Out late recently, we were talking about the long-defunct (31 Oct 1998–8 Jan 2005, r.i.p.) Echo Lounge in East Atlanta and the concerts we had seen there. Well, we were talking about that cinderblock place where we used to see concerts? and couldn’t remember it’s name at first. “E” something? Finally got there.
Continue readingTag: Concerts
Where was I?
Bikini Kill reunited and is touring. I had Pussy Whipped and Reject All American on CD back in post-college apt in Smyrna, probably some double-CD re-release [ed. yes! it exists], and they were in heavy rotation for a while. A few years back I went to see The Punk Singer at Plaza Theatre and was just blown away by how not just punk Kathleen Hanna is but just how leftist intellectual she is. So the tour came about and although I think they’ll be performing nearby this was a good excuse for an NYC trip. Last one was ~3 years ago for my niece’s b-day. So let’s go.
Continue reading Where was I?Concerts I had been to but have not written about or maybe only in passing
I like to write notes here, for my own reminiscence, about interesting concerts I have been to. However comma some concerts pre-date this web site and I think of them often and so want to let them be counted. Most of the dates I list are from memory and what I can find on the web, so some may be a different venue, and a different year, and wildly inaccurate, but still my experience of the concert is there. Their documentation is only as poor as my memory. [ed. I made a partial reference to some of these in 2009 and 2016].
Elvis Costello at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1989. This was his King of America tour and the first concert I ever went to. I know. KoA was mostly country–his foray into the Nashville song-writing scene–and not my favorite, but a great opportunity to go with my brother and his then-girlfriend who was, unfortunately all I remember, a very likeable goofy blond pot smoker. We were in the upper balcony?
- 21 Aug 2009 – Elvis Costello to Release Live Shows on CD (Steve Hoffman Music Forums) – The chat board post references a show in 1989 that they went to, probably the one I went to also.
Some punk bands at 688 Club. It closed in 1986, so it must have been my first or second year in college. I remember being freaked out having never been to any place like that. Things have changed. That locale recurs as concert-related because it’s an urgent care location and I had to go for a freaky looking spider bite I got at one of the Piedmont Park Music Midtown festivals.
GWAR at Masquerade in Atlanta. First mosh pit and hanging out with metal heads from college and some weird drugs and yeah. GWAR spit “blood” and threw “maggots” (dye and rice) on the crowd so clothes were trashed by the end of the concert. And the pope raping scene was… something else. This is where I fell in love with the group dynamics and camaraderie of the mosh pit. I miss that and know I cannot again be a part of it at concerts as an older (?) person. Recommended, though.
Music Midtown several years when it started in 1996. It was at where the Federal Reserve building is now (just up the street from where we live now), then where the Georgia Aquarium is now, then off Piedmont and Pine (near Central Park where Shaky Knees is now).
Philip Glass solo piano at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in 2000. This was when I worked at a company in the king (or queen?) building and we went with another couple from work. They sat in the front row of a very intimate setting and left in the middle of the performance. I hate that that’s my prominent memory.
- 29 Mar 2000 – Pianist, Composer Philip Glass To Give Solo Piano Concert At Emory April 15 (University Communications)
Robert McDuffie performing Philip Glass’s 2nd Violin Concerto at Spivey Hall at Clayton State in Morrow, GA. This I can’t find anything about but I know I was there. Reduction for violin and piano. The joy of the composition was matched by his enthusiasm and passion for the work.
McCoy Tyner at the Variety Playhouse in 2010. I remember his performance being a mix of blocky, forceful and dissonant jazz with the multi-voiced, polyrhythmic complexity of Prokofiev. It was eye-opening.
- 3 Feb 2010 – Review: Pianist McCoy Tyner brings trio to Variety Playhouse (ArtsATL)
Terry Riley improvising on the Tennessee Theater’s Wurlitzer organ at the second year of the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, 2010. His performance was hypnotic. Solo on a theater organ performing phased, minimalist feats of brilliance. One of a kind. Lisa’s mom, Mickey, owned that city’s events and so got us free tickets to everything. I was the only one that could go. I missed the first year, with Michael Gira and Philip Glass. It was/is(?) an amazing rock/experimental festival, more so being in Knoxville. Weird, huh?
- 28 Mar 2010 – Big Ears Fest Day 2 – Joanna Newsom, Clogs w/ Sufjan, Fred Armisen, Nico Muhly, Terry Riley, more (pics, video, review) (Brooklyn Vegan)
Where was I?
My first visit to Vancouver and Canada proper from Fri 28 Sep to Mon 1 Oct for music shenanigans that changed before departure and became much weirder once the night of the concert arrived but could still be categorized as Shenanigans proper.
The trip was initiated on impulse when we saw that Childish Gambino was closing his last tour there qua Gambino. Tickets purchased, other tickets purchased, and hotel etc. However comma the week before our weekend there CG broke his foot during a performance and so cut the performance short and cut the Vancouver performance much, much shorter as in “canceled”. Make-up concert is the beginning of December IIRC, so we’ll probably be visiting again. Beautiful, fun city so no regrets.
Fri 28 Sep 2018
Drinks and snack at Cat Cora’s before departure, a tradition since some previous trip I don’t remember when, but do remember that said name sounded made up, and so was as good a choice as any for departure. Wine, cocktail, hummus, and chat with a 76-year-old who was visiting family and needed to get back home for work. Travelers are the best.
(Mid-flight, I glance at the video screen of one of the people in the seats in front of me, voyeurism we’re all guilty of, and see that Sen. Flake has made some ruckus in the senate Judiciary hearing. Everything since has gone to shit, but watching that 12th hour pause in the apocalypse was exuberant. (I’m sorry to even remember it now.).)
Stopover at SeaTac and more snacks at the Dungeoness Seafood House. The general environment has changed from South East to become Pacific Rim/Northwest. (Last Seattle trip was for the Peter Gabriel/Sting concert.) West coast, man. Current pulp sci-fi novel was left on the plane as we arrived in Vancouver and Lyfted it over to the Marriott Pinnacle.
Pause at the hotel bar for drinks before going out (over the weekend we had a stopover three times at that bar and the drinks were bad each time, ugh, if the hotel bar is not good I question the hotel). Still, we had a nice confirmation of dinner choices when the bartender recommended the restaurant we had already planned to go to: The Flying Pig in an area called Gastown (how Mad Max!). At Das Fliegende Schwein, waiting for our table, the hostess sent us across the street to the bar at The Lamplighter Public House. There, we chatted with a barfly incredulous at our Presidential Idiot. You and me buddy. Light dinner of shared squid and caprese was perfect.
Sat 29 Sep 2018
Day 2! Cold, light rain, and generally what you expect in the northwest. Sun would be good, but this weather fit the locale nicely.
Locally-sourced late-breakfast/early-brunch at Forage–double fried pork sandwich, bison hash, scones for the next morning–to prepare us for our foraging in the wonderfully betreed Stanley Park. As we entered the park we saw one of many groups of people in various rope-based tree climbing competitions. We were promised coyotes and beavers (apparently nocturnally sleeping in their muddy pile of a beaver dam) but ultimately only saw ducks and squirrels and many dog-walkers. I had not dressed for the day, so in the gift shop planted in the middle of the park I picked up a woolen red plaid jacket with elbow patches (Professor Lumberjack!). Near the shop was a display of 8-or-so totem poles carved in the past decade by local artists, each telling the stories of various origins: the art of canoe-making given to local tribes by a water spirit (IIRC?), wolf god be-knighting a family, etc.
After an hour or so of wanderings around the many isolated park trails, we exited at the water to circle back to civilization and relax at the Cactus Club Cafe. Hot waitresses and a crazy chalkboard filled with inscrutable writings and drawings (ed. Lisa has a pic of the blackboard, need to get it to relive the mania). We continued our day of walking with a walk back through the city and its little neighborhoods: a distinctly asian area with shops and markets, quaint houses, and a Louisiana restaurant called The Holy Crab (see above) that had a crab with a halo as its logo. Eschewing po’ boys and jambalaya, we continued back to the waterfront for local beers and margarita pizza at the TAPshack. Late afternoon, the walk and the time change finally hit us, we had a power nap back at our room at the Pinnacle.
The evening’s major plans were a swanky dinner at the 11th best restaurant in all of Canada: Hawksworth. It’s also on West Georgia Street, so that’s nice. First stop on the way was the bar at the Fairmont hotel. It had great atmosphere and an excellent Manhattan and, even better, a female pianist who during her set did a loose cover of Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”. On to some of Canada’s 11th best food! I had fretted over not having a nice-yet-casual sport jacket to wear but, though very nice inside, there was a healthy mix of styles from somewhat casual to some very trashy club dresses to proper swanky. Dinner was on fleek. We shared appetizer squid (again) in peanut sauce then a sliced ribeye, haricot vert, carrots, cauliflower gratin. Any steak I have in the future should be ashamed of itself because I think I blacked out from deliciousness.
Back to the hotel and an early end at around 11:30 because we are old.
Sun 30 Sep 2018
Rain rain rain.
This was the day of the Childish Gambino that was not to be but it was still filled with hi-jinx. First was a long walk to breakfast at Cacao 70 Eatery where, sadly, it wasn’t that good. You get a delicious little fruit and chocolate appetizer, and the waitress was soooo nice, but what followed the appetizer and the soooo nice waitress was just meh. Next, the dotted line of walking to the Contemporary Art Gallery took us by The Moose Garage which was a must stop dive bar situation. Very Vortex-like so we were right at home. A wall of old blown-out stereo speakers, be-stickered walls, and music from Donnie Darko (along with, oddly, some 80s hair metal). Coincidentally, the bartender grew up in Adalaide (though he says he would never go back) and we chatted about our recent trip to Sydney and Lisa’s frequent Australia work comings and goings.
The Contemporary Art Gallery was much smaller than expected, only two large rooms reminiscent of the The Contemporary Austin, but the featured artist, Dove Allouche, had some stunning pieces that, so complex in their preparation, process, and ultimate expression, I can hardly describe. My best attempt: he sometimes works with old, pre-1900s photographic techniques and, with them, photographs and post-processes molds that grow on paintings, cross-sections of millenia-old stalactites, pearls, and the Paris sewers, using crystals as lenses, crown glass (that I think he created?) as part of the frame, and added hand-drawn tones. The processes’ results were almost overfull with content. The other artist, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, was a tonic to Allouche’s density. She works with short, alliterative phrases that kindof break the words contained. Think Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger who, weirdly, I just saw referenced in BoJack Horseman season 2 episode 4.
Other, enumerated wanderings before the plan B concert (and that concert was… oh, jeez, I can’t even…):
Uva Wine and Cocktail Bar around the corner from the gallery. Our first quality wines of the trip, many local, paired with groovy French pop music. A nice British Columbia pinot noir.
Beat Street Records. We had a choice of I think a dozen record stores in the city, most near Gastown which seemed to be hipsville. The only near-purchase I had, I had unfortunately forgotten the name of the album and realized later that it was one of those that I looked at: Pete Rock and CL Smooth’s All Souled Out. Dammit. However, it is a pain flying back with vinyl so, hooray… question mark?
Stop off at the hotel bar across the street from our hotel, because we thought it looked cool but ultimately wasn’t, for some bad wine but delicious house made chips.
Dinner at Taishoken Ramen. Great choice! And five minutes after we sat down as one of maybe three other patrons, it completely filled up and people started lining up out the door. We’re trend-setters. Neat.
One thing Lisa spotted when researching where to go before before our plan B concert (again, oh jeez…) was the Vancouver International Film Festival. Dozens and dozens of films to choose from, I don’t know how we picked what we picked but it was amazing: a Singapore film by the Singaporean director Siew Hua Yeo called A Land Imagined. Generally it was about Chinese guest/slave laborers that come to Singapore to work construction and disappear under suspicious circumstances. A sleep-deprived detective follows the immigrant underground in an attempt to solve the cases. The unifying theme, in a somewhat magic-realist story, was The Ephemeral. Workers without a home and without respect as human beings, land being created that seems to exist outside of any country, sleeplessness, homelessness, lack of self. 5/5. And as if echoing the film, we saw it in a multistoried mall that, like most malls you can think of, was at its end of days.
That was weird.
— Scott D. Strader (@sstrader) October 1, 2018
We chose DPR Live based on the fact alone that he’s a Korean rapper. Could be weird; could be fun. I expected maybe a club scene letting the beat drop and having a unique DJ behind him with maybe some odd, Southeast Asian sampling. Instead with DPR (which stands for I am not kidding you: Dream Perfect Regime) we got a teenybopper, ahem, chigga. Think of him as a Korean Justin Bieber (who’s a Canadian. huh). Thinking that he was going to start fashionably late and that the opener would run late, and not that the audience would be 14- and 15-year olds out on a school nite, we arrived to see only the last three songs. Mercifully. The look on the bartender’s face when we arrived and grabbed beers was classic. A worse night he could not have had.
Still, interesting is interesting and we definitely got interesting.
Post “concert” was across the street at the Cinema Public House which, it was assured, there would be no DPRats. Cool scene, man. A very bar bar with cute waitresses that hung with the best snark I could muster and the soundtrack was old school hip hop that was cool but made me more angry at my missed opportunity with the Pete Rock and the CL Smooth and the fact that they were All Souled Out. Still, good bar, yo. Post hip hop was DJ High Toones with some good cuts. And throughout were Temples of Dooms on like seven or eight TVs. Consistency is a virtue.
The end.
Mon 1 Oct 2018
But not.
Flight home but not too early and the reverse layover at SeaTac landed us in The Africa Lounge for drinks and snacks and talks with bar neighbors I don’t specifically remember. The vacation end was not all depressing like most vacation ends are and I credit Canada.
Thanks, Canada!
Where was I?
Sydney Australia from Tue 24 Jul to Tue 31 Jul. Kindof. Flight was late Tuesday and I arrived Thursday morning. Flight back was early afternoon Tuesday and we returned Tuesday night at around 7 PM. wat? It wasn’t too too weird though. The 4 and 14 hour flights via Los Angeles were much more manageable than those we took when we went to Thailand way back in 2011, and I had absolutely no jet lag.
Thu 26 Jul 2018
Lisa was in for work two weeks prior, so I had most of a day for myself pining over lost luggage, waiting for our room to become available at the Shangri-La Hotel in The Rocks neighborhood, and assaulting a docent at the Museum of Contemporary Art with my 20+ hour flight stink. She was actually very good conversation, and I got to banter with her about the nuances of nationalism in aboriginal-influenced Australian art. It was also neat seeing so many young school kids marching in line and sitting in semi-circles to join in art critique with another docent. Yay art!
This solo museum visit at the beginning of vacation repeats the one I did in Prague while waiting for Lisa and the girls to arrive from München. And correcting a mistake I’d made in that and many other museums, I took notes and pictures of most of the pieces. (Well, I thought I had taken pictures. I am now enraged that most of the art photos I took are missing from my Google Photos album. Around 10 or so are there but missing are some gems.)
Here are short notes I took and some images but not all because Google is a bitch:
Kevin Gilbert 1960s linotype made in prison Active sky, animals the same components as people
Daniel Boyd 2000s Black and White layers
Mabel Juli 2000s Black and White simple abstractions, crescent
Imants Tillers 1980s landscape on panels
Helen Johnson 2000s Huge tapestries with part flat on the ground, hidden image in the back (so much analysis with the docent, great regret over missing images)
Brian Blanchflower 1980s, messy pointillism on rough canvas
Timothy Cook, 2000s, cleaner pointillism, abstract expression, brush work, oval depth infinity
James Angus, three bicycles in one, shifted across space
Callum Morton, storefront cave vortex, flat depth, Josef Albers where depth is chromatic intensity?
Emma White, clay outlet and power strip (Untitled (useless, powerful) I, 2008)
Moya McKenna, classic Still life with slight weirdness, intense primaries to blacks, raw blacks too flat
Ricky Swallow, 2000s, colored balloons with growths, light is heavy, barnacles static, minimalist sculpture like in the Lisbon Museu Colecao Berardo modern art museum? (Caravan, 2008)
Josette Urso, 2000s, pointillism again, slightly varied by accident, ancient script, scar tattoos
Nicole Foreshew, 2000s, walking sticks with varied crystals on the top
Gordon Bennett, 2000s, diamond shape, base color painted over, red ochre overlays yellow ochre, split in two different than if they weren’t [ed. I don’t remember what I meant here], Frank Stella, painting as painting
Ian Burn, 1960s, blue reflective, you are the subject, almost no imperfections must have been difficult, opposite of abstract expressionism
Robert MacPherson, 1970s, three slides become one, last is textural, the black looks fuzzy
Mikala Dwyer, 1990s, tower of plates, more minimalism (balloons) [ed. again, very much the minimalist sculptures we saw in Lisbon], so much tension
Sally Smart, 1990s, red, pastiche, disassemble
OK, so enough of the gallery tour. Afterwards, still in 20+ hour flight clothes, I hung in the museum/waterfont area and enjoyed the sun and birds, then did a city walkabout to search for replacement clothes. No luck. Snacks of sausage and wine at the Angel Hotel (surprisingly inexpensive!) then to get a cocktail at Grain in the Four Seasons because reasons. So many suits during happy hour. And yes still in stink-wear so they were mad impressed (closing sarcasm tag without opening tag).
Eventually joined with Lisa and the boss late night and hung at our hotel’s top floor bar piling up a bar tab that and-I-am-not-joking rivaled a full weekend’s sassiness. Vacation Money is Fake Money so it doesn’t matter!
Fri 27 Jul 2018
We are in the Central Business District: CBD. The goal of the day is a walk from Spit to Manly Wharf.
The Walrus touts itself as gourmet breakfast, but it was just very good breakfast food so no need for too much touting. The food touts for itself and the breakfast sandwiches are <makes smacking sound with fingers to lips>. TOUT! And it became the base of energy for us to do some heavy touristing. Walk to Hyde Park where, much like the crazy grackles we were introduced to in Austin back in 2017, we saw some Australian-specific crazy birds: the noble Australian White Ibis. Or, as it is better known: “bin chicken” or “trash turkey”. They’re apparently the pigeons of Australia but look so odd to our eyes that one man’s trash etc.
Across from the park is St. Mary’s Cathedral. Fun facts which I kinda remember: started in around 1820, burned down and rebuilt, burned/broken remnants on display, large murals representing the 14 stations of the cross (of all my art history, we still had to look up how many stations there were), constant renovations as the Australian sandstone breaks down. Beautiful church that I, oddly, would not think of Australia as having such a thing.
On to Spit!
(We took public transportation which is easy however we are not so skilled, living with a transportation system that goes nowhere, dealing with one that goes errwhere. OK, that’s unfair to Marta. We really just bonked and missed our stop and had to backtrack to arrive at the destination we had seen fly by us 20 minutes prior.)
The tour wonks recommend Manly-to-Spit, but Lisa wisely chose the reverse so that we would end at civilization and bars. After a 10k walk we would earn it. The trail went through Sydney Harbour National Park and was a nice nature walk yet, varying throughout, came close to neighborhoods and family parks. It still gave us steep ups-and-downs, cliffside views, beach walks, peaceful forest isolation. Having abandoned jogging for a while, it was a trail that made me jealous when the joggers would pass us. And yet: we still earned that breakfast sandwich. I guess we earned the drinks at the end too? A lot of earning going on and said earnings came with some people-watching on the patio at Hugo’s.
We get back to CBD and stop for beers at Harts Pub near the hotel. It looked to be converted from an old house into a neighborhood hang out and we did same while watching Australian football. Holy shit that looks rough! Americans are wimps. Back at the hotel we realized that a 10k walk plus beer plus possibly the time change catching up to me will result in a nap until 11 PM. Up and find the only place open with food that wasn’t a late night bar filled with party drunks or a guitar player belting out some 70s pop song I can’t remember but know we did not want to hear: Grain! My first night cocktail joint supplied us with decent bar pizza. Sleep again by 2 or 3 AM.
Sat 28 Jul 2018
Next day’s adventure started and ended with the Sydney Opera House for a performance of Aida. We did the walkin’ around thing (that’s what they call it in Australia, right?) and started a few blocks away at the opera house. Our hotel location was perfect.
I did something stupid and hesitated on purchasing tickets. Well, I almost did something stupid. Normally, I consider money during vacations to be basically play money (see above) and something that affects-me-not. I don’t know why but I felt beset when deciding whether we should get tickets to Aida. Old age? Nah, that can’t be it. So anyway sensibility prevailed and we got the tickets plus a sweet sweet coffee mug for fond, caffeinated memories. Always remember this if you waver: DON’T. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Pre-opera-pre-game was a trip to Watson’s Bay via ferry. There, we got our seafood on on the balcony at Doyle’s (133-years-old! “we opened Australia’s first seafood restaurant in 1885”) and strolled the beautiful Gap Bluff.
Return trip and walk (vacations are nothing if not walking) to the stylish Bangaroo neighborhood. So many cool buildings! And possibly too cool for us. Drinks and people watchin’ at the Bangaroo House Bar.
Home, prepare for the opera–for which I was wardrobely unprepared and had to purchase some khakis at a discount shop which fit well but look somewhat shabby (but the price was right, again I fretted over cost?)–and drinks at the open-air opera bar beforehand. I had never seen Aida before and this introduction had a sense of the modern and classic. The stage contained a forest full of full-height LCD screens depicting various Egypt-influenced, flowing computer graphics. The wardrobe was historic opera and waaaaay over-the-top opulent. Perfect modern introduction to an opera classic. (Throughout the trip, I tried and failed to get a pic of one of the stylish Aida banners displayed across the city. Regerts.)
Difficult search for dinner afterwards but we finally found Restaurant Hubert–stylish, fin de siècle, and late night. Portobello and au poivre, fried gruyere, drinks. However, after an exhausting day we shamefully left the rarity of a cool late-nite joint and only stayed till 12:30. Ollllld people.
Sun 29 Jul 2018
Ahh, the Blue Mountains and their Aussie naturalness without containing deadly fish or animals or bugs or plants. Day trip with a small group and with our Fearless Leader Tom out of Sydney–whose metropolitan area is ridiculously large–west and north and increasing a bit in elevation. They are very much like north GA mountains of similar name. Tom was great and greatly gregarious there and back, but it took all my self-control not to correct his explanation of the blue-ness of the mountains not as eucalyptus-derived but actually an example of the optics of atmospheric perspective (art degree, yo). Still, he bequeathed us with his secret for a good marinade: Coke and soy sauce.
Places visited in the nearby town of [ed. find the town we visited] were: Lyrebird, Conservation Hut Cafe, Leura Cellars (where Lisa scored a bottle of Bloody Shiraz gin from Four Pillars), and the Featherdale Wildlife Park. So many animals at the park! Kangaroos… Tasmanian devils… birds of many types… dingos!! And, of course, trash turkeys errwere.
Drive and boat back to the City of Sydney for drinks at The Push where a singer-songwriter played Tracy Chapman with Britney Spears lyrics (re: our New Years par-tay with her in Vegas) threaded in. Chill. Off to Pony in our hood, The Rocks, for some kangaroo carpaccio and cod dinner. Then we somehow found a Sydney’s version of a classic Irish pub (?) downstairs at a low-ceilinged bar called The Doss House. Australian folk music with guitar+flute(?)+singers standing around a table and just folk-riffing. I spotted the larger-than-life owner with the musicians and as we were leaving he wished us well. Neat!
Mon 30 Jul 2018
Lastdayquicknow!
Queen Victoria Building and a French coffee shop where Lisa got The World’s Largest Croissant and we puzzled over a clock with ships circling it.
The Sydney Tower Eye observation deck to be the masters of all we surveyed and get a sense of just what an awesome city Sydney is.
The Mojo Record Bar (bar closed, record shoppe open) to resist purchasing the rare first Chicano Batman album (Lisa) and the GitS soundtrack (me).
Bar Luca for really delicious burgers before our bridge walk.
Bridge. Mother. Fucking. Climb. I have no pictures but it was impressive. Here’s the deal: start at the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, hook up to safety cables, walk up, uP, UP the suspended arch, and hang out for dusk. View! Starting the walk on the beams over the harbour I gots the nerves, but then when we came down from a height 2x that of the Sydney Opera House the original, lower height felt… mundane. Not unappreciative as such, but the gots-ing of nerves were put into perspective.
And, finally, the NOLA Smokehouse and Bar. How in the hell did Lisa find a Louisiana bar in Sydney? Whatever. Perfect food and perfect atmosphere and they suffered us as the late hangers about but there was way too much good food for the night before our flight back.
