Doing Stuff is Awesome

• Session Americana at the Lizard Lounge Tueday
• Some show at Wally's or Toad tonight
• Johnny A at the Regattabar tomorrow
• "The Importance of Being Earnest" at the Palace Theatre Saturday
• Lettuce at the Knitting Factory Sunday

I will continue to blog compulsively as I work from home for most of the summer.

Leap.

Unfortunately, I'm kind of collapsing from the travel I've been doing. Brain works, body doesn't. Like being a vegetable. I continue to plot/wait for coagulation, actualization, etc. Youth, suffering, impatience, mirth, other.

Last or Second to Last Red Line

Three out of four consecutive nights.

Saturday Nights at the Cantab Lounge

I've drunkenly described the Cantab Lounge in Central Square as a "Noah's Ark of humanity," where on a weekend night you'll see one of every type of human imaginable, except for college students (thankfully, the whole 21-plus thing tends to keep them away). You'll see the crazy African-American lady in an Indian headdress with Bluetooth headset. You'll see two short, gray-topped men in black sport coats--the identical twins who play bass and drums in the Fatback Band. You'll hear many heavy townie accents, and you'll usually see quasi-hipsters embarrassing themselves.

Walking into the upstairs bar, you're greeted by off-color cream, blue, and green everything--almost the exact same colors my grandparents painted the basement kitchen of their tiny Queens bungalow. You'll see paintings of halfnaked women and brewer's memorabilia straight from the mid-70s, the period that almost all of the songs in the set will be taken from.

When the band strikes its first note around 10, all the old people hit the floor. Diane Blue, the lead singer/harp player, is usually just showing up with her coffee (the bassist ably handles vocals for a bit). As the scene heats up and the youth arrive, many old people leave around 11 to pass out or mate drunkenly. Then the paradoxes or ironies or coincidences truly begin.

You're in an amusingly decayed, musty warp zone where musically, it's 1975, young and old and black and white dance together, and pretty, apparently single girls amass at the back corner bar too nervous to hit the floor until that third or fourth drink. A feeling builds--excitement? pleasure? enjoyment? Which fits best? The band never runs out of covers. The funky old dude on the strat never hits a bad note; in fact, he actually shreds. Shreds. Sax and harmonica work together to churn out thick melodies that keep asses shaking and mouths smiling.

I always wonder: did I accomplish enough on this visit? Should I have stayed until they kick you out at 2? Should I have flicked my introvert/extrovert switch and spoken to people (girls) I don't know? When will I have the opportunity to go again? It's like being at a high school dance where everything is right and everything is sound and everyone is grown up and they almost know how to be happy, almost.

As a serious realist (which many interpret as "pessimist"), the Cantab gives me hope. To see the musical and sexual and even just observational possibilities amassing is a treat worth the $5 cover charge. The whole atmosphere is like your mother's most loveably flawed dinner recipe: you're not sure whether all the ingredients make sense, but it's home.

NASHVILLE

So Altman did a better job of this. So the $2.50 Paulaner Oktoberfests, Paulaner Dopplebock, two-for-one Yazoo Pales, and Jager bombs were all bad ideas, each in their own right.

Some of post removed for quality control purposes.

Drinking in San Francisco

Also hiking, beaching, and photoing. Soon baseballing. Saw the Holmes Brothers last night. Here we see me being shocked and amazed by Wendell Holmes, 69-year-old bassist for the Holmes Brothers. His sick thumb-pluckin,' slide techniques, and ability to rule the fretboard while singing harmony with brother Sherman (amazingly dextrous strat player) and drummer Popsy Dixon (master of the snare solo and a voice like Smokey Robinson's). Laura Maestrelli, who created this cameraphone image of my head, said I had to put it here, if I'm remembering correctly.

A Laughable, Illogical Trend in Blog Comments (now with new conclusion)

Several thousand people stop at this blog every week. Many come from links on other blogs or because they googled something that I trashed.

People keep reading my ideas, then trying to discredit those ideas because of my age (in reality, the two have no connection). This first instance occurred when I elaborated on the idea of "terror envy" that was described on a Boston Globe blog. My profile then said I was 25, so within four hours of the post, an anonymous commenter wrote that I should "grow up, little man." Never mind the demonstrated validity of my hypothesis that Boston (the idea of the city, not the municipality itself) actually and actively seeks a role to have had in the 9/11 attacks.

Now, people from the cities I visit on my many travels visit the blog. I don't always like their cities, and they don't always like me. For example: It isn't my fault that Calgary tries so hard to be Dallas that it's actually become an even bigger shithole than Dallas. This point is not debatable. But some anonymous person, having seen my year-old post on that vast suburban non-city, and, ostensibly, my Blogger profile, has now commented that I'm "pretty bitter for a 26 year old" and that I should "grow up."

Ideas can be relevant, descriptive, correct, and even inspiring no matter who thinks or articulates them. It doesn't matter whether you believe that or not, since it is the truth. Personally, I also acknowledge that sometimes it is necessary to offend in the process of being critical. And there's no gauge of whether a post was offensive to someone like anonymous commenters telling you to grow up.

I think that blogs about ideas are a lot more interesting than blogs about feelings, so I'll continue trying to write the former (for the most part).