last thursday, gordie and i went to a king crimson concert.
john paul jones (led zeppelin’s old bassist) opened for them. i’ve never been much of a zeppelin fan so i was less thrilled than most of the people there. he’s obviously a talented musician, just doesn’t really play a style that i’m very interested in. he stuck with a pretty unsurprising mix of rock and blues type songs, playing one of a half dozen or so instruments on each (guitar, bass, mandolin, pedal steel, etc). since crimson’s music is so much about pushing stylistic boundaries, i was surprised to see such a traditional rock act opening. the multiple led zeppelin covers in his set were pretty disappointing to me, but then, i’m not much of a fan anyway. i do have to give him credit for being the first person i’ve ever seen play a pedal steel guitar without it sounding even remotely like country music.
i’ve been a big king crimson fan for a while and in particular a robert fripp fan. so after patiently waiting through the opening act, i was elated when crimson finally took the stage. they’ve trimmed the band back down to just four people (fripp, belew, gunn, and mastelotto) from their previous “dualing power trios” lineup. they still sound absolutely huge though. they played mostly new stuff, including songs off their upcoming album, with “elephant talk” during the encore being the one concession to their older music.
it’s impossible to fully describe the music of king crimson. every member is a complete prodigy on their instrument. robert fripp does things on the guitar that no one else would ever dare to. trey gunn was phenomenal. the band as a whole sounds like nothing else on this earth. no one has ever even come close to copying them. their carefully written, planned out material sounds improvisational and their improvisational material sounds like it was carefully crafted and painstakingly fine-tuned ahead of time.
the only disappointment i had with KC’s part of the show was that Fripp, being the eccentric that he is, removed himself visually from the rest of the band. he spent the whole time off to the side next to his guitar equipment, completely out of the spotlight. you could tell he was there and could make out a dim outline of him but that was all. i have no idea, why.
lani and i got back from berlin yesterday. later than planned. i’ll explain later. got a cold while i was there.
<p>congestion + airplanes = trouble. my ears never quite finished decompressing from the last flight. i’m still partially deaf. just waiting for my head to clear up enough that the pressure can equalize. really weird.</p>
<p>after we got back, i went to a midnight showing of Lord of the Rings with a bunch of people from work. wonderful. might write about that later, in the meantime, <a href="http://writing.multo.com/lotr.htm">multo has a review</a>.</p>
lani and i were supposed to have headed off to the airport to leave for berlin by now. unfortunately, it’s snowing in milan (where we transfer) so the flight’s been delayed about 5 hours. grrr.
<p>so we’re going to hang out and watch anime and a documentary on communist musicals in the meantime (“ooh! singing, dancing soviets!” – lani)…</p>
here’s an idea for someone with more free time than me who wants something to do: the “death blog”. start a weblog that highlights the deaths of famous people. maybe branch out into bizarre deaths and other death related stuff on “slow news days”. the research part could probably be automated pretty easily with a perl script or two to scour the RSS feeds of various news sites looking for death/obituary related keywords.
<p>i remember kamden once mentioning that a friend of his had started a collage of all the people who died while he was in college and quickly became overwhelmed by how frequently famous and semi-famous people kick it. </p>
<p>i wouldn’t be surprised if someone has already done this although google didn’t turn up anything for me.</p>
went out on friday night with gerard and melissa to some nameless bar on the lower east side. dark with pretty good music (lots of smiths, cure, new order, depeche mode, etc.) spent a few hours talking and people watching. boy with horns. girl with huge tattoo on back.
<p>in the subway station going home we saw a guy playing guitar on the other platform. we’ve seen him before. always on the other side. really good. young japanese guy with crazy hair sitting against the wall playing guitar and doing rythm with his feet (on one shoe he’s got some kind of jingle-tap thing). last time we saw him, he had a friend with him playing one of those cheap little air-powered keyboard things (i have no idea what they’re called). if i ever end up on the same platform as him, i’m going to give him $5. </p>
<p>didn’t have enough motivation to get out of my apartment yesterday. just slept in having weird dreams (sprinting through harlem, Lovecraftesque fish people, scaling the outside of a skyscraper trying to catch aliens, etc) and pondering the best way to implement a robust, multi-layer error-handling scheme for <span class="caps">CGI</span> applications in perl. even wrote most of the code.</p>
<p>funny how motivation works. putting shoes on to go across the street and do my laundry is too much work but spending hours coding tricky stuff isn’t…</p>
followed gordie and dave downtown to 55 bar to see wayne krantz play. his music would probably be best described as ‘21st century jazz’. basically, he’s a phenomenal jazz guitarist who knows how to take full advantage of effects processors. overall, despite having a fill-in drummer for the night, the band was very tight. wayne and his bassist have obviously played together a lot and can improvise together effortlessly. there were a few moments during the improvisational parts of the show where wayne was obviously reaching for it; this was pretty forgivable since his technique seemed to involve a lot of reaching down, randomly turning knobs on his effects pedals then seeing what kind of sound it makes and figuring out how to incorporate it with the rest of the music. when i got home, i immediately bought one of his CDs. he apparently plays in the city more or less every week. i’ll probably have to go back again.
had lychee martinis in soho again last night with gerard and other people from work (including jennifer who used to work with us but doesn’t now).
<p>slept late today then, instead of going to the party downtown that i was supposed to go to, i went to go see <b>Amélie</b> again with gordie and ryan. the 5pm show was sold out so we bought tickets to the 7:30 and wandered around midtown to kill time. we stopped in at <span class="caps">FAO</span> Schwartz where ryan’s wife was working as an elf. wow. if my parents had taken me to a toy store like that when i was a kid, it would have destroyed me; i’d probably never have forgiven them for the rest of my life for not buying me everything there. you can buy kid-size <em>working</em>, gas powered harley-davidsons. jesus christ.</p>