Virtually Home

Saturday was less a music festival and more a Monsters of Folk festival. For me, anyway. I skipped out on seeing a number of minor bands that I didn't mind missing in order to stand in line at MOF's autograph table. We were near the end of the line where they cut it off, and I was nervous that I would be the first one NOT to meet the band (which is what had happened at the venue the night before) but it all worked out. The guys were all surprisingly nice, and I got to have a (brief) conversation with each of them. Afterward, Cliff and I contemplated the decision between seeing half of Broken Bells' set, and being ideally placed for Monsters of Folk's set. As obsessive as this sounds, we chose Monsters of Folk. If it had been The Shins instead of Broken Bells, I think my decision would have gone the other way. I dreamed recently that I got to go back to ACL and see all the bands I didn't see when I was busy seeing other bands. It was excellent, but turned out to b...

 Last Wednesday night, the Mountain Goats played a show in Oklahoma City at the UCO Performance Lab on their way down to Austin. I anticipated getting to see them at the festival -- this was destined to end in heartbreak. However, I had the good sense to buy a ticket for the OKC show anyway, and I was rewarded with a brilliant set of my old favorites. John Darnielle puts on an amazing show. I was worried that it would be a low-energy set, since most of his songs are written for the acoustic guitar. I was pleased to be wrong. He's accompanied by a bassist and a drummer, neither of whom do any talking, but appear to be into it. John's stage banter is pretty fabulous -- stories about inadvertently inviting a troop of tweakers into one's small apartment and having them destroy your antique maple-top desk by imprinting it with their tweaker poetry, for example. You can tell he loves his work -- he smiles while he plays, in that uncontainable way, and he plays barefoot. At...

In a country without Thanksgiving, there's not even a pretense of delaying Christmas until its allotted time. Decorations have been going up for weeks now -- lights hung from the sides of buildings and wires strung overhead were the first go show up. Yesterday they started putting up huge trees in Place de la Victoire and by the cathedral near my house. Also coming to Place Pey-Berland is what appears to be an ice-skating rink? I'm interested to see how this is going to pan out. I was told that it will rain all winter, which I interpreted to mean it will never get cold enough to freeze. I guess I didn't expect ice-skating. Although I've never been fond of even the idea of ice-skating -- all that strapping blades to your feet and gliding about and falling on your face seems to lend itself pretty handily to getting digits cut off. But since Thanksgiving is finally upon us, I'll stop feeling weird about seeing Christmas decorations. I'll even be posting pictures...

This is going to be a long and rambling post. Most of it is going to be specific information about the two concerts I saw this week. Don't say I didn't warn you. Last weekend was a rather nocturnal one for me. Sunday night found me trying desperately to sleep "early" and utterly failing until 7:30, which made going to class at 1 pretty painful (and believe me, I know how sad that is). Monday night I didn't manage to sleep until 2 a.m., and woke up on account of a too-early alarm at 4:30 before getting up at 5:30 to start my epic London adventure. It was a really foggy morning. You probably can't tell very well from this photo, but even in the train station there was fog about the rafters. I would have appreciated it a lot more had I not been so exhausted. The train ride to Paris passed in a haze. I arrived at Paris Montparnasse and had to cross the city on the number 4 metro line to change trains (not to mention going through all of the metal detecting...

So about an hour ago I was panicking that I hadn't yet received my tickets to the Monsters of Folk show on Tuesday in London. So I called their office, told someone my problem -- he got a superviser to change my tickets to will call (apparently they don't mail things to France, and didn't bother telling me that when I ordered?), sent me a confirmation email -- and the problem was solved in under five minutes. Why, oh WHY can my washing machine problem not disappear in the same way? Tomorrow I will call them...when I have gathered my willpower...and put more money on my phone. Somehow I doubt my 30 seconds of credit is enough to resolve this problem.

I didn't very well succeed at making my sleeping/waking schedule school-compatible in advance. As I was trying to go to sleep 7 hours "early" last night, I was struck by the memory of standing in my parents' kitchen, trying in vane to argue with my mother about my new school-year bed time. I was short enough I couldn't see into the microwave mounted over the stove, but I'm not really sure what that means. What I do know is that the night before last I went to bed at 7 a.m., and this morning I woke up at 8. Yes, this morning's wake-up time was last night's going to sleep time, give or take "snooze" a few times. It wasn't very fun, but all things considered I think I got more sleep last night than I really expected to. I woke up so early to go to campus because I thought "hey, I have no idea when my classes meet -- what if they meet in the morning? then I'd miss them!" My flaw with this thinking was in the belief that by g...