Virtually Home

2011 started in Belize, where I rang in the New Year on a rickety bunk bed, listening to Counting Crows' "Long December" and Death Cab's "The New Year" while my traveling companions, quite sensibly, slept. On that trip, I experienced a whirlwind of bird walks and rainforest hikes. I found out what termites tasted like. I saw manatees and iguanas and sea urchins. I received more chigger bites than I imagined possible, and climbed a few Mayan pyramids. And then it was back to school, for the start of a long and painful semester in which I took 8 courses, worked, and took on extra research projects just because. Luckily, one of my eight was Animal Behavior, and that class served to solidify my emerging goals for graduate school and beyond. In February, Snowpocalypse threatened to come down just before my brother's family was due in Tulsa, and I skipped town ahead of the storm, arriving in Tulsa about an hour before the snow started to fall. We spent a w...

Today, I was in the Union looking at pictures of activities on campus in years past. Most of the photos in the Union were taken between the turn of the century and World War II, but they've recently added photos from the modern era. Among them were photos taken 1997 of OU President David Boren and George H.W. Bush at commencement exercises. Except that the photo's caption read "George W. Bush" rather than "George H.W. Bush". This is a pretty big error. As I left the Union, I was wondering who one talks to about campus decor. And lo! For the first time in my 4.5 years at OU, I saw David Boren on campus. He was walking out of the building that houses his office toward a car parked on the North Oval. I approached him, he shook my hand, and I mentioned what I had seen and asked if he might recommend someone I could get in touch with about it. He told me he was glad that I had mentioned it, and that he would much rather be in a photo with George H.W. Bush...

Tyler Bryant and the Shakedown On Saturday, I got up "early" and broke my fast with a Cliff bar on the way to the festival. The first act I caught was Tyler Bryant and The Shakedown. I'd never heard of them before, which is perhaps unsurprising in that they were playing on one of the festival's smaller stages before lunch. Nonetheless, Tyler Bryant comports himself as if he's already a rock star. I guess rocking a pink Stratocaster and a sleeveless Pink Floyd shirt are nearly enough to make him one, but I was seriously impressed with his guitar skills to boot. They played a very loud, very energetic set to a crowd ranging ages 15 to 60. Their music is of the wrong generation to be revolutionary, but if you're in the mood for some guitar rock, I'd check them out. Telekinesis This band wins my award for "Best Find of ACL 2011". I'd never heard of them when I wandered over to their set on the Google+ stage, but a bunch of other people app...

On Friday I woke up earlier than anyone should ever be awake the morning after a concert and I drove myself from Dallas to Austin, scrambled to a meeting on the University of Texas campus, and then headed to the home of my friends Stephen and Kim who had graciously agreed to put me up for the weekend. They weren't back from work yet, but I was able to change out of my dress clothes and get ready for festival-going. Just as I started to walk out the door, it started to downpour. Audibly. I stood and watched it for a few minutes. First, I contemplated the muddy horror the festival was about to become and adjusted that I just might be ruining both of the pairs of shoes I'd brought with me. Then I donned my trusty poncho and walked down the hill to Zilker Park. Zilker Park is a large expanse of gentle hills covered in soft green grass. Lots of people were taking off their shoes as soon as they got inside the gate, and I wondered how long the grass was going to survive the daily f...

I was on my way down to Dallas, having scheduled an interview and three days of non-stop rock'n'roll in Austin, which I was unwilling to be deterred from, despite the onset of a horrendous upper respiratory infection. Luckily for me, Bright Eyes was also on their way to the festival and stopped through Dallas to play a Thursday night show at the Palladium on the last night First Aid Kit was sharing their stage. First Aid Kit is a Swedish folk duo made up of sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg. They're 21 and 18 respectively, and have been recording for four years already. Their music is harmony-heavy and their lyrics thoughtful (and in English, in case you were wondering where I'd picked up Swedish). Johanna sings the main vocals and plays a guitar while Klara usually takes the harmonies and accompanies Johanna with a harp or a keyboard. They played the show in nearly-matching black 'N Sync and Spice Girls t-shirts, circa '99, which you shouldn't take as a...

Tim Kasher is a genius. An often overshadowed genius, as Omaha-based frontmen go, but one who's been around for a long time, involved with such now-defunct Saddle Creek legends as Commander Venus and Slowdown Virgina, as well as still-rocking bands Cursive and The Good Life. When I heard Tim Kasher's solo tour was swinging through Oklahoma City, I bought a ticket in advance. Way in advance. I must have been the only one, because no one showed up early. The attendance was so sparse for the first few hours of the show that I was worried no one was coming. An small venue is a beautiful thing, an audience of ten kind of a sad state of affairs. A lot of people showed up late, after the two openers, which was good for the atmosphere and somewhat disappointing in terms of the pre-show ritual. After a pleasantly folksy opening set by a soon-to-be-married local duo called O Fidelis, my ears were made to ring for three consecutive days by a New York band called Aficionado, whose per...

Sunday was Mother's Day, so after our traditional family gathering, I headed over to Cain's with my parents (because they have great taste in music) to see Wilco. The Smith Westerns opened. I had heard their name before, but didn't know who they were until halfway through their set. The sound wasn't mixed well, and the lead singer's vocals were half unintelligible, which was a whole lot better than this between-songs commentary, which was entirely unintelligible. Nothing in their set stood out particularly. It was two guitars, a bass and a drum kit, playing reasonably predictable pop rock. I couldn't vouch for the vocals, since I'm not really sure what they were about. The singer/lead guitarist and the bassist seem to be brothers, with the same slouchy posture and the same curtain of hair hanging in front of their faces. There was a photographer walking around in the crowd trying to get a clear shot of them -- I guess his press pass was limited to the fi...

On Friday, after a little bit of scrambling to print concert tickets on account of complications involving multiple malfunctioning printers, non-access to computer labs and missing ID cards, Zack and I picked Jacob up and, after a brief stop to add fluid to Zack's power steering system, we headed south on I-35 to Dallas. The weather was happy and sunny, and we basically had a sing-along all the way down. We ate some really terrible wings at a Church's Chicken attached to a gas station and headed to House of Blues. (Prepare yourself -- all of my photos from this show were taken on my poor iPhone, whose camera lens is scratched.) Finding the line proved to be kind of difficult, as there wasn't much of one, but we ended up inside behind three OU students (they were the extent of the line) who'd come down for the show and who informed us that, unless we spent $15 dollars at the bar or in the gift shop, we might not end up so close to the front as we would expect. A fift...

News is all over my Facebook feed and the television that Osama bin Laden is dead. I think probably this means less to the overall war effort than the news anchors are making it out to be, but I have the television on mute, and while I watch the footage of cheering crowds gathering in front of the White House, I'm thinking about how strange a creature time is. I remember debating whether or not we should enter the war with my classmates in a middle school English class. I was the only one among the students to think that maybe war was a bad idea. Facebook didn't exist yet, and neither did the iPhone I just texted my brother with. We just cracked open our first bottle of homebrew milk stout, and President Obama just addressed the nation -- who could have guessed he would have been elected? It took ten years, but they found the figurehead everyone was hoping to topple from the beginning. And all I can think about is how weird it is to have seen ten years pass.

You, reader, are lucky. You're lucky because you get to view my low-light, scratched-first-gen-iPhone-camera-lens photos of The National. What a boon. The show was epic. It started out with a set by Other Lives, who looked puzzlingly familiar to me all night long until they walked off stage and someone near me said the word "Kunek". And then it hit me. I'd seen Kunek perform during Welcome Week, my freshman year of college, at the union. I was trying to figure out when at Austin City Limits 2010 I'd caught their act. But they didn't look that familiar. Other Lives sounded great. The preponderance of musical instruments they brought with them looked like a parody of a stage set. A veritable obstacle course. Every member of the band played at least two instruments in every song, though the average per band member (if you exclude the drummer from the data set) was probably closer to four. They had everything, from guitars and keyboards to bells tied to deer a...