re:stocking

the annually rejiggered pitchfork readers poll (now closed) – which somewhat arbitrarily requested five songs and albums of the year, yet a full top ten of favorite songs out of from their best of the 1990s list [a fun and interesting task..i ended up with the magnetic fields' "the book of love" on top, but it might have been different another year] – also asked us to pick the year's top three live acts.

that's always a hard one, and maybe even more so since i saw more live music this year than possibly ever, thanks to a steady stream of CP assignments. robyn came pretty quickly to mind – her august show with kelis at the trocadero was the apotheosis of an emphatically summer-pop-summer, and a great reminder that she's as much of an effortless bad-ass as a performer as she is as a record-maker. (one particularly brilliant bit of stagecraft: eating a banana during the lengthy build-up of "don't fucking tell me what to do" – finishing in time to deliver just the title hook vocal live – in, if this is possible, a relatively non-sexualized, or other-than-sexualized fashion.) it also showed a fairly dramatic progression from the intimacy and simplicity of the first time i saw her into a dazzling, larger-than-life-feeling pop-star spectacle, though the difference was as much about a clear shift in her way of relating to the stage and the audience as added production fireworks (not to mention the perhaps-unfortunately ballad-free setlist.) will be interesting to see how that evolves when she comes back to play an even larger venue, the electric factory, in february. anywhow, a world-class performer, no question.

i'd thought about lcd soundsytem (whom, like fellow top-tenners joanna newsom and vampire weekend, i saw for both the first and second time this year) until i remembered about mayer hawthorne [& the county], from this vantage point easily my favorite new artist of 2009 [and that's not even accounting for the weirdly lackluster live performances of jj and the very best], whom i saw for the first-through-fourth times this year, at four substantially different venues [the most recent time, regrettably and frustratingly preventably, occasioned my missing a chance to see easily my favorite new artist of 2010, allo darlin', for the second time – but first real-full time – all in one day...], and he consistently killed it every time. the mayer hawthorne show is a well-oiled, spit-polished thing of beauty, and those four performances were far more similar than they were distinct [though the latest included some very exciting sneak previews of his new material], but i hardly minded the chance to re-experience it.

for the third slot, i picked a band i'd just seen, and really only recently listened to: stornoway, about whom i wrote this preview for city paper. the first two (and best) songs on their debut album, beachcomber's windowsill – which probably oversell the extent to which they can be categorized as "indie-pop" – bookended a set that demonstrated both rock-solid chops (instrumental and vocal) and considerable musical range, from moody, arty chamber-ish pieces (some of it verging on slightly tedious) to straight-up (and very british) folk (including a really lovely new one, "november song," performed solo and acoustic by frontman brian briggs) to a surprising amount of rocking out, particularly on the big swelling codas to a few songs. there was also briggs' endearingly nervous/nerdy banter, including recitations of inventions made in philadelphia (the slinky, lemon meringue pie...) but the best part was almost certainly the two-song encore, performed entirely unplugged and un-mic'd, which elicited some of the most genuinely enthusiastic crowd-love i've witnessed in a while. [videos of the encore songs are here and here, thanks to my cp compadres.] it was truly a heartwarming feeling to be in that crowd.

let alone recapping the year in live music, this past week alone has been stellar. last friday i watched two fake-local groups – my buddy tom's band via audio and their piano-popping pals jukebox the ghost [aka cutebox the most] – sock-rock a fun-happy beatles-loving crowd that seemed to consist primarily of teens and their parents, some of them in white astro-jumpsuits, with (respectively) songs about slacking, godzilla, pitch-corrected divas, and babymaking, as well as some lovably dopey banter and a frenzied rendition of "what's this" from the nightmare before christmas (also glad i stuck around for the night-closing panda-monium-inducing team-up cure cover.)

on sunday i saw the utterly ineffable nellie mckay kick some life into the bewilderingly all-over-the-place tunes from her new album – from the latin-kitsch/broadway melodrama "¡bodega!" to the meat-is-murder "unknown reggae" – as well as a bunch of the doris day numbers (and some other assorted jazz standards), a few old faves ("dog song"! "sari"!), a possibly new (?), typically beautiful/insane seasonal political number – an anti-christmas tree eco-rant inexplicably wrapped around a broken-hearted love song – and a wtf tom waits cover (awesomely, if unsurprisingly, she can do a pitch-perfect waitsian growl.) i think this was the first time i'd seen her play with a band, a trio of game if non-smiling jazzbos who set a highly amusing contrast to her preposterous, precociously giddy/girlish and befuddlingly anachronistic stage presence. her albums may be (increasingly) hit-or-miss, but her performances never fail to remind me of her truly limitless talent, eccentricity and charm. it's hard to put it words.

finally, last tuesday i trekked up to hoboken with rae to catch night seven of yo la tengo's annual 8 nights of hanukkah at maxwells [ira's account is there], something i hadn't done since 2002, when the band were very memorably joined by ray davies (whom, incidentally, i would have seen in boston over thanksgiving if hadn't, very sadly had to cancel for health reasons...) this show was similarly a pretty transcendent experience, if only because it reminded me how much i dearly love this band (you wouldn't think i'd forget something like that, having written something like this, and i didn't, really, but i maybe hadn't thought about it in a while...)

this is what they played:

HOME = "feels like going home," from ...beat your ass, a really sweet gentle one which i really should have included on home, why did i not do that? [wasn't] BORN 2 FOLLOW is a carole king cover that i didn't know, but almost of the others were familiar YLT favorites, really a solid setlist of classics, if maybe a tad obvious, but just perfect for not having seen them in a while... definitely heavy on the soft pretty ones (season of the shark, last days of disco, shadows, little eyes, black flowers) but that's kinda how i like it, and helped set off the totally awesome noise/drone freakouts that bookended the set (the last and first tunes, respectively from the last two albums.)

they were joined for their entire set (except for "tom courtenay," since he broke a string wailing out during the late-set punk-out patch) by the amazing mr. nels cline (of wilco, nels cline singers, and assorted out-jazz excursions), in a rad eyeball t-shirt, which made the whole thing all that much more awesome, even if he sometimes made it hard to see georgia. then they came back and played two ramones covers – "pet sematary" (james on vox!) and "sheena is a punk rocker") – and were joined by openers bonnie prince billy + the cairo gang (who were also awesome! even though i barely recognized any of the songs they played...need to brush up on billy's last half-decade) to close the night with lou reed's "heavenly arms" (which tbh i only know from el perro del mar's closer.) heavenly indeed...

Livestock Roundup pt. 1: VeryVeroNekoNellieNOMO

time to take some Summer Stock – I've been going to a LOT of great shows lately. seeing some of my favorite artists, old and new, most of whom i'd never seen before. two of the most exciting, from last week, keith urban and taylor swift @ the wachovia center and kitty daisy and lewis @ kung fu necktie, i covered rather lengthily for the city paper blog (and will repost here soon enough.) the following i will try to run thru more quickly, but all were highly enjoyable shows...

The Veronicas @ the TLA, 7/17



Ah, the V's. The band that started it all for me, teen-pop wise. Preview'd 'em in CP, as i also did for Micachu – sweet virginny's Devon Sproule was also playing Philly (well, Ardmore) the same night, so it was pick yr precociously-talented young-twenty-something chicksinger nite (with three excellent options about as disparate as you could get), but I obviously had to go for these saucy Aussies, whom I'd been wanting to catch ever since they cancelled their slot on the Ashlee Simpson show I saw three whole years ago. This was, I believe, their first time back here since then, the "Revenge is Sweeter" tour, and I daresay they seem to be doing poor ol' Ash a few better these days; playing to a packed TLA vs. a tepid half-full E-Factory crowd (granted a much larger venue.)

it felt like the skinny gawky sexy kids party – like a bunch of high school seniors or something who are still kinda awky'n'scrawny, but at least they're the cool kids, revelling in the glory of youth and sex and angst and punk rock and gettin' naked. the video below captures the opening act, Carney, "pranking" the girls by running on stage, prancing around half-dressed (note the artfully nipple-hiding electrical-tape "V" for Veronicas) and grabbing instruments to play along with "Beautifully Broken" – that sort of sums up the spirit of the show: groping clumsily somewhere inbetween juvenile and erotic, but kind of cheekily infectious nevertheless.

the Origliassos made a visually pleasing sort of checker-pattern, with raven-tressed Lisa in a white slip/dress and peroxided Jess in a black one. they were very convincingly live and unaffected, and certainly earnest, giggling and chatting in an uninhibited, girly way – their story of how they decided "twitterhike" from new york with some fans (because there wasn't room on their tour bus?) was endearing if seemingly far-fetched. the band seemed pretty rad and young too, nice to see – at first i thought the drummer was an older, long-haired metal dude (who was inordinately into throwing his stick in the air), but later realized it was actually a girl, who seemed pretty bad-ass.

unfortunately, if predictably, the vocals weren't mixed nearly loud enough, which is particularly a problem for these guys – their vocals being basically the whole point – and I felt like it sapped a lot of the energy out of the show. anyway, they hit most of the hits, kicking right off with "untouched" – was disappointed that they did "this love" as an acoustic duet, even tho it was cool, since it meant no A-ha synth riff – but they skipped "when it all falls apart," which i was totally counting on as the closer. wasn't that their biggest mtv/radio hit in the states? (seemingly not, but why did i think that?) instead, they ended their main set with "4ever" (incl. the first of the mindblowing finale descant lines, but not the ultimate, closing one) and then encored with a breathless "this is how it feels," with more pandemonium and semi-nudity, and fans onstage, like the one who shot this video. would i have dug it more three years ago (when i would at least have wanted to push up to the front row)? yeah, probably so. come on baby, we can't make it last 4eva. still, better l8, 4shur.

Nellie McKay @ 92YTribeca
with Life in a Blender and Jesus H. Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse



Up to nyc for Ester's birthday, we just so happily happened across this fine $15 bill at the snazzy new 92YTribeca, which turned out to be quite a pleasant spot, with a particularly tasty and reasonably-priced (kosher) café. the first and last acts were both rather curious amalgamations who specialized "clever" (not-necessarily-funny) comedic material with a quasi-theatrical bent, both bolstered by strong horn sections. Life in a Blender (bad name; extra points off for making me think of Eve6) were notably the weaker of the two, at once quirkier and blander; the flat-out kooky JHCat4HotA were at least energetically entertaining: a motley crew including two burly bald brothers, a seriously sick black trumpeter/pianist, a girl who we variously described as "new jersey" or "sorority" type (also on trumpet), and a spazzy-neurotic frizzy-haired frontwoman (sorta reminiscent of Seinfeld's Elaine, but even nuttier, and with a preposterously unflattering dress) who spoke-sang nerdily obsessive and sorta dark joke-songs about sex and relationships and modernity. i liked "vampire girls" (with punkish "hot topic"-style pop-culture shout-outs) and "obviously" (...you slept with that girl from your reunion) and the goofily brazen "do me," and actually a lot of the songs were funny for at least the first verse-chorus or so, but not really enough to want to hear them more than once.

so, Nellie was the odd oddball out in the line-up, who stole the show, and all our hearts. actually, she seemed a bit more down to earth and with-it than previous times i've seen her, but she's still a lovable flouncy goof. she only did a couple of recognizable numbers from her albums – nothing from the debut, just "long & lazy river," "there you are in me," "food" and by-request encore "cupcake" from the second, and the razor-sharp "mother of pearl" (aka "feminists don't have a sense of humor") which i didn't know at the time is on her underlooked (er, by me) third – but there were one or two i recognized from past shows, and some cutesy newbies (thrift-shopper anthem "second-hand nell.")

about half the set, though, was vintage '30s/'40s-or-so covers, mostly done on ukulele, many taken from her forthcoming doris day tribute album (!!) which is gonna be awesome (she did a couple along with the finished backing tracks, thereby demonstrating her adorable incompetence at using a cd player), including "if i knew you were coming i'd have baked a cake," and "a-tisket a-tasket" and "broadway melody," which she did in an unreal quavery warble (you can listen to a similar performance of it here.) oh my oh my. here's hoping for a whiz-bang comeback soon soon soon!

The Very Best @ Le Poisson Rouge 7/18
with Dragons of Zynth



tromped across town for a very different sort of affair (fewer swatties, more sweatys), hotly anticipated by me and many. openers dragons of zynth were a lot more fun than i for some reason anticipated, a weird but workable combo of punk, funk, prog, synth-pop, and african polyrhythms, with anarcho/ethno-hipster style. they did some cover of a ghanaian song from the '60s that ben claimed he knew. towards the end they also did some aggressive/confrontational audience-diving, which was impressively intense, performance-wise, but didn't really fit the vibe. anyhoo.

the very best didn't come on until pretty ridiculously late, though i didn't much mind because the amp-up djs were playing some really killer stuff. the evening was already feeling kind of gleefully surreal (at atmosphere of freaky holiday?), partly because of these australians kept coming over to me and trying to talk to me (one of them in...norwegian?) because i was, apparently, the spitting image of their friend (i even danced like him.) once the band finally got on, the whole place just turned into even more of a berserk party, with everybody exuberantly dancing and waving their arms around.

there's not necessarily so much to their live performance – the radioclit dj guy, whichever one he was (there was only one of them there, so half of the duo), didn't seem to be doing a whole lot besides triggering the tracks – though towards the end of the set he made himself useful by pouring out little cups of bacardi and manischevitz (?!) to pass out into the crowd. esau mwamwaya seems like a total sweetie, with an infectiously giddy grin, but even if he didn't have much to offer in the way of showmanship (his english might not have been that good?) he was certainly singing his heart out, and his voice is a majestic thing indeed – in a way, their music is very simply all about the unbridled joyfulness of the singing. (as ben pointed out, the songs themselves are quite simple and similarly-structured.) the back-up singer had a broken leg, or something, but she sang along just as jubilantly. ezra koenig of vampire weekend turned up to sing his part on "warm heart of africa" (though not, unfortunately, to play the sample from their rework of "cape cod kwassa kwassa"), and he is such a chubby-faced cheery cherub, sooo cute!

meanwhile, they had a dancer going crazy all over the stage, shimmying and booty-shaking, rubbing her privates in audience members' faces, sometimes bringing folks up on stage to dance with her, and so on. all in all, it was a pretty crazy scene (even the cast-bound singer got up to hop around at one point), with lots of happiness all around – maybe not the very best musical performance i've seen in a minute, but without a doubt one of the very best parties.

more photos here and here.

[more coming soon, on Neko Case, Escort, and NOMO...also Taylor and Keith and Kitty, Daisy and Lewis... I just had to get this post finally up, several weeks late.]

SxoxoxSW

PART THREE

[PART TWO] [PART ONE]

oh man, that's how i feel about my life sometimes...

day three was, like, perfect. as far as concert-going goes, non-stop thrillz - bam bam bam from show to show. so i'm going to dispense with the narrative flow.

Rjd2 [at p4k party, emo's]
in case you haven't heard, Rjd2 is no longer a dj or an electronic-producer dude. Rjd2 is now a prog-funk hard rock band. at least, that's what it seemed from this set, which included full-on band renditions of "since we last spoke," "exotic talk" and maybe a few others from swls, along with new material with a similar energy (but more singing.) some deadringer selections too ("horror" and "ghostwriter") but these required rj to get back behind the sampler to trigger the vocals. it makes some sense - rather than make sample-based music that sounds like a rock band, why not just have a rock band? the answer is that rock bands are often boring. this band wasn't - they're funky and hard-rocking and pretty technically great (at least the drummer) - but i wonder if i might have felt differently if i wasn't familiar with the more unusually-flavored original versions of their jams. either way, fun to rock out with them that afternoon

menomena [ditto]
they're not much more than a normal-ish indie rock band, but they are a very nice indie rock band, and i'm very happy to have seen them in action. hard to say what exactly it is about them, but their music stands out as being enjoyable without being identifiably all that different from any number of other (fine, but unexceptional) indie bands. another very cool drummer, with a pretty unique steez (more part-oriented than groove-oriented, but still groovy enough.)

girl talk [ditto]
i felt kinda bad - this crowd was not going to be whipped into a hedonistic dance frenzy like last time i saw him (or probably any other night-time club show he plays.) i did my best, but to be honest the set wasn't quite as inspiring as it could have been either. still, it's like impossible not to have a great time watching/listening to greg do his thing, and this was no exception. he played "c'mon 'n ride it" but didn't come down into the crowd to start an actual train until later on in the set. towards the end, he dropped his (underwhelming) "let's call it off" remix, and announced "peter bjorn and john are in the building!" - but how much cooler would it have been if they came out to do the vocals live?

i didn't take this picture, or the next one, but they were taken by somebody very close to me (the entire front two rows seemed to be photographers)
sorry, my camera died!

amy winehouse at the fort (fader/levi's party)
she was apologetic - she hadn't realized the venue would be so big, or she would have brought her full band (which somebody told me later was actually the dap-kings. pretty crazy, i wonder when/where they rehearsed. oh wait - whoa - apparently they were her band on the album too. why didn't i know that?) instead it was just her and a very suave-looking guitarist (duh, it was binky, in a silky purple shirt), doing laidback acoustic readings of her songs. which still fail to make much of an impression, except for "rehab" of course (but even that i don't think is that great. i'm kind of confused about why the album is getting such glowing press, even though it's cool that we may have a bona-fide [relatively-straight] soul hit on our hands in 2007.) still, the lady can sing. and hey how about that hair, and that makeup! and those tattoos! (look here for a better shot of amy's left arm tattoos, which was actually taken from closer to my vantage point, just at a different show.) her style's pretty intense, but it's also pretty damn wtf, no?

they told sigrid that their sweatsuits are now extremely smelly

datarock [ditto]
hell yeah. actually, not too much to say, but they put on a great show. all the faves from the album, and even the ridiculous ones (like "night flight to uranus") came off very sharp. some silly guys. after their set, "(i've had) the time of my life" came on the speakers, and they made us all sing it into the microphones.

nellie mckay [at exodus]
there are some good pictures from this set here. no way i would have been able to take anything like that - i barely even got to see what she was wearing (hey, nice shirt.) it's no great mystery why there was a lot of talking going on during this set: nobody could see her! the stage is very low at this venue, and she was sitting down, at an upright piano. before the set started, matthew and i were standing in the middle of the crowd, chatting with a chatty floridian ex-new yorker about the xpn world cafe, the three-penny opera, why pretty little head is nellie's coming-out album, and the all-important question of which is your favorite pipette ["if she were a man," she said, it would definitely be the "classic ice blonde" (that's gwenno i think) and she was mystified about why her husband and their drooling male friends all preferred rose (as do i)].

but shortly after nellie started playing, we moved upstairs to the way back so at least we could actually see her. everybody else was still out of luck though - "we can't see you!" somebody shouted after the first few songs. "oh, well...i can't see you either," she responded. "maybe it's better that way, for both of us!" i'm not sure why i never realized before that she sounds (her speaking voice anyway) exactly like judy garland. though what she says is a lot brattier. anyway. so, she did "cupcake" and "lazy river" and a couple others from the new one (but not "columbia is bleeding," which i'd say is probably the highlight, nor "beecharmer" of course.) also "suitcase song" (yaay!) and "david." (i did shout out "i want to get married!", but if she heard me she probably didn't take me seriously.)

best part was the closing medley of "doggies and kitties": jumping back and forth among "yodel" (is that right?), "the dog song," "pounce," and "ding dong," in a way that really showed off her piano expertise and smart little theory-head, as she modulated around with little impromptu interludes and laughed at herself for messing up the words (i forget what the typically self-deprecating line was that she fumbled and then added "apparently" as an aside.)

still a goof; still a lovable goof. (was she really using sheet music?)

________

marit larsen


marit larsen


MARIT LARSEN!

[at, um, uncle flirty's]

whooosh!

okay, well, i'm still waiting on nan to send me the photos of marit that i took with her camera, but i guess i'll go ahead and write about the experience. this is the only halfway decent photo from that show that i can find online - but i have better ones, just be patient. thanks nan! (videos coming soon too.)

well i got to the venue when foxy finn irina bjorklund was still playing - was very glad to catch her last four or so songs. she and her band played rootsy cosmopolitan folk, mostly in english, and a couple of chanson-style numbers in french. she has a very appealing sort of casual sophistication - wearing an antique-looking lightweight yellow dress, sitting down to perform (she pulled out her saw for the last number) like she was playing on a back porch somewhere, with one shoe on and one bare foot (hmm, looks like that's a trademark/habit of hers) - and of course the french numbers only added to her sultriness.

and then it was time for marit's set. actually it took a while for her to go on, as there were some technical problems - the doorlady later told me that a fuse had blown in the [electric] piano, which was a recurring problem at that venue because of the demands of converting the voltage for the european equipment. meanwhile marit was in the corner by the stage, pacing and occasionally stretching...

now, my excitement for seeing her had been mounting throughout the week (since tuesday night when i found out she would be appearing), and especially after the previous night with the other marit, i was hoping for a similar experience (friendly post-set interaction, free cd? - wasn't really expecting on another dance contest and t-shirt), except better because i actually know and love miss larsen's music and would therefore have more to say to her.

but it wasn't until the moment i saw her in person that i fell in love with marit larsen. in <3. is gorgeous - not necessarily in a dramatic, striking way (like striking you over the head), but like a perfectly sweet, fresh-faced twenty-two-year old girl you might meet where you can't quite believe how delicate and soft and exquisite her features are. and tiny too, so delicate she would almost seem fragile if there wasn't so much sparkle in her smile and life in her rosy cheeks. (you'd never call her a porcelain doll - she'd just roll her eyes and laugh - but it would be a warm, easy laugh, wrinkling her little freckled nose.) it's cliche but the photos just don't do her justice, certainly not the wavy-haired, styled-up press photos, which tend to subdue her brightness (and her smile) in trying to present a more mature, moodier marit. maybe her soft, glowing vibrancy can't be captured in a moment's stillness, but i'm hoping my attempts will fare somewhat better, being from that shining night - with her simple, girlish dusky-purple dress; gold barrettes holding back her lengthy, straighter hair and looking somehow fairy-like - and taken through my smitten eyes.

well. i just bounced around quietly, enjoying my giddiness, while i waited for nan to arrive and the set to start (which happened in that order.) finally the band took the stage - seven pieces including cello, banjo, several guitars and keys - there was a fair amount of swapping around throughout the set - and launched into "only a fool." at this point it's harder to recall to mind than the impression she made visually and physically, but her musical performance (and the band's) was simply outstanding as well. truly - i was of course expecting to be excited by it, but i think that even anyone unfamiliar with her music would have been impressed. it's no surprise that she's a very professional performer (she's a ten-year veteran after all), but it was especially touching to see how much fun she was clearly having on stage. she displayed ample chops on guitar, mandolin, piano, and harmonica, and sang beautifully, reinvesting familiar lyrics with heartfelt meaning. there was one fabulous new song (apparently called "steal my heart" - the line that sticks in my memory is "if you're going to break my heart, break it like you mean it.") otherwise she hit most of the highlights from the album, including of course "come closer" and the moving "solid ground" (on piano.) no airing of "under the surface," and no "don't say you love me" as i was hoping - it was a short set - but, after a spirited run through "don't save me," she closed with possibly the most exciting cover she could have chosen; "my boyfriend's back." with a spot-on, energetic folk-rock rearrangement - retaining the hand-clap rhythm but fleshing out the stop-starts with a rootsy gusto.

meanwhile i was dancing my fluttery little heart out, at least to any song for which it was the slightest bit appropriate, and mouthing/singing along with many of the words. there was a good eight or ten feet between the edge of the stage and the bulk of the crowd, and while it would have been completely awkward to stay very close to the front with all of that distance, i hovered in the forward portion of that gap, sometimes hugging the speakers along the right side of the space. so, well, it would have been practically impossible for marit not to notice me, since she more or less had to look at and past me to see the rest of the crowd, but i definitely felt us making eye contact for much of the set - especially on "come closer" (it was all i could do not to take the titular instruction literally), which is sort of a perfect song for shy eye-contact flirting, shaking our heads at each other knowingly on the "will it keep you warm at night?...(i don't think so)" clincher-line. i mean, who knows - it was mostly beautiful self-delusion, of course - but i was having fun with myself, anyway, and marit certainly seemed to be having fun as well, and i imagine some piece of that came from seeing how gleeful her music was making me.

anyway, she played eight or so songs and that was it - the sizable audience applauded appreciatively and we few giddy fans in the front clapped and cheered, but it was hardly a crowd capable of demanding an encore. still, i think her set found a very welcome reception. i was sort of too busy being smitten to pay much attention to anybody else, but i did say hello to the two other people up front who had been singing along and being excited (and joining me for a bit of dancing, though not much.) they turned out to be true marit superfans - they'd met through the fan forum on her website, and they clearly knew all sorts of things about her and her band. they'd come extremely prepared - they had posters for her to sign, presents and letters to give her, and had in fact made contact with her before, so she'd known to expect them. thanks to them, i was able to go to her dressing room (well, it was just the pool room in the back of the bar, reserved for the bands), just by sort of tagging along as they were trying to get in to give her the presents.

it was more than a little bit awkward - i'd been feeling particularly awkward since i'd initially tried to give marit a hug after she got off stage and was going around shaking hands - ordinarily i would have asked first, but i was still caught up in the rapport we'd been developing in my head while she was presumably too busy focusing on her performance to notice. she accepted the hug, of course, but it was still a bit uncomfortable - what i hadn't accounted for is that she is a good deal shyer than she seemed on stage. she's friendly and certainly polite, and she smiles a lot, but she's definitely reserved. but i have to say it was exacerbated by the two superfans, who seemed like they'd be pretty socially awkward even in a completely comfortable situation - which this certainly was not - and i'm sure me popping and tagging along didn't help much either. (after all, they are internet message-board denizens, who aren't known for their social ease - at least one of them self-identified as obsessive, and they both made comments to the effect that it was very surreal experience since meeting marit had been a long-time dream of theirs.)

by the way, you can read their accounts of the evening's events on the maritlarsen.com forum: scroll all the way to the bottom here for matt's ("Fanboy") indepth retelling; and here, scroll down past his blurry photos - that's him in the first five - for the same with sarah's ("SSrb1098") additional comments. for some reason they think my name is frank - look earlier in the thread for some of their initial gushing and first mention of me as "that guy jumping around in circles with things falling out of his pockets" (hey, it was only one thing - my camera.) i've registered on the board (as "Maritricious!") but i've not been able to bring myself to post yet.

so, anyway, we went back to the band room, and i mostly just stood there while matt and sarah alternately gushed and apologized for gushing too much. marit was certainly touched but also amused by the whole thing, saying that of course she didn't mind, that it just meant they liked her music a lot, which is the important thing to her. they gave her the presents - a lovely necklace, a stuffed texas longhorn (that makes noise), and wha twas apparently a scented candle (i only saw her smelling it, didn't see what it was) - and had her sign the posters. i didn't have anything to give her or take as a souvenir (i'd meant to snatch the setlist - which i usually don't care about - but i was distracted and sarah got it) but i did get a bit of (slightly more modulated) gushing in, and i also got to tell marit that "my boyfriend's back" is my karaoke song - and she said it's hers too! and that's why she insisted on having it in her set. so that was nice. it was all very nice.

i'll have more to say about marit later on (her name's pronounced something like MAH-reet, by the way - though i didn't really realize that at the time and may or may not have said it incorrectly when i was talking to her.) i've been listening to her album a bunch in the past week (and i finally ordered an actual cd copy of it), and i have some new opinions to spout about it. but i'll hold off for now, because this has gone on plenty long enough.

________


what happened next? well, i went by stubb's BBQ to try to get in for BDB and GBQ, but they had stopped selling tickets (even though there was plenty of space inside.) i went by antone's to try to get in for antibalas and the dap-sharons - no luck there but i had a lovely time waiting for an hour or so on the cash line ("optimists line," as i'd taken to calling it) in the warm night air, soaking in the loveliness of what had just happened, and chatting with my linemates lucinda, a former philadelphian who insisted that i wasn't in texas, i was in austin, and [never told us her name], a piano grad student at nyu, about struggling-artist life. if i had had my wits together i would have realized i could make the most of the $20 i'd spent on the nellie ticket and go back there to catch peaches (probably could have gotten in too.) but i didn't, so i just wandered back to scandinavia (er, uncle flirty's) and watched some of who i thought were grand island but now think might have been reykjavik.

whatever it was didn't really pique my interest, so i continued to wander along sixth street (a continual enveloping performance in itself - closed to traffic for the duration of the festival and mobbed every night with all sorts of interesting characters), taking it all in. i turned down an unlikely street and caught the strains of what i thought was maybe just a small, informal hip-hop show, not an official part of the conference, until the mcs started chanting "it's the pack!" indeed it was - just kicking off their set at the beauty bar patio. it's a small venue, but there was still room for me if i wanted to pay $15.

i decided to just stand outside the tent and watch for a while from near the entrance, where i had a clear view of the stage. after a few numbers i wandered on, not really engaged, past a series of venues on 7th and then back to stubb's to sit for a few minutes and listen to a couple of the good bad and queen's lovely mellow numbers ("kingdom of doom" and i'm not sure what else.) then i headed back to the beauty bar, still in a bit of a daze, thinking i might be able to catch the pack closing their set with "vans" (the stuff that i'd heard had been disappointingly conventional-sounding compared to that whispered, bizarro mini-masterpiece of skeletal hyphy.) (hmm, this is kind of interesting - article about "vans" and product-placement censorship.)

no such luck - the pack had evidently just finished their set, but the federation were starting theirs (sort of surprising that these names weren't already taken, eh?), and this time i actually stood and watched, along with a san franciscan fellow with a captain's hat who showed up soon after. they were fun - hyphy's supposed to be about being hyper and getting stupid, and though their outfits and general performance style was more or less standard hip-hop, they did do some goofy dancing and arm gestures and so on. they finished up with three songs in a row that i knew from my hyphy-downloading binge a while back - the so-so "18 dummy" and "i wear my stunna glasses at night" (or whatever it's called), and the genre-defining (i assume) "hyphy," which is really pretty great. mostly it was just nice to see a performance in a different style from pretty much everything else i'd seen at the conference - although to really appreciate the show i should have been inside the tent where it seemed like there was some serious dancing going on.

actually they might have kept going after that, but i went back to meet matthew where we had parked our bikes twelve hours earlier. we recounted our divergent evenings (he'd seen the watson twins, andrew bird, perry farrell, badly drawn, and good bad) over goodflow oj at kerby lane, then biked the rest of the way home in the wide, wide empty streets.