Virtually Home

Gregory Alan Isakov during his opening set. Josh Ritter is one of my perennial favorites, so when I heard he was doing a solo, acoustic tour, I jumped on buying tickets. Gregory Alan Isakov opened. I hadn't heard him before, but his singing and especially his guitar-playing are beautiful, and if you're a fan of Josh Ritter (or Turnpike Troubadours/John Fullbright or Alexi Murdoch), you should probably check him out. He said he usually plays with a band, and that the solo tour "terrified" him. He needn't have been scared, though, because his performance was great. Josh Ritter's "solo, acoustic" set turned out to be sort of neither thing. He brought two members of his band to accompany him, and they played primarily guitar and bass, though they played mandolin and various other instruments from time to time. There was no drumset, which is perhaps what they meant by "acoustic," though mostly bands don't tour with electric drumsets,...

1) Go back in time and tell myself not to move to Minnesota. 2) Go back in time and tell European settlers not to move to Minnesota. (Bonus: The Dakota and Ojibwe will be psyched.) 3) Go to summer. Never come back.

Midnight Reruns When I owned a drumkit -- before I moved to a small apartment in Saint Paul -- it had a Rural Alberta Advantage (RAA) sticker on it. I like their lyrics; I like their drumming; I like their singer's weird voice. I first heard them on a Saddle Creek sampler when I lived in France, and since then I have frequently wished they would make music faster. The good news is that they have a new record on its way out, and their short tour that began in Minneapolis last week is kind of a test run for new material they're recording right now. Midnight Reruns Midnight Reruns opened the show. They're a four-piece rock act from Milwaukee who played the first two nights of the RAA's tour, after swinging back up from Austin (they played the Soundpony in Tulsa on the way). I liked some of their riffs and the way they smiled when they played. I liked that they visited the Como Zoo before the show that night. And so I bought their record after the show. Their dr...

I vastly underestimated the extent to which the weather would have a major effect on my emotional well-being. When it is this cold, I fail to be productive, and I hate everyone and everything. It is a truly terrible way to exist.

I'm in my ninth year of devout Decemberists fandom. There is something about the storytelling, the melodies, the little guitar hooks, the accordion and harmonica and melodica -- hell, just about everything about it appeals to me. I especially adore all of that prog-rock complexity reduced to Colin Meloy with a guitar. I've traveled to see Decemberists shows in Maryland, Texas, Washington state, and London, England -- accordingly, there was little that could have stopped me from seeing Colin Meloy play in my own backyard. This was my second visit to The Woman's Club of Minneapolis (the first was to see Ben Gibbard with Advance Base). Very little about the venue appeals to me. They have tragically little parking, and are located in a neighborhood plagued with "residents only, violators will be towed" signs, so you have to get there ridiculously early in order to be able to leave your car somewhere. This is tragic because it's a seated-only venue, so there'...

Animals have sensory systems that allow them to take in and make sense of information present in the environment. Some animals (like me) fly airplanes and go to grad school, and their nervous systems are used frequently for knowing which way is up and worrying that they might not be in the right place. When you're an instrument pilot in training, you spend a lot of time learning to trust your instruments during flight in the clouds because sometimes, when you fly in featureless grey, the part of your brain that integrates information from your visual and vestibular systems gets really confused. This confusion can cause your brain to have very definite opinions about which way is up -- and these opinions frequently do not coincide with any kind of reality. Spatial disorientation can be very dangerous when you consider that the airplane is traveling at some relatively rapid rate near an object (the Earth) of much, much, much greater mass. The solution to this disorientation problem...

Today, I lost a great uncle. He was a wonderful, earnest, slow-smiling kind of man. He was good, and I will miss him.