Virtually Home

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...

On Sunday, I ventured into the vacuous gap between Norman and Oklahoma City to attend the Pete Yorn and Ben Kweller concert at the Diamond Ballroom. It was my first time at the venue. On first arriving, one is struck by the gravel parking lot and the vehicle-swallowing potholes one must traverse in order to access it. The building itself looks exactly like it was designed to be a skating rink -- cinderblocks with blue diamonds decorating the sides, long and low, with "DIAMOND" spelled out in white lights above the entrance. The tickets mistakenly said the show started at 8, and a mystified opening band called The Wellspring started at 7:30 despite the bare handful of people that were present. It was their last night on tour with Ben Kweller and Pete Yorn, and the guys had decided to prank them by covering their instruments in some kind of powder. At the moment they started playing after having described this, some techies ran back out and dusted the drumset again. The drumm...