Three bits of awesome I’ll note for the record tonight.
First, as I crossed a bridge over Rock Creek this evening, a big hawk or something floated not far overhead. I got a good look at him. A bona fide bird of prey.
Second, Phish paid serious homage to Genesis this evening at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, covering ‘Watcher of the Skies‘ and ‘No Reply at All.’ I don’t have cable, but I did follow along via #phish and #genesis hashtags on Twitter. As you might imagine, the stream was a mixed bag: “This sucks!” type tweets, followed by “Phish is so tight!” etc. I hope someone posts video soon.
Finally, disc 3 of “Cosmos” arrived in the mail. More deep thoughts ahead.
I found plenty of bloggable stuff out there on the Internet today. Here are a couple of bits and pieces.
Peter Gabriel. According to AP, he’s bailing on Genesis’s induction next month into the rock hall of fame, citing his upcoming European tour. Sort of harsh, no? Maybe they do some sort of video link.
Carl Sagan. NPR quotes the scientist on the view of Earth from 4 billion miles away.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
When I was little, I watched “Cosmos” on public television – that show kind of blew my mind. I might have to Netflix that action.
“As a bonus you’ve been probably bobbing your head all along and not just because you might have a contact high,” says Click Track.
Ha ha ha! Stoners getting high at the Trey show! Ha! Only I didn’t see or smell pot or any other drugs (besides booze) once when I was there. Maybe the blogger did, but he didn’t elaborate. Then, from hackneyed to casual racism: “The two forays into light-reggae were about as successful as you’d expect from a band of seven white folks led by a dude from Vermont.” Yeeeucthh.
It could be your first time playing in public with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett in a very long time.
Sure. We’ve just done weddings in the last few years. Time to move along. I think the older you get the more you appreciate the history of what you’ve been through with these people, which is quite nice. And we’re all still alive. That’s a plus these days, too.
My bluegrass bender continues. Tony Rice’s self-titled debut album has really been hooking, especially the tracks: “Eighth of January” and “Big Mon.” I found myself downright rocking out to those two the other day. The next Rice record I’m going for is “Manzanita.”
I’m warming to the idea of making music on the iPhone. Along those lines, although from a visual arts perspective, is this New York Review of Books story: “David Hockney’s iPhone Passion.”
“It’s always there in my pocket, there’s no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there’s this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it’s over, best of all, there’s no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There’s something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.”
It appears my next door neighbor has bought a new toilet, a Kohler. The box, out on the sidewalk, bore this tagline: “The Global Leader in Performance Toilets.”
Via Blip.fm, I came across FoxyTunes, Yahoo’s music player browser plug-in. It’s a great conduit from iTunes to Twitter. I wish they had something equivalent on the iPhone, which is how I do most of my listening. Anyway, the FoxyTunes page on Genesis’ “Anyway” led me to this YouTube video of the pianist’s eye view of the tune. Very nice.
Phish is playing with their fans’ minds again. This time, it’s with this nifty countdown of album candidates that the band might don as their musical costume Halloween night out in Indio, CA. Each day, a record gets axed, literally.
For now, “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” is still in the hunt, although I think the odds of its survival are low. Who knows, though. Crazier things have happened.
If I had my druthers, I would have nominated “Selling England by the Pound” – I think Phish could go to town with “The Cinema Show.” Damn. They could even hook Mike Gordon with a double neck.
I know I’ve made something like this observation before, but I wonder how I would have reacted in 1986, when I had about 40-50 records and tapes, if you told that 23 years later I’d be able to keep the lot on a handheld computer that would also serve as a telephone, camera, video camera, notepad, calculator, address book, and so on. Would I have flipped out or shrugged? It’s conceivable that, as a 14 year old, I might have had loftier expectations for 2009, like space travel or invisibility or something.
Speaking of the iPhone, on the way home from work today, the iPod served up a few outstanding songs. One was “Subway to Venus” by the Red Hots, a fitting tune for riding along in an absolutely packed Metro car. Exiting the station, I was about take off the headphones, when Genesis’ “Keep it Dark” came on. I’ve loved that big riff since the eighties.
Abacab. On the Metro shuffle this evening, the title track off “Abacab” popped up. Great tune. I listened to the whole thing. Interestingly, right as I walked on to the train, I thought of playing video games, old school video games. This association makes perfect sense to me. “Abacab” was released in 1981, when I was nine year old. In 1982, Atari renamed its video console the “2600.” I owned an Atari 2600 around that time, and I was also recording Genesis songs off the radio.
Cheese. Last night, after walking the dogs, I fired up the DVD player and watched the end of the “Return of the King.” I hate to be harsh, but it occurred to me, I think for the first time, that the “closing ceremonies” bit of that film is powerfully cheesy. Like the surprise wedding moment for Aragorn and Arwen? Ooof. Maybe I thought that part was cheesy in previous viewings of the movie, which I like overall, but last night it hit me pretty hard.
Compression. I think I’m ready to invest in a compressor pedal. More on this topic in later posts.
