Month: June 2008

Bidding you Badu

Jason Preu1 Comment

Late spring, early summer – 1998. Lawrence, KS. Sticky-humid, the air during the day makes you apt to avoid real labor, moving around too much brings tiny beads of sweat to your forehead and at night the humidity instigates your more animalistic instincts – something about the start of summer calls together cosmology, meterology, ecology, cartography, biology, and psychology to color this particular time and place with a subtle sexuality and sense of ecstastic abandon.
You’re in an apartment without air conditioning, so the windows are open, curtains closed. The sounds of nightlife trickle in and about: snippets of conversations, traffic, car doors closing, laughs, yells…
You’ve a half-full glass of lemonade sweating on a nicked, chipped, and worn,wooden coffee table beside you. Asserting its right to be here now, your sweating glass writes a circular graffiti tag that intersects marks made by glasses come before.
You lounge on a faded, red couch while a ceiling fan on low speed pushes a teasing breeze down upon your bare chest.
Against the room’s north wall sits a standalone, wooden cabinet, small and squat like the coffee table and just as aged. Two candles flicker on top of the cabinet and inside the cabinet is a small stereo, its two accompanying speakers placed on the floor next to the cabinet.
Your host enters the room and smiles.
“You’ve got to hear this,” says the host, interrupting the current CD (Soul Coughing’s ‘Ruby Vroom’) to put in another. “No, no, keep your eyes closed.”
You pick up your lemonade and rest the glass on your belly button. Beads of water drip down your right side onto the couch underneath, though the pinkish fabric barely shows any signs of wetness.
So you do close your eyes, and through that lazy air comes some soulful voice captured in a live setting, backed by an interesting rap-influenced jazz band with lyrics that also seem very much inspired by hip-hop culture. The songs are new, yet familiar.
And damn if that music, that album, ain’t a perfect fit for such a moment. Damn if it don’t just synch right up with the mood, the heat, the place, the timing, the everything.
You have these moments every now and again when the music and the situation come together so perfectly. In the past it might have been Pink Floyd in the fall, while sitting in a Dillon’s parking lot and watching families pick out pumpkins for Halloween. In the future it may be decorating for Christmas while listening to David Bowie (however incongruous that may seem).
And it’s these remembered moments that make you up; scenes of delight and tragedy edited together by a rarely-considered, internal author into the story of you. Rewrite a scene, erase one, ignore one, or add a new one and you’re slightly changed. Erase them all, and you’re someone different. Now there may be an unchangeable You sitting and watching this narrative unfold but that’s a philosophical charge for another day. Today’s philosophical charge is simply the consideration of you as a story told to yourself (tropes and clichés, metaphor and allegory, where sometimes the plotting and characterizations seem to blend perfectly, where sometimes the surprising sequence here forces the use of another unlikely bit there) all in an attempt to recognize and understand any narrative patterns or frameworks that the story of you exhibits. Not a slight charge, by any means, but a worthy one.

Bidding you Badu

Unbereevabul

Jason Preu2 Comments

For the first time since I’ve been taking this route (over a year now), I had a companion bike commuter to follow into downtown. Not only that, but the mofo was outpacing me! On a hybrid! I closed the gap on the hill up into the City Market, but dang, why you gotta crank so hard first thing in the morning, new commuter?
(Then I got to work and realized I hadn’t quite fixed my rear tire’s slow leak – and didn’t feel too terrible about getting schooled by a hybrid.)
I see so many more cyclists these days. It costs us almost 45 bones to fill the Corolla, so no wonder.

Unbereevabul

Peter Murphy – Beaumont Club – 6/15/08

Jason Preu4 Comments

OK, first to know is that to me Peter Murphy is THE alternative rock god. Hands down – more so than Robert Smith or Dave “Bat Rabies in my Eye” Gahan. I was surprised my awesome wifey could even find a ticket to his show last night, being that she bought it so late in the game. I thought for certain it would be a sell-out.
So how was the alt-rock god in the flesh?
For one, not even close to selling out. Shame on you, KC alt-rockers.
For two, there wasn’t quite the spectacle of old-school gothery I had expected. Lots of black t-shirts, plenty of dark eye makeup and lipstick…but only a few fully-customed children of the night.
For three, ’twas a very short set. Arrived at the Beaumont by 8:30 – Murphy got on probably close to 9 and I was home before 10:30.
For four, Murphy sounded great. Despite…
For five, having a totally nu-metal/grungy backing band. No joke. Every song had an escalated tempo and an overbearing STP-Flies-in-the-Vaseline-like guitar underpinning. Except for ‘Strange Kind of Love‘, where the Murphster broke out an acoustic and the band relaxed their heavy hands, the atmosphere was like listening to a Peter Murphy cover band. The music had no subtlety, no finesse, no glamour, no drama, no flair, no metaphor or mystique, and ultimately it seemed as though the band was simply going through motions.
When I got home, Sarah told me we were an early stop on the tour, so maybe they were still getting into it…
Nevertheless, I thank my partner-in-crime for hooking me up with a way-cool early b-day gift. I’m glad I got to hear Peter Murphy live (even if he didn’t play ‘Indigo Eyes’)
Speaking of which, I think I’ll leave you with that:
(Nothing pretty to look at – so just listen.)

UPDATE: Photos from Wayward Blog

Peter Murphy – Beaumont Club – 6/15/08