Sep
30
When I come home cold and tired
September 30, 2006 | Leave a Comment
On Friday, September 29, Roger Waters and his many-piece ensemble rolled into the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre (FMBA) in Tinley Park, Illinois. Up until several years ago, the FMBA was called the New World Music Theater, then it spent a few years as the Tweeter Center (an alarmingly hilarious name for anything), and now apparently another corporation has gobbled it up. The FMBA is enormous, somehow more imposing than even a Major League ballpark because of its structure of metal tubing with little visible support. This isn’t a place you want to be if there’s a natural disaster, so luckily I was crammed in there with twenty thousand other people who were largely intoxicated. Pretty awesome.
I missed the first half hour of the show for a variety of Murphy’s Law-type reasons, but as my friend and I pulled into the FMBA, we realized the show had started and Waters was playing “Have a Cigar” from Wish You Were Here. Parked in the third-to-last row of a gravel parking lot at least four blocks long, we heard the strains of “Fletcher Memorial Home,” a compelling idea yet boring song off of Pink Floyd’s mediocre 1983 album Final Cut. Waters played some of his solo material—remember the opera he was writing last year, about the French revolution, apparently?—which, though fairly unmemorable, was both intensely political and accompanied by beautiful visuals on the huge, Pulse-like screen behind the band.
The FMBA, as an amphitheatre, is all outdoors—there’s a roof over the seating area but no walls, and the back of the venue is an expansive, slanted lawn. We had seats, which I thought would mean actually getting to sit and watch the show instead of being jostled by gross drunk people. That was a silly assumption. First, I’m not sure why anyone needs to stand during a Pink Floyd show—it’s not like you’re dancing, assholes. Sit down. A drunken man behind me and two meatheads in front of me almost came to blows over the meatheads’ insistence on standing. The drunken man’s belly bounced against the back of my head while he swore vividly at the meatheads. I put the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and prayed for a miracle. No dice.
Second, is it really worth missing part of “Comfortably Numb” or “Money” to go and buy nachos? This was less irritating than the people who paraded in and out of the show with beer every fifteen minutes for two hours. If you’re going to abuse something, isn’t the point of a Pink Floyd show to get really, really stoned? A huge portion of the crowd was shitfaced and belligerent, swaying like morons and making bathroom runs every other song. I did catch a lot of wafting marijuana smoke but it paled next to the communal beer breath. Beer was $9 at the FMBA, too. Giving these assfaces the benefit of the doubt in terms of tolerance, they were spending between $50 and $100 on alcohol.
Back to Roger Waters, though. After a 15-minute break halfway through the show, he and his band returned to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Everything I said before about the crowd acting like imbeciles intensified during my favorite song of all time, “Money,” but shortly thereafter they finally calmed down and sat in their goddamned seats, even the meatheads. Finally standing up at an appropriate time, the entire crowd took to its feet to sing along with the last track on the album, “Eclipse.” This created a near-spiritual, arena-shaking feeling that lasted through the end of the song; the ovation after Waters and the band left the stage; and their encore of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” “Vera,” and “Comfortably Numb.”
This is the best concert I’ve ever seen. The musicianship of Waters’ band is technically flawless and the arrangements were tight; even the sound, projected from enormous quad speakers, was shockingly clear. Waters created an ideal mix of his own questionable solo work and early and late Floyd. An unexpected highlight of the night was a female backup singer’s spot-on rendition of the sweeping, ecstatic “Great Gig in the Sky.” What broke my heart about this performance, though, was the absence of the rest of Pink Floyd—no matter how good the Dave Gilmour-alike on the guitar (or the second Gilmour-alike on vocals) sounds, he is not part of Pink Floyd. He’s a hired gun. Especially on tracks like “Comfortably Numb” and “Breathe,” defined by Gilmour’s smooth, slightly-raspy voice, any number of imitators could not recreate his presence. I’m sure that at a Gilmour concert I would feel the same way about Roger Waters’ absence. When a band composed of men in their 60s still looks, plays and sounds great, why can’t they just get it together to play some shows?
The Rolling Stones tour incessantly and in much larger venues—80,000 people in Comiskey Park at upwards of a hundred dollars apiece is a pretty outrageous scale, probably to demonstrate to the world that their forty-plus-year career is not over yet. Even the mediocre Gin Blossoms are reuniting, for chrissake. It’s time to make nice again, Waters and Gilmour. At least Paul McCartney isn’t trying to switch your songwriting credits around.
Sep
24
Reflections on “Walden” after reading a summary of it
September 24, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Weekend Edition – Sunday (NPR) 05-05-2002
Commentary: Reflections on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” after reading a four-page summary of it
Host: LYNN NEARY
Time: 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM
LYNN NEARY: Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to write, observe and reflect. His reflections are still being studied nearly 150 years after they were first published. WEEKEND EDITION commentator Tom Schiff found a handy shortcut that got him thinking about this classic work of literature.
TOM SCHIFF: I wasn’t actually reading “Walden,” I was reading a book called “The Book of Great Books,” something you get at the bargain table at Barnes & Noble. “The Book of Great Books” is itself actually a summary of 100 great books, sort of like Cliff Notes summaries, only shorter. I was reading it mostly out of a genuine curiosity about most of the books, which I haven’t read, and also so that I can seem more educated and erudite than I really am.
Anyhow, when reading the four-page summary of Walden, I was struck that Thoreau, though roughing it, more or less, back there in 19th century rural Massachusetts, was actually living on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 300-acre farm out there at Walden Pond. I mean, this wasn’t like some homesteader tromping off into the wilds of Montana to chop down trees and bring his little slice of modern civilization to the wilderness. It was more, like, `Hey, Ralph, you know me. I’m Henry David Thoreau, the intellectual poet and, you know, you’ve got this 300-acre spread out there in Concord, and it’s your property, so even though civilization is creeping up, you can farm it and hunt on it and fish on it and keep others out, and you don’t mind if I build a place on it and just kind of hang out for a little bit, do you?’ Of course, Ralph, also being an intellectual and a writer, said, `Sure, go ahead. I’ve got 300 acres. Suit yourself.’
So that’s what Thoreau did for a couple of years. And I think having read a four-page condensation of “Walden,” that the moral of the book is live modestly, and you don’t need that many possessions, especially if you’ve got a friend with a 300-acre property that they let you live on for a few years. Which brings me to my other observation about the book, which is about the difference between liberals and radicals. Radicals seem to me to be people who don’t have much and live amongst others who don’t have much and genuinely feel they’ve been screwed by an unfair society or economy. A liberal is somebody who lives on their friends’ 300-acre farm and preaches to others about the virtues of material modesty. Or maybe it’s someone who reads a four-page summary of a book and pretends to be more educated and erudite than he really is.
NEARY: Tom Schiff reads condensed books in Los Angeles.
Sep
11
Standard Caroline-Ed interaction
September 11, 2006 | Leave a Comment
ed: the butthole surfers also do a great cover of underdog
caroline: hahaha. too bad their name makes me want to boycott them forever.
ed: what?
ed: oh god, caroline. there are things wrong with you.
Aug
31
promises promises
August 31, 2006 | Leave a Comment
a recent this american life had a dan savage piece in which he described a promise he made to an ex-lover who was, at the time, dying of aids. the advent of a new drug cocktail extended the length of dan’s promise from a few months to the next several decades. this made me wonder, have i made (and broken) promises? i’m sure i have but the worst part is knowing that i don’t know what they are. the breakees probably remember, the way i remember girls who cruelly teased me in junior high. i wish i could remember.
Aug
30
summer job
August 30, 2006 | Leave a Comment
the summer after his first year of college, my dad worked as a bricklayer. once he saw the most beautiful, popular girl from his high school class walk by while his white-trash coworkers blared country music and wolf-whistled at her. our society has turned against jobs that use the body instead of the high intellect, when a union plumber probably makes more than the average college professor. it’s never seemed fair that the people doing the grossest jobs — janitors, exterminators — make less money than everyone else. physical labor clears the mind and shapes the body, could be worse.
Aug
28
golden delicious
August 28, 2006 | Leave a Comment
my latest experiment with my gastrointestinal system is peeling apples before i eat them to eliminate the part that’s hardest to digest. peeling apples is fun, anyway — using a serrated knife and trying to create one long ribbon of green. i can’t do it, but maybe that’s an acquirable skill. either way, i have a whole bag of golden delicious apples to work through, which means plenty of rehearsal. this is a low-pressure performance compared to everything else happening right now, finalizing schedules and starting classes in my second-to-last semester as an undergraduate. the times are flux.
Aug
27
everyone looked like an idiot
August 27, 2006 | Leave a Comment
a friend of our family, who has always inflated me with praises like “you’re my hero,” talked to my dad about my future. my dad said i’m considering law school and mike said, “it doesn’t matter where she goes to law school — she’s just going to end up working at the aclu anyway.” last night i talked to max about my future. graduate school in english or law school? he asked which i wanted more, and i had no idea. i am paving my future with as many options as possible to avoid ruling anything out. maybe it will work.
the flood of people rushing back into beloit is even more surreal than in years past — for the first time, there’s no one to point to who’s more experienced or learned about beloit, because our class is the oldest. i’ve also lost the impetus to meet first-years; there’s something inherently suspect in introducing yourself to people three years younger with whom you inevitably have very little in common. i’ll meet some through the newspaper, and maybe through a class, and that’s fine. the question is, what distinguishes seniors from underclassmen? maybe our calm confusion as we see our futures.
is it better to put up with people i don’t like, and make nice in social situations, than to be more frank about my feelings? i tend to believe that going along is harmless in some instances, and big public gatherings are among these. like most adults, i am skilled at the purposeful ignore. but there is also a whole group of people with whom i like talking when we’re in a crowd together, who are fun in certain contexts, who are entertaining whilst under the influence. the well-roundedness of the social scene is what really appeals to me.
max and i also talked about the way people change during their years at school. max said he remembers himself as a first-year and thinks he must have looked like a total idiot. the thing is, everyone looked like an idiot at one point, even sober squares like me. and the other day, when i saw a faculty member kick a runaway grape under a table to avoid having to pick it up, it was comforting to think that those idiot moments would continue indefinitely. comforting and embarrassing, maybe. i’m hopeful that they’ll become less frequent, but can’t promise.
Aug
24
c.y.a.
August 24, 2006 | Leave a Comment
this weekend at home, my dad introduced me to a concept that obviously exists in my life but that i’d never put a name to before.
c.y.a.: cover your ass.
he was using it in reference to my writing job, where my boss has been a little irresponsible and then tried to shift some blame to me. but really, this is my new motto. when i often get that feeling like i’m a six-foot-tall bull in a china shop, i know this philosophy is right — maybe being more conscious of my actions will help me learn to c.y.a.
Aug
23
“adults”
August 23, 2006 | Leave a Comment
the museum bustled today with seventy beloit faculty whose purpose was to shuffle around and meet the new and temporary staff members. on top of that were trays and trays of small elaborate hors d’oeuvres and a king’s ransom of wine, showing that faculty — like students — are most likely to attend events under the banner of free food. this isn’t surprising; i don’t know about you, but the older i get, the more i realize that “adults” are just children with better pedigrees and more complex coping mechanisms. they leave messes and make demands, filling larger shoes, but only physically.
Aug
23
smile but don’t wish
August 23, 2006 | Leave a Comment
at home this weekend i found a metal lunchbox (purchased at big lots) that i carried in high school as a pencil case. apparently i stuffed it full of mementos at some point because i opened it now to find a batch of my friends’ senior pictures with inscriptions on the back. there is middle ground for people like me, people who did not love high school but who didn’t hate it either, with pleasant memories that don’t make us long to relive those days. i smile but don’t wish for seventeen; i miss people but do not seek them.