring. And out of this must come the Electric Guitar. Its use of cheap pink effects, official and otherwise. Pause. Except the Wah Wah pedal, a real friend from Clapton and Cream if not quite Jimi Hendrix. This is the Ghost the men spoke of in their economic testimony. But who's the Subject and who's the Object? Who's the Faces and who's the Vases? The Ghost is the jam of course, his lackadaisical willingness to engage only this way is the inertial powerpull that made its rickety front justify its ephemeral existence.

(Aspects of) the Grateful Dead have somehow accrued hipster respectability, but Phish will never be acceptable within the indie world. "Rosenwinkel Vertigo," though, with Chris's characteristic enthusiasm for what will never be cool, jumps uncountably many levels further than, say, an ironic Junta reference as Chris tips his hat to "Time Turns Elastic," Phish 3.0's magnum opus. Recorded and released as a single in the period between Phish's three comeback shows in March 2009 and that summer's tour—a space of tantalizing possibility, like the first months after a revolution—TTE, their first ambitious and proggy composition since maybe 1993, suggested that there might be no upper limit to the creativity of new Phish. But hopes that the band might be entering some phase of artistic recommitment deflated nearly instantly at their next show and have yet to be renewed. The opening notes of "Time Turns Elastic" signal that the next quarter of an hour will unfold without improvisation, and so the song's performance is nearly universally dreaded by fans, and widely regarded as an F.U. to the audience.

Sound of the Summer performs exactly the sort of accidental and backwards slip into luxuriant, breezy beauty that its narrator strenuously resists.

TWO

On the radio tonight I heard an interview with a high-class cook who, when you order a "root beer float," serves you a soft transparent cube that tastes just like a root beer float despite having none of its other properties. Maybe The Beatles is like that, somehow abstractly summarizing the total harmonic event of the Beatles in a featureless gel. Musically "The Beatles" recalls "The Meaning of Flowers," the instrumental that opened Three Kinds of Ears, a mostly improvised session featuring Chris, his brother Kurt, and Hilary Irons, the artist sister of brooding backwoods crooner and widely sought-after bass guitar sideman Asa Irons, recorded during Thanksgiving-time 1998. What is the meaning of the Beatles? Other than the scat-sung ascending "hello, goodbye" major scale, the clues are not overt; the bass is not even especially roving. I'll venture that the title refers not to the band but the LP, because this is the song where Transparency becomes a double album. I mean, this is true in a blockheaded, literal way, but I intend it as a substantive aesthetic point: the first disc doesn't read as part of a double album. It feels complete, self-sufficient, composed, and appropriately sequenced; even the oddball instrumentals have a place in the whole. It lacks the typical marks of the form—it's not excessive, incoherent, unedited, improvisatory, tossed off, etc. But "The Beatles" definitively represents the switching off some inner censor. It is the Wardrobe through which we pass into a wider world where the artwork finally escapes control of the artist, and secret correspondences arise unbidden. Whether or not the second half of this album is good, it is certainly multiply permeable, open, decentralized, and full of wide patches of forgetting.

I can't tell whether Be Easy on Yourself is advice we're supposed to follow or not follow. Can I take back what I said about too much double tracking? Because I love the doubled fuzz vocals. Giant spaces in this song; space-defining scaffolding; transparency.

I can give no musicological reason for connecting In the Walls with Chris's high school duo, Clov, but it feels like the world of I Am the Cornship to me. (Chris could tell you exactly which harmonic twists he did and did not know back then.) In many ways Transparency represents the totality of Chris's pop music vocabulary, a mini-encyclopedia of the styles and zones he's inhabited over the last 20 years. Maybe it's his way of quitting pop music forever. Another song salvaged from Chia, one I desperately wished Chris would not junk. The idea tape runs throughout.

The Pilot's Skull is an object that embodies a story; it would have been an excellent premise for a Hardy Boys adventure (Hardy Boys rather than Nancy Drew because the former series is, I think, more preoccupied with modes of transportation, their allure and consequences). I think I found the pilot's skull/He thought he could go anywhere at all. The moral of the story is implicit, though quite frightening. Maybe Chris scared himself making his last album; Transparency, even if it's better, whatever that would mean, represents a step back from whatever precipice Fresh Sip is contemplating. The line about the number-one complaint that he's ever told is almost certainly self-referential: what's the number-one complaint that Chris is ever told? Because everyone thinks they know what's wrong with his music. The snippets from idea tapes (it'll be a tape of me just doing the repeats) are just the sort of evidence of process one demands from a double record.

Chris usually has one "rocker" per album, and Contact High is it. The fuzz riff is a vocalization of outrageous drug pleasure, the wicked opening of a primal maw. Chris doesn't usually allow us to enjoy his music this much—his approach is largely based on subverting musical expectations, which at times can make the music seem like it's more about him than us—so it's nice to have one song that generously gratifies desire.

No Business Shoes is a skipper when I'm cruising for good ones, but a favorite when I'm listening straight through; why is this? Chris has apparently learned some lesson in crackling high-end frequencies from his work with Greg Davis (effected cymbals?). The uncomposed excess of the cymbal's rhythm is welcome; Chris's recorded performances often sound like they're straight from the sheet music, like, if a sound isn't intentional, functional, and repeatable, it doesn't exist in the right way. A victory for indifference.

In spite of the record's multiple disavowals of competition, Ordinary Consciousness may another example of Chris versing Dave. During candles on the map of the persistently solutionary, one of the vocal tracks omits the "the," causing the rest of the phrase to be displaced by, I think, a 16th note, which makes the vocals staggered and shimmery. It's cool that this isn't an electronic delay effect, but a human effect caused by musical thinking.

Sort of similarly, 1999, related to Fresh Sip's "999" in digits only, features this brilliant stitch in time: the beat (= the whole sound-world) is momentarily shifted when Chris deletes an 8th note as an illustration of the lyric I cut my life along the line. The song narrates an failed attempt at dropping out; out of what I do not know. The Fender Squire may be Clark's Bullet.

Like most of Chris's songwriting, The Sun Comes Back is not programmatic in the sense of "a visit to the circus" or "the fireman's parade marches by," yet it is poetically illustrative; its synaesthesias are unnameable but true; the words and music do not mimic and are not artificially grafted together, but are coordinated, like the organs of a living being, and seem arise from some third, common thing, perhaps the imagination. Is this song mastered too hot, or is this perhaps, again, the sun? I think I can tell that the bass guitar is purposefully buzzy, beginning with the performance; that drum though? Jesus, I forgot how awesome this chorus is.

Does Rain Doctor sound like a Ben song from new Clov? Again, Transparency feels like a career retrospective or Greatest Hits composed entirely of new material. Flying over all the cities where one has lived in order to decide whether it was all worth it; mastering the pop form in order to kill it. Ryan and Kurt and Ruth and Kyle are all somewhere on the record, too, though it cheapens things to try to say exactly where.

Noting semi-correspondences to the Beatles may be the lowest form of criticism, but the warbly beginning of Mystery, presumably imported from the original ideas tape, is sort of Transparency's "Can You Take Me Back?" Gasping through the 90s nihilism of Infinite Jest. You're already cool with the blues outdoes the humorless Elliot Smith.

The Sweetest Flags may be what the pilot of "The Pilot's Skull" was singing during his daring final run. This song addresses the Coleridgean moment when the poet of the inner sublime drops whatever pretense of aesthetic investigation and admits the rawness of his greed for satanic pleasure. ("And all should cry, Beware! Beware!/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!") I'm inventing everything in time—this kind of thought, when it's not a thought but a direct observation, is usually the result of poisoning, and one wishes to repeat it immediately. Ever seen atoms? This song makes me think of Flagstaff Hill, in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park, and its majestic view of the Oakland skyline. My favorite drinking fountain is near there.

Arabesque defies recollection and exists only in the moment of listening. There is no internal reason why its druggy orientalism must come to an end.

As Bono of U2 has said, the trick of pop songwriting is to write lyrics that are general enough to appeal to a mass audience, yet sufficiently evocative of individual experience that each listener believes the song calls uniquely on them. Crosst Bridge has this illusory effect on me.

Angleterre Anywhere argues that England just is a mode of perception. Durham, Dover, Newmarket, and Portsmouth, NH are each named after a location in England; New Jersey, the site of Keith Jarrett's recorder-heavy Spirits, is named after the Island of Jersey, which both is and is not part of the UK.

"Half-step Mississippi Uptown Toodeloo" is a name for the way Jerry plays guitar.

"Get yourself a powder charge/and seal that silver mine" suggests a plan to close off some pathway of pleasure with a spectacular, ultimate act of violence, conceived perhaps not in a moment of clarity but at the height of the fever of intoxication, when images of the evil of digging into one's brain are crowding in, and it seems that only some form of selective suicide could solve the problem all at once, like maybe taking a massive dose of the object of pleasure itself, like, this one last giant powder charge may finally do the trick.

Paper Radio

NEON PARK did the swinging CAKE SLICE FRAGONARD album cover for Little Feat; & the TOMATO WOMAN w/sideways face in hammock (the one that Phish did)

RAINBOW MALL ROAD is a right turn off Washington Ave on my ride to work. The former Rainbow Mall is now a private community college.

PAPER JAMZ is a line of cardboard guitars for children. Flame motif. (Hilary and I read the Wal-Mart Christmas catalog that came in the mail. The game was to choose a present for Tessa from every page.)

Biking down Cumberland Ave I saw a DEFLATED YELLOW AND PINK SOCCER BALL in the center of the road. Its panels were flaking off, revealing something fibrous. Should've fucking kicked that ball from my bike.

Realized that if I posted the sentence that just occurred to me, I could never use the key phrase in my novel, should I ever write it. Words die instantly on the internet, even if they live forever in the Search Engine's data farm, creating whatever quantum of heat. I half remember this article I skimmed at nytimes before checking on something suddenly more pressing, it said something about the way computer light fucks with the part of your brain that reads. You can only really read things on paper. Even friends' blogs I just kind of skim.

Revolver

Beatles game: imagine the album you are listening to is the newest Beatles album, the one closest to the core, the one that makes everything else irrelevant, the most real and defining set of songs, the suddenly necessary capstone to a catalog that has just been completed; hear it as the final Beatles album.

the black and white thing: you can hear vast nothing in every song; it's anti-acoustic: the aesthetic of pure tape world; this music takes place nowhere; the sounds are cut out and pasted over white, scarily free, contained by nothing (this is more than a projection of the collage on the cover, you can hear tons of unclaimed acoustic space (the Beatles had obviously been impressed by death (the second appearance of McCartney's "Taxman" solo means no one played it in the first place. Mechanical reproduction: there are no Beatles. The meaning of "Paul is dead."

"She Said She Said": you can imagine Lennon doing the knee-bend dance, so it's still the old Beatles.

Beatles game: all Beatles is the old Beatles, Liverpool basement music, Hamburg stage smashing music (hence The Beatles, finally mastering the thing called "Beatles." With the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, all these oblique approaches, then The Beatles. It doesn't mean "just these four men," like, "the earnest men in these four photos, more or less doing things individually", "these four finite humans, epaulets off, no mystery bus, KISS without the makeup," no, it means "this force finally knows itself"

paranoid feeling listening to the remaster that this is not the Beatles; is it possible that my cut-and-pasted-over-white-space perception is actually the product of some form of digital editing, one that's primarily conducted visually? Is it the same as the Cirque du Soleil Beatles album, bits lifted and crunched and reanimated? Is this normative, final interpretation of Revolver essentially the same as Rock Band?

Beatles game: the catalog in reverse. Like, they know the nasal count-off is the first thing you'll hear after the crashing piano chord and the runout loop. Please Please Me as the final development of a spirit set in motion by Abbey Road.

Seven levels is not some abstraction. That's how many times the idea you start with is transformed into something other than itself before you're dumped back into the room where you actually are. Seven songs on each side of the record. "But there are only six chambers in a revolver." Yes, but the hole in the center of the cylinder turns makes it seven; seven/the hole/death is what makes it spin. The water swirls around the sides only if it can get out the bottom. Rubber Soul, Death Picture, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Is the revolver motif a continuation of the Rubber Soul flirtation with Country & Western (like Cowboy George on the cover)? I am personally wigged by the lost mid-career Country Beatles.

It's a Phish tradition to don a "musical costume" on Halloween night and cover an entire album by another band. Conventional wisdom says that the album they pick reflects some aspect of the band's current direction and self-image. When Phish turned their back on progressive rock and tried to become a pop group, they recorded Hoist, a jumble of cliched forms, and covered The Beatles (1994). After Jerry died and Phishtour absorbed Deadtour, Phish, who had made an artform out of real-time feedback with their audience, had to adapt to playing giant arenas; hence the football-riot rock of the Who's Quadrophenia (1995). Having worn out the multi-peaking tension-and-release jam model, Phish found inspiration that would last them the rest of the 90s in the multilayered rhythms and repetitive dance jams of Remain in Light (1996). As the drug scene, both on lot and backstage, shifted from psychedelics to club drugs and narcotics, Phish saw fit to cover the Velvet Underground's Loaded (1998), an album whose hipster detachment suited the band's newfound lack of care; after earnestly striving after the ineffable in 1997 (no musical costume during the "Phish Destroys America" fall tour), suddenly it was no big deal to be Phish. It's harder to see what the band was up to in covering Exile on Main St. (2009), which seems conceptually unrelated to both the writing and jamming that year—maybe the theme was touring the Earth as old men, and mastering the extraction of wealth from other aging males. This year, smart money was on Queen's A Night at the Opera, on the basis of a leaked photo of a printing block for a tour poster that seemed to reference its cover. Or London Calling—Trey said he listened to lots of the Clash during his house arrest. Or Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The (fucking jaw-dropping) Broomfield 46 Days (10/12/10) seemed to argue for Smashing Pumpkins—a surprise bVII-IV-I groove straight from the psychedelic 90s supplanted the usual one-chord outro jam, with Trey harmonizing through the chords in sliding octaves of fuzz. I was personally hoping for Kid A. But to the disappointment of those who thought the $400 they gave the scalper would be rewarded with a performance of Physical Graffiti, Phish picked rock non-icon Little Feat's 1978 double live album Waiting for Columbus, a record that previously existed in the consciousness of maybe 2% of their audience. Mr. Miner writes pretty well about the significance of this selection (though "Smell My Feat" might have been a wittier title than "Little Phish"). I've only checked out the first couple tunes, and Little Feat is apparently weird (I kind of don't believe what I'm hearing; the chords are sort of from Randy Newman land; the bullshit quotient is unclear; the weirdness usually wraps up well). It is amazing to hear Phish playing unfamiliar music, to be a couple minutes into a tune and realize you're in the Phish place again, but you've arrived there by none of the usual paths. It's significant that Little Feat is a band much like Phish: showy cornball hodge-podge Americana for white people to dance to, where inessential complexity is essential to the sound. The effect is like peeking into an alternate dimension and seeing this uncanny double of Phish—it's amazing to realize that they don't need any of their own material to sound that way, and could have become the same band even with a completely different catalog. (This is one reason that the first set at Manchester was so powerful: it represented a total rewrite of the Phish canon.) Conclusion: Phish is real, and totally free.

Fall tour

Some Narnia gate has clearly been stepped through.

The Show of Life

Phish at Verizon Wireless Arena, Manchester, NH, 10/26/10

What is the Glass Bead Game? Wouldn't you rather not know? I'm happy not knowing. The Swiss woman who played clarinet in my free jazz group in Pittsburgh gave me the feeling that it was the sort of book that, if you heard somebody older talking about it when you were in 10th grade, you'd believe could open a door like the one the Renaissance guy peeks through to see where the gears are that move the solar system. This feeling is enough for me; a copy of the edition on the left sits atop our TV; I bought it as a decoration. Maybe someday Tessa will wonder what it is.

While on a grad school interview trip, Hilary called me from the World Language Center to ask what I'd like for a present. I was in the process of scrutinizing every 420 reference I could find in Walter Benjamin, so I asked for Hesse's Steppenwolf†, on the basis of this quote from "Myslovice-Braunschweig-Marseilles"‡:

As I have said, I was not a novice when it came to using poison; but whether it was my almost daily feelings of homesickness, or the paucity of human contact and the uncongenial localities, never before had I felt myself so at home in the community of cognoscenti whose records of their experiences—from Baudelaire's Paradis artificiels to Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf—were perfectly familiar to me.

I made it maybe 75 pages into Hesse before giving up, and never got to the famously surreal ending with the talking cars or whatever, presumably a grove of psychedelia, but I read plenty of the old man's misanthropic grouching and his accounts of wandering around town avoiding old acquaintances, which was in any case probably more realistic on the cannabis front. When I realized that the grouchy man was Hesse, thinly fictionalized, the book began to make me ill, and I put it away. I read some of Siddhartha in high school; I remember nothing about it, aside from a certain hallway outside the gym where I sat reading before track practice. Bottom line is I'm 98% certain the content of The Glass Bead Game comes nowhere near the field of meaning suggested by the title.

So the question I wanted to ask is: What is the string that holds the glass beads together? You know, the FLOW GLUE? Ever write with, say, a blue uni-ball VISION micro and choose your words just to keep the ink flowing, just to pull the beautiful wet wells a couple characters longer? You're writing, but the whole continuity of the thing is contained in the act of drawing, its true guide (its OTHER COMPASS) is this act of sculpting in an unrelated space. And the reason I wanted about ask about FLOW GLUE AND THE OTHER COMPASS is that I think it gets at the problem that's been dogging Phish since their return in 2009: Trey is sober, he's no longer fingerpainting in the inner space of drugs and alcohol, and without that hidden primary medium of composition, nothing seems to be holding the music together. This is the drama of every show: will the Muse visit, even if just for a couple bars? Because if She does, this is proof that magic is true, that there are Renaissance doors in the actual world, that flow glue is free, if you can find it, and that God exists. I, for one, totally stand with sucky, groping new Phish, trying to get off the ground on its own wings.

†Benjamin, who died in 1940, never heard the music of Steppenwolf, though his colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer may have.

‡The first sentence of Benjamin's essay: "The story is not mine."

Phish at the Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, ME, 10/19/10

The day Hilary's water broke, I was rushing around like a madman, picking up supplies for our hospital stay, lanolin and cabbages and things, and when I got out of the grocery store and started the car, this song came on the radio and the first lyric I heard was something about looking into a newborn's eyes, and when the host came on, he was like "that's the Boneheads from Hallowell, ME, and they're here with me in the studio!" and my whole spiritual life seemed to crystallize in that moment. So when I saw Steve Jones from the Boneheads at Phish, I had to tell him of his role in our birth story. My state senator was there, too, and I thanked him for visiting the elementary school where I work. My high school principal was there; he remembered my name. The granddaughter of a Maine Country & Western legend and former co-proprietor of an ice cream stand in Hallowell at which one could order a ten-strip of LSD was there. The buddy with whom I canoed out to an island in China Lake in order to eat that acid was there. The first person I played a "Fire on the Mountain" jam with was there. And this is really just the tip of the social iceberg represented at the Civic Center that night.

I don't think I had set foot in the Augusta Civic Center since I went to see Guns N' Roses in the spring of 1993, on the day I got my braces off. I went to the circus there once, the only time I went to the circus, and my only really specific memory of this event is of a spherical iron cage in which three motorcyclists established and sustained death-defying interlocking orbits. The room was dark except for the motorcycles' headlights, whose shafts' churning pattern resembled, if I have this right, that of the roving headlights of the UFO in Explorers, which was roughly contemporary. I went to my friend's dad's dojo's karate tournament at the Civic Center and watched that dad chop wood. In fourth grade, Matt B.'s parents took me to a state championship girls' basketball game there, and we brought a giant bag of confetti and gleefully sprinkled it over the spectators below. I recall talking to Matt about the Dr. Who that was on the night before, Peter Davison's "Terminus," as we walked across the snowy lawn between the parking lot and the venue.

More evidence that the world no longer exists

Stanley Fish on the fate of French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater at SUNY Albany.

"To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking,"

said Karen Lotz, the publisher of Candlewick Press in Somerville, Mass. “From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes.”

As an argument, where the premises are supposed to add up to the conclusion, this statement is baffling—written texts, no less than pictorial ones, require that a reader supply imaginative analogs to hold characters and stories together from one sentence to the next (it would be insane to suggest that with the written word, everything you need to know is on the page); lacking information which the audience's imagination must reconstruct is typically held to be a property of digital representations, which are inherently gappy collections of samples—but something about it is right. You're going to lose if you try to make a philosophically sturdy distinction between picture-knowing and word-knowing—some written texts are as untranslatable as pictures, some pictures can be rendered in words; picture books have a symbolic vocabulary (reading one is not at all an experience of pure seeing); resembling the things they represent is not the unique province of pictures (nor, within language, is resemblance limited to obvious onomatopoeisis (read Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, or listen to him read it, and you'll hear how mimetic sense can be fully carried in sound)); nor is it vision's special privilege to overflow whatever linguistic map is applied to it, for language is as excessive as any sensory medium; words overflow themselves—but I want to say, yes, pictures open different worlds and call for different forms of thinking and occasion deeper swims of mind. So I think I agree with Karen Lotz, and I am horrified by the trend of forcing children to read at earlier and earlier ages.

We've been listening to more radio lately—it is a window onto a shared world, however limited, so even if we aren't getting out to see friends, we can still participate in social reality by listening to callers sound off on the Moss trade. Plus a Wilco CD is stuck in the player of the vehicle that was handed down to us. Plus unexpected rewards may be delivered by the radio, and as students of behavioral science, we know that an intermittent schedule of reinforcement is the best way to strengthen a given behavior—a slot-machine that pays out at random is going to be more addicting than one that pays out every time. "Jet Airliner" came on recently, and I guess I had never really listened to it, and my ecstatic experience of Steve Miller's pacing and delivery of rhyme fueled the next several weeks of Scan and Seek. Compulsive radio-checking was also reinforced by the rediscovery of Boston's "Let Me Take You Home Tonight," the (comparatively) grainy acoustic realism of which runs counter to the production aesthetic of the rest of the band's debut album. It just sounds less fake. Easier, funkier. In my currently impoverished mental life, its melody has taken on great importance. The austere Strat-nudity of "Before You 'Cuse Me" (the Journeyman version) is totally avant-garde, and the lameness of Clapton's fills is deceptive—if you can make it through the verses, the outro solo is other-worldly. Clapton is God. Driving over the bridge from Portsmouth to Kittery after a desperate afternoon of listening to the Shark, my ears were wiped clean by "Alive." You couldn't transcribe this melody without recourse to quarter-tone accidentals. Sasha Frere-Jones reviews the Pavement reunion in the current New Yorker, and he thinks they're pretty good, though not, as Robert Christgau claims, "the finest rock band of the nineties," an honor Frere-Jones reserves for Nirvana. Fuck that. Pearl Jam. This is just a guess, since I really don't know their music, but my hunch is that no 90s band is more deserving of critical reappraisal and hipster embrace. Last night WMPG happened to be playing a demo of "Inca Roads," and Tessa got wide-eyed and still and pursed her lips in a silent "ooh" shape of curiosity as she tuned into its sound-world.

Paul's Boutique

So Tessa appears to enjoy the Beastie Boys more than the Beatles. Could a preference for zone and flow over song be an early predictor of a Stones bias? (The only Beatles she reacted to was "The Inner Light"—the instrumental beginning got her attention, but she was then annoyed by the singing.)

Randy Moss traded to Minnesota Vikings

At the Social Security Administration's baby name website, you can type in a name and see where it ranks in the top 1000 over the last 130 years or so. "Rhiannon," for example, does not chart until 1976, and peaks in 1977 at #418. "Aja" appears in 1978, and peaks that year at #412; "Asia" has proven to be more durable.

Baby clothes

Having (justifiably, I think) skipped our friends' wedding yesterday afternoon, we stopped by the reception, our first social outing as a new family. I'm accustomed to the difficulty of interpreting certain vibrations in social space, given my own tendency to refract these vibrations through personal prisms of unease, but stepping out onto the interpersonal stage for the first time as a parent, I was unprepared for how much more mind-torquing bad vibes can be when it's not just you but your baby who's being judged. Like, if a friend says "...little cupcake" in response to the cupcake applique on the cardigan Tessa is wearing, and their general affect and tone seem to infuse the remark with irony and disapproval, like, "weird clothing choice," and this friend's personal taste in baby clothes runs more vintage ebay/boutiquey/pretend-it's-40-years-ago and seems just by example indirectly disdainful of mass-cultural, normative Babies R Us-wear, is the apparent hostility really just a reflection of my own ambivalence toward dressing my daughter in a frilly pink thing with a cupcake logo, or am I correct in sensing criticism and discomfort?

Allow me to discuss for a minute our choice to roll with the generic, over-the-counter baby clothes of 2010. Let's set aside arguments of practicality—that it was convenient to get most of Tessa's wardrobe as baby shower gifts, that we derive no personal enjoyment from the task of unearthing vintage gear, and that we happen not to be hooked into a reliable pipeline of tasteful hand-me-downs—and get to the ideological crux of the matter: dressing your child in commercial, traditionally gender-coded baby clothes gives her more autonomy than does a wardrobe curated to match what you, as an adult with developed taste, might personally wear. Believe me, I find threadbare cords and grubby old sweaters unbearably charming. But it's freeing to suspend your vision of coolness and let your baby be the world's baby for a while (I mean, she is anyway). Be as much of an elitist as you need to about experience, culture, learning, and nutrition—you want her to grow well, and this will require selective snobbery—but there's a difference between guiding the development of an intelligent being that has powers of agency and decorating a helpless possession. For to be unique and authentic does not require unique and authentic clothing chosen by someone else. (The same goes for choosing a name: the name is a container, and it can start out totally empty, and then it gets filled by a person. It's almost like some parents worry that a regular name won't be big enough for a non-regular person, as if they're front-loading the name because they don't trust their child, but isn't this the opposite of how language usually works, like, the more specific the word, the smaller its poetic world? I think of my friend John. For me, his name is a overflowing rainbow-range of connotation; an utterance of this syllable, however common, does not fail to call up his once-in-the-universe particularity. His parents did not attempt to reflect this particularity with an equally unique identifier; this would have been a category mistake, a confusion regarding the proper deployment of mimesis.) So let your child present as a decent, unassuming citizen of the world, and let her define herself with her abilities and actions. Like, if she's going to be the best in her class, let her be the best at sackbut, Go, Farsi, or Spenser, but not the best at being dressed by someone else.

Baby playlist

Way incomplete; writing preempted by baby.

"Ripple" (from American Beauty) This was a sing-along at Hilary's little sister's Quaker high school graduation. I was shocked that so many people knew the words, and still am. It's not just that they're nonsense—some nonsense is learnable—some basic deep-language glue is missing, and even after dozens of spins I can't guess what word might occur next. Amazing melody, though, and astonishing synergies in the arrangement. Happy to lay down some neural pathways with this one.

"Vermont/Tokyo Counterpoint" (Steve Reich composition for MIDI marimba = reading rainbows) Seized by the thought that I might perish on the fifteen-hour drive from my parents' house back to Pittsburgh, I made a tape of this piece for my brothers. I had heard it only once or twice, but felt it was kind of a map of me, and was I feeling emotional about possibly dying on the highway. Listening now through baby ears, I am impressed by how light and fun this music is. In general, Reich is on our autism-watch blacklist, but this piece is unencumbered by rule-mindedness; it changes not according to a formula of permutation, but in order to follow its joy.

"Ocean Bowls" (Karma Moffett; a recording of crashing waves, accompanied by assorted notes played on Tibetan bowls, a geographical non-sequitur whose incoherence and ahistoricity are, I guess, par for the course) Let me begin by saying that new-age music scares the willies out of me; what it does to the brain is manipulative and drug-like and all the more insidious for the way that it shoves aside whatever's musical about music and attempts to act directly on the brain. I had some credit at the yoga store and wanted to get something like the waves track on Hilary's guided-meditation CD. Relaxing, but maybe not in a good way.

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II (performed by Keith Jarrett on harpsichord) It cannot be said of Keith Jarrett that "he makes it sound easy." (Only the clavier is well-tempered.) Which of these pieces had I loved years ago? I found this music extremely anxiety-producing and shut it off. However, an LP of Bach's Oboe Concertos that was a pre-natal favorite still gets lots of play. The double-reed family poses a formidable challenge to my many vows not to overparent.

"Jive Talkin'" (Bee Gees) This song was formerly known to me only as scary drug music from a Paper Rad DVD, so I was shocked to hear it on the radio the other night (it's the occasional payoff like this that keeps me hooked on Rock Radio Roulette). "Jive Talkin'" is pretty amazing as a Stevie Wonder forgery; I think the beat is a direct lift from "Superstition." Although thoroughly intoxicating for me, Tessa was unimpressed; babies seem to have a built-in bullshit detector. I owe the Brothers Gibb 99¢.

I had an amazing wrong-key/flipped-beat/out-of-context hearing experience yesterday as the radio morphed out of dream-protoplasm into the solo from "Everybody Wants Some!!", my favorite passage in all of Van Halen: a simple melody, then that melody an octave higher. Whether or not you like them, I think we can agree that Van Halen has no musical peers; they outclass all. I also think they represent the pinnacle of modernism in rock music, though this thesis, I have found, does not have universal intuitive appeal. When challenged to defend this view, or at least give it some content, I could say only "seems true." Sketches of an argument that tries a little harder: novel experiences of time and space, reflecting those made possible by new technologies of media and transportation; anti-romantic, anti-sentimental detachment; primitivist incorporation of African art; futurist extension of the perceptual body; privileging of phenomena of motion and speed; populist avant-gardism; fascist fusion of athletics and aesthetics; self-identification as musical art; insistence on purity of medium; aestheticization of the alienation and aggression and mechanization inherent to urban, industrial experience; mastery as a value; genius as a value; content composed of experiences of form, with no regard for classical unities; responsibility to nothing outside the music.

Mike's Song 7/21/98

A Mike's Song jam builds on a funky F# blues vamp (it happens to be the only thing in all of Phish that Hilary says she likes), and it wraps up with a mock-heavy D-E-F# power chord sequence; because the jam has been a mostly Dorian affair, the D is kind of arresting. On this night at the Desert Sky Pavilion, Trey pauses after playing what sounds like a pretty conclusive lick, and Page, quite justifiably, hammers out the D on one of the next bar. Aside from the entrancing siren loop that's been going throughout (F#-F-E, up higher than the guitar neck goes), Trey's solo has been unspectacular, not for lack of trying, and it's clearly time to move on. Judging by the drum fill leading to the downbeat, Fish is heading to the bridge with Page. At this point, Trey could have been like "whoops" and flubbed his way into the rest of the sequence, which he does often enough. But instead he chunks out a F#m7 on two, and by three the rest of the band has fallen into place, establishing an open groove that's evenly distributed over the instruments, and they're suddenly sharing an interpretation of how it feels to roll loosely through space. But Trey's attention span is short, and he eventually leaves the group jam behind to attempt again a feat of heroism, and it's Page's stroke of genius to back up the minor shredding with a F#sus4-to-F#maj sequence, and when Trey catches on there's this absolutely transcendent (Jane's, 90's) moment where he keeps his blues riff going while grabbing the sus shit down below, "transcendent" as in you feel like you're suddenly outside of everything looking in, a spontaneous peak totally unlike Phish's standard structured climaxes—music has carried the day—and then Trey goes to the D, sealing up this seven-minute alternate universe out of Mike's that they wormholed into and at least half the band hadn't believed might exist.

Music Mountain

Wishing I could escape to Music Mountain in the Berkshires. I think I know what it looks like. I'm trying to make a painting of it, based on Hilary's description of an 80's Tanglewood poster that hung in the mud room of a friend's mom's house in Durham, NH: red oval sun, orange glow, yellow sky, and two humpy overlapping hills in undulating pastoral greens.

Balcony jumper at Phish tour closer

Old news, but still on my mind. There are many reports from people who watched the guy get a running start and dive over the railing, and many from those whose section he crashed into, 25 feet below, but mostly I imagine it from his perspective.

From a thread at Phantasy Tour; by all accounts, "fuck it" is verbatim:

I really don't think this dude was trying to kill himself, he was probably on a head full of acid and went through a bad thought process and at the end he came to the conclusion that jumping would solve something, so he said fuck it and went.

Sunday night at the Apohadion

KURT WEISMAN Even this late in human history, a bluesman can apparently still make a deal with the devil. The narrator of "Rainbow Blues" has sold his soul in exchange for extraordinary powers of vision (this blues' turnarounds are little holographic movies that seem to step outside the song's time, rainbows whose arcs unfold kind of perpendicularly to the staff paper (though this blues rolls forwards not left-to-right but like a country road going under you (the melody is sweet, but the singer's questions are kind of chilling for anyone who's been tempted to ask of their imagination more than God gives freely, or who wonders whose voice, exactly, is speaking through them

ROBERT STILLMAN'S "HORSES" Kind of hard for me to separate the music from the pathos of the had-a-bright-future-in-an-advanced-kind-of-jazz-but-walked-away narrative, especially since I like getting my socks knocked off by advanced kinds of jazz (like An Introduction to Kalifactors, for example). In my favorite music, many players' lines seem to be coordinated as if in a living intelligence, but when the many lines really are coordinated by a single musical being, the unity loses its appeal; the magic is all in the as if. (I managed to suspend this prejudice when I closed my eyes, but it's hard not to watch a one-man band—the real-time production of Horses is pretty unique, as human actions go—and being a spectacle does seem to be part of the point: Horses refers to an era, real or imagined, of fly-by-night novelty entertainers (though why Horses' music is so somber is beyond me; I can't imagine it would have lasted long in the bygone marketplaces it posits (interesting that Stillman will play-act the Royal Nonesuch in this icy fashion, but refuse to flaunt his talent in a way that would actually have the vulgar appeal of an itinerant showman

MICAH BLUE SMALDONE Though I've known Micah for a while, I'd somehow never heard him play. Living in Portland, one gets used to responding politely to one's friends' performances, but on this night I needed neither tact nor artifice, for, as it turns out, Micah is one of the real guys and requires none of our nepotism. Hilary once told me, "People say that Micah has the voice of an angel." I now understand her to mean that Micah is a righteous, destroying angel who scares the shit out of his audience. You feel like he's watching you burn in hell, and he's wicked angry. His 12-string sounds like a machine, some tank from the Great War, a combine rolling through the grain, capable of mangling the body of a careless farmhand. It would be a mistake to say that Micah has "peeped into the heart of man" or something, for the evil in these songs is not buried in the breast, but embodied in things people do (like when the murderer raises his dagger, the evil's pretty much right there). I am still spooked by the way Micah's face looked for a second.

Piano Jazz

They replayed an old episode tonight: Clark Terry, recorded in 1994. I imagined riverboats on the Mississippi as he spoke of them, and the steel workers who would disembark to enjoy the good food, pretty girls, and cheap booze of St. Louis. (For Terry, this image is not just a story, but a biological structure caused by those steel workers, way back in time; they are weirdly still present in his body.) Late in the program, one of Terry's improvisations went to his famous mumbling place: scat singing that becomes an automatic music of inarticulate gurgles, consonants with no vowels, stray words and partial sentences. This kind of letting go is mostly not done in jazz, or anywhere. Joyce regarded language as a reflex, something our bodies can't stop doing, and Finnegan's Wake is kind of a picture of this regurgitative flow, but it's one thing to carefully plot the spillage at your desk for 17 years, and quite another to allow your mouth to erupt in this fashion in front of other humans. I had stopped moving and was deep in listening when Terry paused at the end of a phrase, and in this space Marian McPartland interjected, clear as a bell: "Michael Jackson." I do not know from what sub-basement of knowledge this chilling utterance might have emerged, whether it was spontaneous or premeditated (for she did not seem to be in any state of talking-animal flux), but it seemed to stop time, and I, as in the moment before a car crash, was frozen in a sort of cone of perception receding to slatted grille of the clock radio's speaker.

still haunted by sucky band practice

so let's think instead about what's right in my musical life:

practicing on the vintage (& charmingly broken) Musser marimba I've borrowed; loving the black keys; figuring out little melodies (like "The Longest Time" (I'm so inspired by you)); playing along with Phish (they are always in tune); cruising the Real Book; comping to a metronome (1st time this millenium); pecking through "Confirmation." If I were stuck on a haunted space station for eternity, having this instrument and a Charlie Parker Omnibook would make it alright. ("Omnibook" is also the name of the space station.)

I'm in love with Orff percussion in general. I think the idea is: give kids real instruments that yield immediate sonic (& kinesthetic) rewards, and they will find their way into the world of music without further instruction. It's working on me: I haven't been this musically curious since I got home with my first electric guitar (Boxing Day 1989) and started picking out riffs I heard on 92 Moose, like the sitar part to a certain Bon Jovi song. These days it's "Sounds of Silence," "Guyute," and "On Top of Spaghetti" on my diatonic glockenspiel, whose keys' amazing selective rainbow goes green, brown, red-orange, yellow, gray, blue, lavender. My new Sonor xylophone is diatonic, but it came with extra bars: switch F to F# to play in the key of Hilary's kalimba; then switch B to Bb for lydian b7. Ace and Sheels were over on Monday, and our four-part Orff jam (xylophone, glockenspiel, shared marimba) makes the electric rock band seem pretty much obsolete. (And doesn't Sonor Orff sound like the name of a friendly man?)

more hope for music: you can now listen to Chris Weisman's songs all the way through at his website. I listened to "The Wordbrare Sessions" tonight. This song has always put me in mind of John McDowell's Woodbridge Lectures, and the library in which I first read them.

A game: which of Chris's songs seems most to refer to mallet percussion? I believe there is a correct answer...

& no sweets before bed

Around Christmastime, after months of adhering to a strict low-glycemic diet (I had been chastened by the results of my glucose tolerance test in September), I embarked on a bender of late-night ice cream eating (well, mostly frozen yogurt) that continued until this Monday. See, I had discovered that I could read and eat ice cream at the same time. It's more specific than that: I found that Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a Boxing Day purchase, was particularly well complemented by Ben & Jerry's "Half Baked" frozen yogurt, due to the nature and timing of the rewards delivered by each. No longer really "experimenting," I continued to read the rest of Klosterman's oeuvre (except Downtown Owl) in this fashion, and then David Lee Roth's memoir Crazy From the Heat, before dropping the "reading" part of the equation. Stonyfield Farms' "Cookies n' Cream" was my constant companion throughout four seasons of Jeeves and Wooster. I knew I had hit bottom when I sat down to listen to Phish's famous 12/29/94 "David Bowie" with a quarter of a tub of Breyer's "Take Two," so when the midwife told Hilary to cool it on the pre-nocturnal treats, I felt that the message was also meant for me. According to Joyce, an inrush of simple carbohydrates shortly before sleep shapes and really kind of ruins in advance your whole next day's glycemic career.

So this is Day Four, and though I am at this moment tracing in thought the quickest path to what might in truth be called a frosty pint, I have been generally wowed by the difference in the overall depth and texture of my mental life. I want to shout it from the rooftops: consciousness lives again! Sitting in the balcony of Cumston Hall on Tuesday night, crying as the cast of The Comedy of Errors broke into a seemingly spontaneous rendition of "Wimoweh" during the curtain call, I felt that Shakespeare himself was by my side, marveling at the summer stock troupe who, four hundred years later, had recalled his artwork to life, set in motion all its vital parts, and in so doing lit up, at least once more before death, long dormant neural constellations of meaning in the skulls of all those present that night at the Theater at Monmouth.

sleep

is life

Record roundup 8/8 (today's haul from Strange Maine)

The Incredible String Band: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter ($3 "as is" (=some endearing crackles and one sort of intentional-sounding skip during Koeeoaddi There))

I've tried many times to enjoy ISB, and have hitherto succeeded only in appreciating the Minotaur's Song ("I'll do what's wrong as long as I can" was a slogan of mine during the bad old days (Paul Simon: "How many nights you think that you can do what you been doin'?" (many nights, years of nights, it turned out))). I mean, I felt I got what ISB was up to, but rejected it and kind of resented it. But I knew that Hilary liked this record, and my newfound nesting instinct said that this record jacket was a necessary element in our prospective daughter's home. I played Side One tonight while cooking dinner, and while I am generally not a vinyl fetishist, it may be that I needed to hear this music coming off some non-digital physical thing that has survived time and passed through many hands and has a big picture before I could like it. Several years' distance from Feathers and all they represented may also have helped. I felt as though I could hear 1.) the music of ISB, sort of how it sounds by itself, yet also 2.) its pervasive influence on Feathers and 3.) how awesome Feathers was. How lucky for the world of musical art that Feathers lived in its activity, in hearsay and rumors, and in the floating aesthetic imagination, but chose to die (& live forever) rather than pitching itself into the corporate space that seemed so hungry for it. (Williamson and Heron: what is it with all the twos of songwriting (it was sort of surreal to see how many more writing credits accrued to Messina than Loggins as I was perusing The Best of Friends this evening (& may I take this moment to praise Armstrong and LaRoche, whose music as Do'a is changing my life pretty much every day these days

Jack DeJohnette: Pictures ($4; cut-out, possibly never played)

Improvisations in the studio: some where Jack layers organ and piano over drum beats, some where Jack just plays the drums, and some jamming with John Abercrombie. Recorded in Oslo in February 1976, probably a beautiful time on Earth. Space is the element most lacking in improvised music (it is plentiful here (Manfred Eicher is a master of space, even in epic, composed music ("artistic freedom" may be the wrong concept to apply to an Eicher production, but come on, who else would put out an album even remotely like this? (bizarre and risky and highly personal solo records: a subgenre of jazz worthy of much greater study (musical risk-taking: the first track (Picture 1) has a propulsive, funky beat, and all this harmonically dense ambient organ stuff starts to happen once the rhythmic line is established: thank you Jack DeJohnette for daring to lay down a groove like that on an album of impressionistic, brush-strokey, Zen-like improvisations! (No rules but those generated inside the music.)

Phish: A Live One (free; scratched double CD, information totally intact)

Skot said he found it on the street outside the store. Groundscores apparently come in threes: I found $60 on Congress Street while biking to Dr. Reed's (I also found a saltwater fishing license that helped me track down the owner). The day after I returned the cash, I found $5 on Water Street in Hallowell, which I promptly cashed in for coffee and a (regrettably floppy) ginger cookie at Slates Bakery (thinking again about quitting caffeine even as I am now flying on a rare evening coffee; Slates: I am totally sold on the current Green Mountain Coffee cup, brown and grey and green mountain-and-tree silhouette waves motif (I believe that addictive drugs work by giving back what they take away, that is, spontaneous moments of connection and insight and clarity evaporate from life, but similar feelings are dispensed again during the first minutes of coffee drinking, and coffee and its paraphernalia come to represent the neurological events that the drug has locked away and can alone release (I am more psychologically addicted to caffeine than ever, and for the first time am looking at houses and seeing widow's walks or sunrooms or little rooms' weird sideways triangular windows and thinking not great spot to get high but morning coffee room, which I guess is an improvement and maybe an addiction I can live with

Phish at the Comcast Center (formerly the Tweeter Center, formerly Great Woods), Mansfield, MA, 6/22/10

Set One

Lit O Bit: It always gets my attention when Phish opens the show with an oddball pick instead of a crowd-pleaser. See, my greatest wish for the band is that they play what they want rather than play the songs they believe their audience wants to hear, because this entails that the band wants something. (Many things were missing from Phish 2009—musical risk, exploratory jamming, interesting setlists, powerful drumming, melodic leads—but the most serious deficiency was in artistic desire. Trey had somehow recovered the awesome power of Phish, and this was an unthinkable miracle, but what was he supposed to do with it?) I guessed wrongly that this was an NRBQ cover, but my guess was correct in spirit: Phish is out to prove that they are the world's best workaday rock n' roll band. They have been the weirdest; they have gone the furthest; now they want to rock the hardest. If 2009 was primarily about showing that they could still play passably well, 2010 is about being the best. I can accept this as the artistic goal of Phish 2010.

Camel Walk: Continuing the virtuoso bar-band theme. Parodic R&B from the band's early years, and a prescient anticipation of 90s alternative funk. I think of this as Phish's Groovechild song. (Planting the seeds: during 1988 and 89, Phish played at the Stone Church in Newmarket five times.) I thought to myself: these guys are so fucking lucky to STILL be making the music of their teenage years, and I am so lucky to be still be watching it.

Possum: When I read Hammer of the Gods in seventh grade, I wondered what a "war horse" was. You know, like "The Train Kept A-Rollin'." Well, a "war horse" is a tried-and-true B-list tune that's easy for the band to break out at any time, and that no one in the audience is especially excited to hear, but that reliably works the crowd into a frenzy once it gets going. I like Possum because it's a chance to hear Trey playing a traditional blues form; he's almost always better playing over changes than a vamp, because he's more willing to play the kind of chromatic nonsense that is really his strong suit. However, because they seem to trot out this particular war horse whenever I am in the audience, this became an opportunity for an early pee break. A set of inconspicuous steps between concession stands led me into a hidden beer garden with a row of empty and miraculously clean porta johns under the pines. This secret grove stands in stark contrast to the men's room proper, where sinks of the kind you may remember from primary school bathrooms (circular pebbled basins ringed by a sprinkler operated by a bar you depress with your foot) become a sort of pissoir in-the-round.

Divided Sky: Part of the fun of Phish is seeing how they are going to execute a particular improvised bit that's stuck into a more or less static frame—Trey's transitional lick during the modulation in the Moma Dance, the freakout in Tweezer after the "Uncle Ebenezer" line, the initial lightning-bolt of the searing funk siren in First Tube. Listening at home, Divided, being 95% composed, has traditionally been a skipper for me, but Trey's solo at the end has recently become one of those points of curiosity. (Note on terminology: it is silly to say "jam" when it's really just a guitar solo that's under discussion.) And at this show Trey treated it as an opening for urgent, creative, living music—this is one of the hallmarks of Phish 2010: formerly petrified greatest hits are vital again, fully spiritually inhabited. The Manteca-like motif that grew out of the Hartford Tweezer and wafted ghostily through the rest of that set seemed to make a reappearance.

Dirt: The whistled melody has been with me since the show (my bike-riding melody). I love the melody-as-solo solo, something Trey rarely does. Dirt makes me feel deeply sad, and also very free. I love that Phish can make me excited by playing a SONG. Fuck trance jams.

Sample in a Jar: More song-Phish. I never weary of this particular greatest hit. I hated Hoist when it came out—I felt betrayed by the band. Where's the weirdness, the tension, the excess, the improvisation, the atonal fugues, the climaxes, the worked-out proggy stuff, etc.?—but I had a soft spot for Sample because I already knew it from shows, which is a big deal when you're 17. This is one of my favorite Fishman beats—16th note hi-hat playing, punctuated by ghost notes on the snare, is his particular area of expertise—and nothing makes me happier than when he's smashing the shit out of his drums (something he seemed afraid to do during 2009). He's brought back the red donut muumuu, but I wish he still wore the goggles, because it feels like he is driving the band through space. One of the amazing things about being so close to the band was seeing how Trey and Mike seemed to be surfing this wave of sound. The (recording of the) Sample from Blossom totally blew me away (it's amazing that Phish played at Toyota Park one night, then someplace called Blossom the next; "Blossom" is a a more fitting name for the misty vegetal fractal unfurlings that Phish may cause in our imagination, but "Toyota Park" is a more fitting name for the wide swath that the Phish tour machine cuts through our world). Trey's melodic playing has been mostly weak and unstable since Phish's reunion—like, if there's a three-chord jam (e.g., the aptly named "Backwards Down the Number Line"), Trey will sort of play the changes diatonically but almost always land on a wrong note with respect to the chord—but at Blossom, Trey made such music out of the Sample solo, weaving true melodies around the chords; it was astonishing that he could still do this, and it made the his customary scalar stumbling seem more like a choice. At Great Woods, however, the solo seemed disjointed, more about the rhythmic shape of the phrases than the melody. Then again, it was so loud that melody was hardly relevant; Trey was steering something much bigger.

Kill Devil Falls: Best ever KDF? It's easy to think that when you're there. (Yet I know that the Merriweather and Portland KDF were not the best ever.) The solo (maybe even "jam") raged way past the previous boundaries of this mediocre country rocker. In keeping with the night's established theme, this was competent, committed, melt-your-face Phish: intensity yes, musical risk-taking not really.

Dr. Gabel: The debut of a mysterious song about a mysterious man. The song part was overlong, but the stupidity of it felt right. Dr. Gabel has a sense of humor that the 2009 material lacks. Its persistent wrongness (the chords are happily non-functional) reminds me of the material Phish came back with in 1997. (A period of writer's block had followed the pretentious and overwritten Billy Breathes, but they saved the band with a shitload of unserious throwaways, kind of their Basement Tapes.) Besides Number Line, I don't think any post-breakup material has been received this well by the audience, who were going bananas.

Run Like an Antelope: Didn't do it for me.

TWO

Mike's Song: I like to take a little time during each show to wander the venue—find some spot way up on the lawn where I can see the top of the pavilion (a UFO with sound and lasers coming out of it), watch the medics and police carry someone off on a stretcher, dance in some walkway before security clears everybody away, look into the sad eyes of gypsy kids on Family Tour, and so on. On this night, however, I think I was on the lawn for about 30 seconds when I thought, "You have a sixth-row seat—do not waste this amazing ticket!" and hurried back to my section, with renewed permission to enjoy my incredible vantage. I don't recall any specific impressions of Mike's. It seemed brief.

I Am Hydrogen: Really? Again? (The classic "Mike's Groove" is the triad of Mike's Song, Hydrogen (a blissful, phishy instrumental), and Weekapaug Groove. During the best part of Phish's career, this middle spot in Mike's Groove was a wild card: maybe you'd get Simple, or Swept Away>Steep, or Lawn Boy, or Walk Away>Tweezer>Glide, or The Horse>Silent in the Morning>Punch>McGrupp, but during reunion Phish you can pretty reliably count on Hydrogen.)

Weekapaug Groove: For me, this was kind of overshadowed by the Hartford Paug the week prior, which features some of Trey's most inspired whale-call playing yet—that's a topic for another time. (It's kind of insane that I'm writing about Great Woods instead of Hartford, two nights that were sort of a spiritual high-point of my life in music.)

Sneakin' Sally Though the Alley: Although this Robert Palmer cover dates back to the ur-Phish of 1985, Sneakin' Sally is emblematic of metamorphosis of Phish into dance music, and mostly connotes 1998. This was a rare instance (for me) of being thrilled merely by "getting" a desired song. A few nights before, Wally and his metallurgist friend Mike had been singing the refrain over the Tweezer jam, so this felt like a confirmation of something that was in the air. The groove was thick. Apparently Trey cut off the jam early—so said critics the next morning—but at the time I felt like Trey was perfectly tracking the energy of the room. This has been a common criticism the whole tour: Trey has been killing jams right as they promise to break through into something big, either out of fear of the unknown, or in order to move ahead with an artificially planned setlist. A third option: playing high-energy songs in the 8-12 minute range is exactly what Trey wants to do. This is how Phish built their audience. By the late 90s, Phish had enough of a permanent following that they could afford to spend 30 minutes on monotonic funk, aimless ambient plinking, or heavily effected modal suicide-by-shredding. But in 2010, Phish has a much smaller built-in constituency; they need to prove, night after night, that they are the best rock band in the world. And if they leave their audience desperately wanting more, that should be a mark of success for a band that's just played a three-hour concert.

Light>46 Days, Limb by Limb, Golgi Apparatus, Slave to the Traffic Light, Loving Cup; Encore: First Tube: I find myself having much less to say about this whole stretch of the show. By this point, I was THERE, totally immersed in the music, dancing hard among giant abstract shapes. I'm still in awe of what I believe happened, but I shall pass over it in silence.

The Earth sticker (blue ocean, green Americas, white clouds) that had been on my wah-wah pedal since, I think, the summer of 1994 fell off last night, at a rare non-Strange Maine gig. Misidentified as "Mr. Chris and the Animals," we played a continuous hour-and-a-half jam at Slainte!, a wine bar on Preble Street where apparently anybody can play and make $50. There was one amazing peak, a few dense thickets, and lots of scarily sparse expanses. Zack had been using the wah; the sticker fell off as he left the stage in disgust.

I am dying to listen to last night's show—I mean, what the fuck happened? (the tapes won't move me any closer to that moment)—but I want to jot down a few notes before I rewrite my memories with recordings (sellout admission: Phish's official soundboards sound so amazing this tour (yet another aspect of Phish's increasing mastery of their product, Phish) that I have suspended my former principled insistence on audience recordings (though please read Taper Larry Stubbe's thread at bt.etree on why the culture of amateur taping is endangered)). My memory of the show's astonishing final moments—during the cacophonous, blinding (strobe-lit) coda of First Tube, Trey held his guitar by its body and waved it to sculpt feedback through the monitors, then finally raised it heavenwards, the tall way, as it sang—has already been contaminated by a video shot from the opposite side of the stage, and I closed youtube as soon as I realized that some dumb phone's shitty image was eclipsing the earthshaking truth of this apotheotic moment. It really did feel like Trey was atop a mountain, harnessing a god's awesome power (there's some Stockhausen 9/11 angle to the world splitting open like this (Hilary is a participant in a long-term study of witnesses of the 9/11 plane crashes; the project ostensibly ("ostensibly" since psych experimenters can be kind of devious about what they're really testing for) concerns the stability of memories of trauma over time. Though Phish is art and not war, experiencing their live show can also be a sort of trauma, and their fans become addicted to this strange pain the way that soldiers become addicted to war and during peacetime long to be back in the line of fire (why does the experience of war seem to be an experience of truth? (it is relevant to my account that I was very close to the band, so not only was the music inhumanly loud, it was visibly being made by particular humans (I really want to go song by song, but I must go to sleep at last

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem was just on Terry Gross. He sounded intelligent, but his music did not. I replaced it with the steely wonder of Kenny Loggins' Celebrate Me Home, which I bought yesterday from the 25¢ bin at Strange Maine. It is a masterpiece of human disco: soulful, musically literate, and perfectly matched to the embodied imagination. Do we dare to ask: what happened to popular music (& its audience & its press) between 1977 and today? And what happened to our bodies, such that LCD Soundsystem can be felt as dance music?

I began this post with the intention to compare James Murphy with Ryan Power of Burlington, VT, who makes dance pop the way Murphy does—alone when recording at home, then on stage with his friends—but who (like Loggins and unlike Murphy) seems to know everything Stevie Wonder knows, and who is in general a really important piece of evidence that the human being has not died and that the human being has not ceased to make music; this comparison seems extremely necessary now that I see that LCD Soundsystem's new album is called This Is Happening, a timely and frighteningly apocalyptic answer to the question posed by Ryan's last album, Is It Happening? Please watch Ryan's band play the title track.

Finance box

$36 Round-trip ticket from Portland to Boston South Station on Concord Coach Lines, including complimentary pretzels (like the peanuts Ford requires Arthur to eat before hitching a ride with the Vogons) and water. In-flight movie southbound: Leap Year, which I had intended not to watch, but which kind of caught my eye 20 minutes in. Watching the film without sound and trying to imagine how the film might have begun turned out to be extremely engaging.

$4.75 Ticket for MTBA commuter rail to the Rt. 128 stop. A man who walked into the cafe while I was making myself sandwiches for later (almond butter on that black, square German bread with all the grains) was wearing an amazing stained-glass pendant, the size of which connoted an enviable lack of concern for social convention: a green equilateral triangle (base on the bottom) overlapped by three interlocking rings (like the John Bonham symbol (Drum Logos) but inverted). I had to ask him about this peculiar motif, and he explained that both the triangle and the rings represented the Trinity. Why two distinct representations of the Trinity were required, and why these two were united in a single design, remained unclear to me.

$10 Contribution towards gas and tolls for the Boston-to-Hartford ride. (Neglected to help Tarkanian on the way back; fucking loved listening to Newport '63 in his car.)

$8 Falafel plus tip at Tangiers International, LLC. Acceptable, but not really in the same universe as Mamoun's of New Haven. Tangiers is also a grocery, and though many amazing tins of Moroccan sardines were on offer, in the interest of financial austerity I contented myself with merely possessing them with my eyes.

$3.08 Two one-liter bottles of Poland Spring, purchased at a CVS, from observation of whose clientele one might infer that Hartford is still a very, very segregated city. The Comcast Theatre permits patrons to bring in one sealed bottle of water, though they will confiscate the cap at the door. I had a savvy friend sneak in extra caps for me. Refills at the water fountain were free. A Dunkin' Donuts shack shaped like the domed cup of a high-calorie summertime drink was devoted entirely to giving away samples of (extremely sweet) iced coffee and caffeinated slush; nothing was for sale. In fact, coffee was not available anywhere within the venue.

$2: donation to a bluesman busking outside the neighboring Connecticut Expo Center, whose "When the Saints Go Marching In" did serious damage to my prejudice against barre chords.

$1 Donation to the Phellowship table, in exchange for a yellow "One Show at a Time" sticker. Waiting for the show to start, I spied an extremely cool-looking guy a couple rows down in my section: tall, mustache and non-problematic goatee, long hair tied back, pink headband, purple bandana around neck, the black Joy Division tee with the waves, shorts worn with tall striped socks, hiking boots. His face suggested intelligence, detachment, and independence. Really the only remotely heady person in sight. And as he walked off I saw he that had a Phellowship sticker on his shoulder: fucking sobriety rules.

$5 Phish 2010 Hartford "merit badge." I'm don't usually go in for merch, but these little circular patches, modeled after Girl Scout badges, with a different design for every city, conform perfectly to my longstanding obsession with the kind of old-school tourists' badges one might collect for one's knapsack on a journey through Europe.

$60 Pavilion ticket to Phish at the Comcast Theatre (formerly New England Dodge Music Center, formerly Meadows Music Theater), Hartford, 6/17/10 ($50 for the ticket and $10 for two-day shipping by FedEx—my tickets to last summer's Hartford show arrived by U.S. Mail in a legal envelope with a 44¢ cent stamp, a miracle I did not wish to attempt to replicate); private sale. My comrades in section 700 row QQ saw me in the lot the next day and shouted "Glitz!" or maybe "Lids!" Either they had mistaken me for someone else or they had given me a name in my absence. In any case, I consider my "lot name" to be established.

$15 My share of one night's stay at the Motel 6, Windsor Locke, CT. Room 229: like a leap year. One of the two Amandas brought earplugs for all to compensate for her snoring, which indeed was not insignificant. (On my return bus trip, these served to wipe out all non-tinnitus sound except the crying of a baby in the seat behind me, which sound the earplugs radically foregrounded.)

$10 Dunkin' Donuts coffee and breakfast sandwich; half a personal pizza with anchovies at Francesco's Pizzaria and Restaurant, Suffield, CT. The DD was emergency tour food, ethically on par with the burning of fossil fuels as one scoots down the highway to the show. (On the ride back to Maine, I saw a McDonald's billboard advertising the Egg McMuffin: "You have 10,000 tastebuds. Use them all." The notion of using one's taste buds seems entirely appropriate, since fast food is scientifically designed to capitalize on our bodies' natural mechanisms of rewarding us for eating salty, fatty, meaty, and sweet things. In the case of most things we eat, we intend to nourish our body, and the enjoyment is kind of a bonus. But when we eat only for the bonus, we treat our body as a mere means (to pleasure) rather than as an end in itself. (It occurs to me that the one time I've eaten an Egg McMuffin since preconscious childhood was en route to a show last summer; it was sort of an accident of group-think: two out of three of us did not want an Egg McMuffin, but we each ate one in order to be doing the same thing together. (We will explore the fruitful analogy between the food of McDonald's and the music of Phish another time.))) Half a personal pizza at Francesco's turns out to be a great deal of food, too much, really—my body screams for vegetables—though Alex and Dave put away a large pie and were still able to dance their asses off. Warning: one slice's entire cheese, dermal in its toughness, tends to come off in a single bite. Amazing molded plastic water pitchers.

$1 Donation per the Seventh Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Some of my Phellowship friends were going to the Friday noon meeting of the "Phoenix Group" of Suffield, CT—hitting meetings is the other part of their tour—and I figured it would be more fun, and better for me, than hanging out at the hotel. Though I do not consider myself an alcoholic, issues of addiction and recovery, let us say, have figured in my life, and I've benefited from reading the Big Book, so it was kind of neat to go to a real, live meeting, even if I felt like a total asshole sitting in that room listening to people's stories.

$60 Pavilion ticket to Friday's show (6/18/10); private sale conducted hand-to-hand.

$1 Donation to bluesman on the second night ("What a Wonderful World"). A half dozen teenage girls with complicated sunglasses were singing along. One effect of this summer's decreased demand for tickets is that teenagers are more able to go to shows, which is awesome. (One effect of our musical culture is that there's pretty much no way that teenagers could be exposed to Phish, except by word of mouth.)

$1 Donation at the Phellowship table, second night. (The pink headband guy was wearing a Black Sabbath Vol. 4 shirt for this show.)

$5 Partial compensation to a man whose near-full cup of beer I knocked over while looking for my seat in the 400 section of the pavilion during "The Moma Dance." It is hardly reasonable to set one's cup of beer on the floor and expect it to remain undisturbed at the concert of a band so renowned for performing dance music; yet this is what one man in section 400 did. After I gave the man my money—not enough to buy another beer, but proportional to the degree of responsibility I was willing to accept for the accident—he asked me if I had "any good molly." I continue to be flattered when someone thinks I might possibly be dealing drugs. (I was on my phone with a friend who was trying to find me and waving my free hand to make my location conspicuous. In my hand was my bag of almond butter sandwiches. A guy walked over and asked, "Are those boomers?" I said no, but that if he wanted to stick around, he could meet "my friend Molly," who had spotted me and was walking down the lawn toward us.) See, for years I've had to endure suspicion of being a narc—my long hair must really be working! It is also possible that I dance like someone who is on drugs. The thing is, the slower you dance, the bigger the music gets. I noticed that the girl next to me was picking her satchel up from the floor, and the beer owner said something about "the guy who spilled my beer." This was my cue to leave section 400 and not return for the rest of the show. It took me most of "Julius" to make my way back to Wally and his crew on the lawn, just in time for "Reba," my first since 1994. I don't know how to describe it, but at some point Page started doing this incredible other thing during the jam. I opened my eyes and right then Wally exclaimed "YES!" It's always amazing when Phish is shared; the community of listeners who hear things like why that chord is important is probably way smaller than the 30,000 people the Comcast Theatre can hold.

$4 Two Charlie Cards, one apparently non-functional, for the ride from Central Square to South Station.

$6 Bagel sandwich and coffee at Au Bon Pain in South Station (went to Cosi first but balked). Another travel food failure of virtue: under normal circumstances, I'd rather put a dagger into my stomach than farm-raised salmon, but in the setting of South Station, the prospect of a salmon wasabi bagel was inexpressably alluring. The coffee was served in an amazing mustard-yellow cup. As I drained it, I reflected on the decreasing likelihood of my sleeping on the bus home. I hoped Leap Year would be shown again, so that I'd be able to test my hypotheses about the script. Instead it was Night at the Museum II; a large man's head mercifully blocked my sightline to the screen. I read several chapters of Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, from which I drew the conclusion that if I am not writing, I am wasting my life. (I need to read more, too.) Shrek II or III was starting just as the bus pulled in to Portland. In the film's opening moments, Shrek wipes his ass with the pages of a fairy tale and takes a shower under squirting mud while the names of the stars who did the voices appear on the screen. The mismatch of the film's celebration of the ugliness of the individual body, its irreducible excesses forever outrunning mastery, with its stars and their branded personalities is shocking—not because of their managed physical perfection, but because of the universality of their names, which have entered the language, leaving behind no trace of the grotesque, unknowable individual; this incongruity is a clue that something is deeply ideologically wrong with this film.
__________

total: $232.83