Sushiesque

Music for art museums

New York Magazine: So, what’s up with the freaky photo of your face covered in blood on the tour’s Facebook page?

Nico Muhly: Listen, if you deal with classical-music people, the kind of head shots you have to have as a composer are APPALLING. Go to ten composers’ Websites, you’ll want to kill yourself. It looks like some seventh-grade … it’s so bad. I just thought, Fuck that, it’s so uninteresting. The stuff I was sending out of myself last year was like, you know the one where I look all giddy and sort of like a serial killer? They were like, “Do you have anything more serious?” And I was like, “Well, yeah, I do, but I’m going to have blood on my face.” There’s no in between. It’s sad, too — have you ever noticed, you see a picture of Philip Glass and it’s always that same pose? You can just hear the photographer being like, ‘Put your hand over your mouth, look pensive!’ You’re like, ugh, God. It drives me crazy. You know who has great head shots? James Levine. It’s that one of him looking super excited to be conducting Berlioz. It’s awesome.

I saw Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, and Thomas "Doveman" Bartlett at the MFA on Sunday night; my inexcusably late review went up on Bostonist this morning. (Nico Muhly kindly linked to it on his charming blog.)

Arma virumque cano

I haven't been to the opera in three weeks. After a season of Gil Rose and James Levine, of rarely-performed things being performed, and of sitting down a lot: Here I am holding down a space at the Paradise for me and my plastic cup of beer, earplugs on hand. Here I am alone on the ramp at the Middle East Downstairs, leaving my notebook in my pocket and wielding my camera with impunity. (I am not alone in ogling Jessica Moss's shoulders.)

I took Fancy McCulture-Pants to opening night at the BSO (where youth was rare and "lovely to behold") and Sanskritboy* took me to the last, exhausting night of the Symphony—and the last afternoon, dashing to the nearest Thai food between halves of Les Troyens. I never did get around to buying opera glasses, but I did buy a little red Loeb edition of Virgil.

Above: Ms. Moss, of Silver Mt. Zion. Below: John Eccles' Semele (the pre-Handel Semele) in a black box at BU.

*He has taken up blogging again, but only about the 19th-century French buddhological Journal Asiatique.

Architecture about dancing

Some metaphors and other ill-advised language from my review of St. Vincent, Foreign Born, and Basia Bulat at the Middle East this past weekend:

• like a frantic marionette (or somebody who learned to dance from John Linnell)
• tightly-coordinated assault
• pale girl-on-girl action
• 36%-milkfat vocal harmonies
• pluckables

Rightly omitted:

• St. Vincent mêlée

Feel free to click on "Recommend this!" despite your understandable reservations.

See also: Phrases I had the good sense to leave out of my Joanna Newsom review.

Pictured: Annie "St. Vincent" Clark (top), with the microphone that sounds like a poorly-connected telephone calling from Paris while it's burning; Basia Bulat (middle); Foreign Born (bottom). See my flickr account for more photographs of the show.

New words from old art

Vorticism. n. A British art movement of the early twentieth century, characterized by abstractionism and machine-like forms. Term coined by Ezra Pound.

Dazzle ships. pl. n. Ships painted with a camouflage pattern of contrasting stripes, also known as Razzle Dazzle. Used in World War I. (Also, an Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark album.)

See my review of "Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939" at the MFA: "Oh, the places you (plural) will go."

Pronubial. adj. Presiding over or promoting marriage.

"Thy aid, Pronubial Juno, Athamas implores" in William Congreve's libretto for Semele. Unfortunately for Athamas, his fiancée has been doing ho activities with ho tendencies.

See my review of Handel's "secular oratorio" as performed by Opera Boston and Boston Baroque: "Women ended up on tables, a lot."

ROKK

Saturday evening at TT's started gently, with crisp maple leaves wafting downwards: Arms & Sleepers hid behind a screen, emitting loops and drifting bits of song while we stood back and tried not to let our modern hairstyles cut silhouettes into the projected videos: a drive through the city with colors inverted, a flash-animated autumn, and other nearly-abstract eye candy to distract us from the men behind the curtain. Soundpool took away the screen and let footage of themselves wash over their stationary shoegazing, a huge pretty girl superimposed on a life-size pretty girl with a pretty voice. Ad Frank emerged from the catwalk, and I was impressed with his ability to sing and dance and drink and unbutton without spilling his drink, until he spilled his drink.

Perhaps excited by the unusual sight of multiple keytars (two! on the same stage!), the audience's gradual transition to belligerence was complete not too many songs into Freezepop's set. I was jostled and to my surprise I jostled back. The band strutted and sang and incited the crowd to chant BRAIN POWER and, after an encore that consisted of their contributions to Guitar Hero, it all ended in a screaming heap of metal hand gestures. I misplaced my bottled water and Sean Drinkwater misplaced his suit jacket.

What a curious life we have found here tonight

Following sounds of distant brass down Elm Street yesterday, I found a self-identified Leftist Marching Band performing in front of the Davis Square branch of Winter Hill Bank. They sang a song against Walmart, and then some Sousa, and then some more protest songs because, as they reminded us, they are protest band.

"We don't play store openings. We don't play parties. We just stick it to The Man."

They had some magnificent hats, and a belly dancer.

Sleazing darkly in the dimming divide

Phrases left out of the review Joanna Newsom at the MFA that I published in Bostonist earlier this week:

• occasionally licking honey from her fingers
• Lillian Gish on hallucinogens
• Dark Crystal: The Musical
• "I love you truly or I love no one"
• harps look like math
• Aili, who had never heard Joanna Newsom before, came out of the show not furious at all.
• +5 against hipsters
• cricket-filled trees
• Joanna Newsom makes way more sense in person.

The next morning I did a rash thing and bought tickets for her November show, Ticketmaster fees be damned (and Ticketmaster fee processing charges, and Ticketmaster fee processing charge processing fees). If you look at the Somerville Theatre's seating chart, we'll be in seats B4 and B5, orchestra center, pleasantly close to the big black box that says STAGE.

Sunday In The Park With William Shatner

Sunday morning (technically). David Pajo sings, strums his guitar, and taps an array of bells with his foot at P.A.'s Lounge. Jon had asked him to play "Baby Please Come Home," and he does so, beautifully, while Jon's getting another beer.

Pajo's bells. (More photographs of him and Holly Throsby and Joy are over here.)

Jon starts to recommend that I see Gary Numan on Sunday night, but we've got tickets to see William Shatner conducting the Pops. I win.

Sunday morning, Sunday morning. After a farewell party for the girl who brings the party, a mysterious encounter with a sandwich on a fence, and a smattering of sleep (fitful and riddled with obese cats), Rachel and Ryan and I treat ourselves to brunch and do our best to abide by the rules of The Neighborhood:

No hitting, kicking, or biting.

Sunday afternoon. We collect some more people and zipcar it to the Cape. We bring chairs, blankets, cookies, scrabble, and appropriate reading: Ubik by Philip K. Dick, a library hardcover of The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, and a beaten Mercedes Lackey paperback, which Aili has purchased from my downstairs neighbor's yard sale in a fit of misguided nostalgia: the protagonist is a sullen boy who does not wish to join his parents' textile guild. He is spared that fate by a psychic white horse who speaks in italics, with colons. :I am teh psychic horse:

Sunday evening. Aili borrows my camera. She brings back some pictures of a distant William Shatner, and a video of him conducting Sousa's Washington Post March with extravagant inaccuracy.

Rachel spells NERD on the scrabble board, leaving four letters on the rack: DORK.

Two moons rising in a shop window on the main drag in Hyannis.

I could sleep for a thousand years

I left Rachel's house reluctantly on Sunday evening, heavy with eggplant, collards, and strawberry-rhubarb compote, thinking that I should never buy tickets in advance, especially not for shows on Sunday nights after epic dinners. But, around 1:00 am Monday morning, leaving TT's after Devotchka's crazy sold out show, I was seriously glad that I had bought that ticket, and that I had not taken that wonderful nap I'd nearly opted for instead.

I'd scarcely heard Devotchka at all before seeing them play, and I'm glad, because the records, lovely as they are, don't do the band justice. What's jaunty on the album is joyfully belligerent at the show; their most mournful song, "How It Ends", becomes an anthemic singalong; everything is noisier, and fierce. It didn't take them long to rile the crowd into a state that made me think of that time I saw the Arcade Fire*: theatrical, deadly earnest, and very very sweaty. (And they did it with polka.) I was missing the last train, and elated.

Nick Urata has Roy Orbison's warble, Morrissey's audacity, Vlad's wisdom, plus theremin skills and charm to burn. This man can break your heart in four languages.

The first shall be last

Tonight I unearthed my scanner, its power cord, and a compatible USB cable (all of them in separate, still-un-unpacked boxes and bags), and I scanned my Final Fantasy embroidery at the highest resolution I could. I had begun cross-stitching these six sprites from the original Nintendo game shortly after I'd seen Final Fantasy open for an epic Arcade Fire show. Final Fantasy is Owen Pallett, whose music consists of "violin and looping pedal and thin, stupid vocals," according to his web site. He holds the title of World's Most Popular Gay Postmodern Harpsichord Nerd, according to the Times (henceforth, "WMPGPHN"). This evening, he headlined a show of his own, not especially far from the apartment I just moved into, and I had no excuse not to bring him my sampler, which had been folded up in a paper bag since I'd finished it some time ago.