Virtually Home

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...

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...

Okay, readers. If there are any of you out there who haven't abandoned me or keeled over dead from the impossibly long wait, here's the deal: I am going to blog now. I was putting off blogging non-sequentially, since I still (and this is pathetic) have yet to finish my narrative on winter break in the neotropics. So here goes. I am blogging non-sequentially, and I don't care who knows it. My hope is that by writing about spring happenings, life will return to this blog. If only the weather would cooperate, this idea of renewal would feel complete. Jacob and I have been tossing around this idea of camping for a while now. Springtime inspires me to be outside. I really can't remember camping often, if ever, as a child. I presume this is probably because my brother and father went camping regularly with their Boy Scout troop and were probably pretty bored of it. Anyway, one weekend at Devil's Den, Arkansas last spring is the only conscious memory I have of camping. ...

It has not escaped me that I have so far failed to update you, faithful reader, on my winter break Central American extravaganza. Since returning, the real world has rather rudely made its presence known, and I've not really had much time to think about the rather daunting number of photos I took, or the somewhat impossible task of relating accurately what happened while I was away. Here goes anyway. I woke up really early. Painfully early, after not having actually achieved any modicum of deep sleep. I finished packing, drank a cup of coffee (little did I know it was going to be my last cup of real coffee for nearly two weeks) and Dad drove me to the airport in the cold, pitch-black predawn. I waited in the longest security line ever witnessed at Tulsa International (by me, anyway). Three people, on seeing my passport, asked me if I was going to a mission trip. Because clearly anyone who would deign to go to another country must also be proselytizing. Is there anything more co...