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.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
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
Monday, June 21, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
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
$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.
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total: $232.83
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