The Clientele @ World's Best Rock Venue

I saw the Clientele last night at Johnny Brenda’s. It was my first time at the club, and the great things I’ve been hearing were all true, and in full effect. They serve excellent food and beers; their owners are also proprietors of the Standard Tap, a Northern Liberties staple. The small size is ideal, and the stage is high—more to the point, they have a balcony that looks almost directly down on the performers, and this is a great angle to watch the musicians—you can really see the way all of them are playing, working with their instruments.

I was particularly happy with this because I wanted to watch Alisdair MacLean play guitar. He’s one of the rare figures of the past 20 years of rock who has managed to do something original with the electric guitar. In fact, he’s managed to do something with that very staple of college rock guitar, the “jangle.” In his playing, jangling is full of detail, and drawn out into blurry, dreamlike clouds of sound. He plays a lot of major 7 chords, but they never sound loungey. The main thing I was able to glean with my less than acute eyes was that he finger picks everything. I could see a pick sitting on top of his Fender Deluxe Twin Reverb. But he never touched it, that I noticed. This is extremely rare in rock and roll. And while he’s playing using a folky method, the music is still always clearly sounding pop. A few years ago a friend told me that when they play live they sound just like on their recordings—his point was, essentially, so why go see them. But it was actually impressive to see how effectively they created the sound with just four musicians; and Maclean's voice was pitch-perfect, with the exact same hushing reverb treatment that the band is probably best known for. Another aspect of the JB’s experience: the sound is excellent. Rock clubs have come such a long way since when I started going to shows over 20 years ago. That’s a form of gentrification I’ll take—a lot of the grit of the old days was simply pretention, anyways.

New Yorker Tea Party article

I didn't read it very closely, admittedly, but the Ben McGrath piece in last week's New Yorker seems entirely puffy to me, and dangerously legitimizing of a deeply corrupt and insidious movement in US politics. He lets one kind of loony guy represent the fringiness of the "party," instead of asking questions like, "How does a movement claim to be populist and fight for working class people *not* to receive medical care?" Or "Why is it any more possible to associate the term socialism with Barack Obama than it is to say two plus two is five?" Such questions have just become too obvious to ask for most US journalists. Which is to say, they're so obvious, so deathly deserving of being asked, that they have to be written off immediately, or else the hours and hours of coverage given to these people would suddenly seem wholly unjustified.

A Solution?

If I had a kid, then I'd have an excuse for the shortness of my attention span, and for how little work I get done, at this ripe old middle age.

Why?

Why does the Blue Man Group make me so angry?

However, there's this, from wikipedia:

In the 12th season episode Trilogy of Error Homer describes the Blue Man Group as "a total rip off of The Smurfs". Also, in "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner", Homer - on the verge of being arrested - desperately babbles "Don't tell my kids I'm going to jail. Tell them I joined the Blue Man Group. I'm the fat one!"

Big Star box

Emusic just posted the Big Star box set, which I've been debating whether to buy for weeks now. You can download as much as you want--at least none of the rarities are marked "album only." I've had a big revival in listening to this band lately. Alex Chilton's voice is so sublimely sweet on their records. And I've developed a rather obsessive relationship to the song "Daisy Glaze," in particular, with its lovely elongated and slurred vocals over a barely continuous beat--not to mention the direness of the lyrics, wherein the narrator, upon seeing his lost love with another in a bar, intones, "And I'm thinking, Christ, nullify my life..."

In other news, I just ate a copious amount of corned beef.