No need to be anywhere before noon, so I may have actually gotten a full eight hours. It’s usually pretty difficult to get to sleep after spending 12+ hours running all over Raleigh & watching bands. The brain has to process, and/or get over its fight-or-flight reaction.

Saturday started off in the cool darkness of Neptune’s, for a day party dubbed The Metal Lunchbox, thrown by Grayson & Tina Haver Currin. The lunches on offer were comprised entirely of things — ginger/cayenne juice, chocolate, pimento cheese sandwiches — that I’m unable to digest, but I’d had a late breakfast, and a PBR & a huge glass of water proved more than sufficient.

The Hem of His Garment — the loose Chapel Hill collective of deep seekers of drone — kicked things off in a comparatively svelte (but still plenty loud) 4-person configuration. I’ve seen them with more than a dozen performers arranged in a semicircle, all hunched over, guitar headstocks shoved up against amps, backs to the room and each other. Given that Neptune’s only holds like 47 people, 4 people were more than sufficient, though, I reckon.

My only quibble with their set was that they seemed largely to be just using their amps & not taking advantage of the bigass subwoofers that Neptune’s had brought in for the duration of the weekend. My chest vibrated, but my innermost innards never really started to throb.

Downtime between sets consisted of going upstairs to street level and marveling at how pleasant the weather was.

MAKE were up next, with a tight rundown of the central 4-song cycle from their latest album, The Golden Veil. Years ago I decided to call them “blackened space metal” and that still seems to be a reasonable description — huge drums, instrumentation that manages to be delicate & melodic while still gigantic, the duelling screeches of Spencer & Scott. They’re always fun to watch, and nowadays, with heavy hitter Luke Herbst behind the kit, they seem like they’re being propelled headlong forward by forces much bigger than themselves.

By the time MAKE were finished, I actually needed solid food. Garland had been running a special Hopscotch menu at their sidewalk window all weekend long, but I hadn’t had any of it yet. This turned out to have been yet another mistake on my part — the fried spring rolls, cut into chunks & served with fresh herbs & little leaves of butter lettuce to wrap them in, were the single best thing I ate all weekend. +100, would ravenously consume again.

I haven’t been a huge Vattnet Viskar fan in the past, so I went upstairs to Kings & caught most of a set by Flesh Wounds, who completely blew me away, despite the fact that I’ve seen them at least a dozen times over the past few years. Lately they’ve been moonlighting as Mac McCaughan’s backing band (and frequently opening for themselves as Flesh Wounds on tour as well), and maybe that’s partly to credit for the boost in their tightness without any decrease in their ferocity. Whatever the cause, they seem to have figured out how to channel all of their previously chaotic energy into a focused beam of destruction.

I’m writing this a week later, so things are starting to get blurry. In brief: Saw the last 1/3 of Vattnet’s set & was actually much more into it than I had been the previous two times. I’m still inexplicably uneasy about black metal bands with short haircuts, though.

Went upstairs & saw PIPE’s first song. Ron was forgetting all the words to a song they’ve been playing for 20+ years, so I decided it was skippable & went back downstairs. Watched some of Locrian. Still unable to accept heavy doses of synth in my metal. I know it’s a personal failing, but I own it.

Upstairs, Midnight Plus One were ripping through yet another amazing set, which also yielded the best photo I took all festival:

After Locrian, improviser in residence Greg Fox played a solo set at Neptune’s using only a snare & some kind of midi trigger setup that translated minor variations in tone from the drumhead into discrete musical notes. It was kind of interesting, but kind of limited — Greg said it was a prototype that his friend had been working on, and that he’d only just gotten to play with it. I look forward to hearing what it’s like once he’s mastered it.

As it was getting towards 5:30 I headed down to Slim’s to see if I could catch Wing Dam at a day party. Turns out the whole day party was off schedule because they had decided not to risk having a second stage outside. Happy accident, then, that I got to see some of Charming Youngsters, who apparently formed while they were in school in Greenville, NC, and have lately moved to Durham. They were really good — not breaking any amazing new ground, but making catchy, somewhat twangy indie-rock. I made a note to see them again.

Wing Dam finally set up & started playing, but something was off — the monitors, the PA, the state of the evening — so they weren’t providing the same buzz they had the last two times I saw them. This being Hopscotch, it didn’t take too long for me to decide to wander on.

My friend K & I wandered down to Remedy for dinner, Fox for drinks, and reemerged at street level in time to violate my oath against City Plaza shows & check out a few songs by X. They were better than the last time I saw them, nearly a decade ago, at Cat’s Cradle. That time they’d just started touring with Billy Zoom again after a bit of a hiatus, and they had clearly practiced their asses off. All of the spontaneity was gone.

This time around, due to the sad circumstance of Billy’s cancer returning, they’d been out on the road for just 2-3 weeks with a fill-in guitarist, who was loose & raucous & excellent & who brought back just the right amount of shambling chaos to the proceedings.

I still only stayed for a couple of songs. Started walking when they started playing “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene,” which is every bit as rapey as it always was, and is a lot less defensible the older we all get (not that it was ever defensible, but hopefully our sensibilities have evolved). They really ought to retire it, but they won’t, if for no other reason than that Exene is a stubborn motherfucker. I interviewed her once on the phone. It didn’t go well. It was almost entirely my fault (I was a kid) but yeah.

Back in clubland for the final night of the festival. First stop was The Hive to catch Moenda, who include some ex-Calabi Yau folks. They, more than anyone else in North Carolina (and probably the world), sound like they frequently dip from the same well as Cantwell Gomez & Jordan. When I ran into Dave Cantwell later in the evening I learned that he had never seen nor heard Moenda. Pretty sure the converse isn’t the case.

It was early still, meaning it was still physically possible to get into Slim’s and work yr way to the front, so I stopped in to see Bandages. They were fast & loud & tight, like Motorhead fronted by a deranged ranty person. Scott Williams was playing a new-ish super-metal Flying V with extra metal curlicues & pointy bits. It had a Floyd Rose tremolo rig (Scott’s first, as I later verified on FB) and Scott was wailing away on it, to great effect.

Go see them, next time you have a chance.

My #1 top choice for Hopscotch was Ian William Craig — plus by now my stamina was starting to wane & I could really use a chair — so after Bandages I walked across town to the AJ Fletcher Opera Theater & settled in.

Canadian Ian William Craig is a Serious Musician — instrument builder, trained opera singer — and this was his US debut. For his Hopscotch set he had 4-5 cassette recorders — one 4-track and several bog-standard mono portables like we all had in the 70s. From where I was sitting I couldn’t quite figure out his process, but he seemed to be using loop cassettes (answering machines used to use them) and creating loops on the fly by singing into a mic that he routed to one or more of the cassette recorders. Mostly wordless vocal phrases.

Some of the tapes had noises on them already, I guess — plus it sounded like they were gradually losing oxide & disintegrating. It was basically like IWC was creating the Disintegration Loops on the fly with nothing but some cassette recorders and his voice.

It was stunning, and was far & away the best set I saw all weekend.

Once he was done I took the weirdly long walk around to the back of the building to the Kennedy Theatre, and caught the last few songs from Asheville’s Sarah Louise. She plays 12-string acoustic guitar, largely in tunings of her own devising. Her set was mesmerizing & soothing, and I liked it so much I bought her latest release, Field Guide, on Bandcamp while I was watching it.

After that one-two punch I wasn’t sure that I needed to hear any more, but it wasn’t even 11:30 yet, so I wandered back over towards the populated side of town & stuck my head in to the Lincoln Theatre for Chelsea Wolfe, who came on amid a cloud of fake smoke & an endless bassy rumble. I was reminded of all the things I didn’t particularly like about the last time I saw her — the awkward theatricality, the weird mix, the lack of chemistry onstage — so after a song or two I bolted.

Everyone on Twitter said that every venue had lines out front, so I figured I’d head over to the Hive to ensure that I could catch some of Zs. No line there, and I could even halfway see the stage, where Cloud Becomes Your Hand were still flailing through their tediously zany set.

Once they were done & Zs started to set up, there was apparently some issue with the drumkit, or lack thereof, so it was closer to 1:00 than midnight by the time they started. And although I love Greg Fox’s drumming, and weird-ass skronky stuff in general, I was only able to hang on for maybe 20 minutes before deciding I’d had enough Hopscotch for one year.

Final tally: Saw at least 5 minutes of 38 different bands. Drank a lot. Walked a lot. Had a great time. Will probably go again next year, despite my cynicism.

No need to be anywhere before noon, so I may have actually gotten a full eight hours. It’s usually pretty difficult to get to sleep after spending 12+ hours running...

Got in at 12:40 or so; got up at 8:00 or thereabouts. Day parties are fun, but they’re also a surprising amount of work. Next time you’re at any venue to see any sort of live musical entertainment, take a moment to ponder how many additional hours of work everyone involved put in so that you could stand around & drink beer and watch a band for 45 minutes.

For several years we partnered with our friend Cory Rayborn & his label Three Lobed on the day parties, but this year Cory is more focused on his label’s 15th anniversary, including a commemorative 5-LP box set. Side note: some of the recordings in the box set were made at previous day parties. Full circle!

So: This year we booked the thing with a little bit of help from WXYC and WKNC. I felt like it was a good idea to kind of carry on the tradition of booking weird one-off collaborations & just general crazy nonsense, so I emailed a bunch of people & asked them to find other people to collaborate with. It worked pretty well, and that part made up about half of the final lineup:

This year we upped the ante by having bands upstairs at Kings *and* downstairs at Neptune’s, which at least partly explains why my phone tells me I walked up/down 36 flights of stairs on Friday.

We simulcast the whole thing (or as much of it as we could, given the occasional overlap between bands upstairs & downstairs, despite our best efforts to stagger) & it was also recorded by our friends at NYCTaper.com, so look for it there once Jonas & Erik have had a chance to catch up on their sleep.

I wish I could tell you more about the 8 different artists & their sets. They were all very nice people & I enjoyed meeting them. I was thrilled at what I heard, and I look forward to eventually hearing the stuff I missed. Honestly, it’s all a huge bleary blur to me right now.

I didn’t manage to eat while the day party was going on, so after the last bit of gear was loaded back out, I stumbled next door to Capital Club 16 and had my traditional celebratory post-day-party dinner of two Sir Walter Raleigh cocktails & a schnitzel sandwich.

Because I really do hate seeing bands at City Plaza, and/or I’m an asshole, I didn’t go to City Plaza. I did spend a few minutes ruminating about having seen TV on the Radio at a tiny Greensboro record store called Gate City Noise in 2003. You could tell they were going somewhere, in part because they had a distinctive sound & some great songs, and in part because there were all these weird industry-looking people in the audience.

So instead I took my time at dinner, and then wandered around downtown until I found Ruby Deluxe, the new bar opened by Van Alston & Timothy Lemuel. Of course Van was there, sitting at the end of the bar, so we sat & shot the shit about how much downtown Raleigh has changed since I moved away in 1996. A lot. It has changed a lot.

Then it was time to racewalk over to Deep South: The Bar to see Naked Naps, a Raleigh band whom I have recently fallen in love with, but had never seen live, because I am an idiot. They were so great. Gtr + drums + voice, just the right mix of aw-shucks DIYness and straight shredding. I highly recommend their album OK, Bye.

I liked ’em so much I did that rarest of Hopscotch things, stayed until the end of their last song. Then, still clinging to the notion that I needed to see a bunch of metal this year (as has been the case most previous years), I headed to the Pour House to see the Raleigh technical death metal band Escher.

Escher went through some struggles last year & you can read all about them in Bryan Reed’s excellent profile in the Indy. Friday night they were tight & confident, although singer James Broadhead still had to rest on a stool periodically, ongoing fallout from the car wreck detailed in Bryan’s article.

One reason I really dig Escher’s recent EP, The Ground is Missing, is the incongruous but awesome sax that appears on two tracks. Somewhat weirdly, although they don’t have a sax player (at least not currently), they still play those songs with the funny jazz-chord breakdowns where the sax parts should be happening. That just served to emphasize how much I wished they actually had a sax player. I’m sure Crowmeat Bob would be up for sitting in with them now & then.

In any case, though I stayed for their entire set, I wound up feeling antsy, and wandered off about two songs into Wizard Rifle.

The 15-20 minute gap I had before Zeena Parkins was due to start at Fletcher was filled perfectly by a stop at the Pie Pushers trailer next to the Lincoln. As a Durhamite, it seems so bizarre for there to be so many people out on the streets at night, milling about, and to see so few food trucks. Maybe that’s why Raleigh [apparently] has more of a public vomiting problem late at night on the weekends? All the restaurants close & the only thing left to pad out the booze is a hot dog from one of a handful of carts?

Damn convenient to have the best pepperoni slice in Durham right there at my fingertips, though.

Zeena Parkins is, I guess, the reigning champ of avant-garde harp, and for the first half of her set she gave what amounted to a master class in nontraditional harp techniques. Which was kind of the problem — from where I sat, it felt less like coherent musical work(s), and more like a checklist of techniques that she moved through, in linear fashion. Here I repeatedly pluck, palm mute, and rap on the body of the harp. Now I pull felt through half the strings & attach alligator clips to the other half.

Plus she had a snare next to the harp with the snares engaged, and they buzzed like crazy when she hit certain notes. I can only assume this was intentional, but it was also incredibly irritating.

I was more excited by the second half of her set, which she performed on an electric harp/zither thing of her own devising. It was only around 1/3 the size of a regular harp, with maybe 20-30 strings, a half-dozen pickups, and, fascinatingly, a guitar whammy bar on the lowest four strings. She had it run through delay & sample pedals, and was able to generate all kinds of insane noises & overtones. I was too tired to move anyway, but throughout the second half of her set I was much more interested in staying.

I had already deviated so far from my “plan” that I figured I’d wander around the corner to catch the second half of Jenks Miller’s set with his band Rose Cross NC. Never a bad decision. Jenks seems to have put his “metal” band Horseback on hold — Mount Moriah have gotten pretty busy, plus Jenks & Elysse got married over the summer — but a lot of the ideas that were in evidence on the last Horseback album, Piedmont Apocrypha, have carried through into his work with Rose Cross NC: a mix of drones, deliberately paced grooves, and extended improv sections.

The people seemed into it, too. It’s never entirely clear to me whether people are able to make the connection between bands & the names of the people in them, so I wondered how many people went into the show knowing what they were going to get, or thinking they knew what they were going to get, and how those expectations colored their impressions of the results.

By this time it was midnight, or a little bit after. I had highlighted Natalie Prass on my schedule, in part because I liked the snippets I had heard, and in part because I continue to be mildly intrigued by Matthew E White & his Richmond-based Spacebomb studio/label/house band. I’m never 100% sold on his white-suited soul revivalism, but his earlier jazz band Fight the Big Bull were pretty undeniably great, and there’s a thread of weirdness running through a lot of what he does.

Natalie’s new album is on Spacebomb, and her backing band appeared to be folks from the Spacebomb house band — guitars, keys, drums, horns. I walked in after they had started, and realized with a bit of a shudder that they were kinda vamping their way through a cover of “The Sounds of Silence” that was *really* not working for me. Too much 70s schmaltz, not enough soul. At the start of her next song, her voice seemed off, and I wondered whether she was having trouble hearing herself.

This being Hopscotch, rather than stick around & wait, I bolted, rambling around the edge of downtown to catch the last half of NYC band Big Ups, playing to around 18 people at Deep South: The Bar, aka the Hopscotch venue of band death. It’s not that it’s a terrible venue — I mean, it is, primarily due to the fact that their primary decorative motif is the worst possible selection of classic rock lyric quotes that have been lovingly painted on the walls by their regulars.

But it’s lousy for Hopscotch bands because it’s not particularly close to any of the other venues, and in the heat of the moment, it’s all too easy to look at your schedule, identify one band a block away, another band 7 blocks away at Deep South, and go for the closer one.

That’s actually one reason why I make a point of heading over there a few times during the festival: the bands can use the support, sure, but I’m also usually sick of big crowds & it’s great to be able to walk in & get reasonably close without pushing past 150 other people.

Plus for whatever reason, Hopscotch consistently puts bands I like over there. So it was with Big Ups, who make snarly snappy skronky gtr/bass/drums/vox indie/postpunk with lots of sharp corners and funny faces from the singer. They were exactly what I needed to top up my batteries enough to get me all the way back out I-40 to Durham to bed.

(This meant foregoing Old Man Gloom and Pile, both of whom I’d very much wanted to see, and both of whom I’m sure were absolutely amazing, but I’d been awake since 8:00 a.m, and had walked 8 miles & climbed 36 flights of stairs. Half the battle of Hopscotch is knowing when to retreat & live to fight another day.)

Got in at 12:40 or so; got up at 8:00 or thereabouts. Day parties are fun, but they’re also a surprising amount of work. Next time you’re at any venue...

As I mentioned earlier, this week marked my 20th anniversary at WXDU. I was too preoccupied (and subsequently exhausted) by Hopscotch to make any big plans, and I don’t know that I would have anyway. I’m there every week, more or less, so if I want to do a big pre-planned show I can do it anytime.

Instead I just pulled a bunch of records that I really like, and played some of my favorite songs from them. It was a lot of fun, which is pretty awesome when you consider that I’ve been doing more or less that same thing every week for the past 20 years.

Here’s a recording of the show:

And here’s a listing of what was played.

I do a lot of other things at WXDU besides DJing, but I’ve never gone a semester without doing a show. It doesn’t get old, because there’s always new music arriving in the mail, every week, forever and ever. (Although I’ll admit that the vast majority of what I played this week wasn’t brand new — it felt logical & right to reach back across the past 20+ years.)

I’m always surprised when I talk to someone I know & they mention having listened to my show. It probably seems weird from the outside, but I’ve been in radio for nearly 30 years and I have always assumed that nobody was listening, while at the same time always working hard to make things as entertaining & educational as possible for anyone who happened to stumble past. My invisible nameless friends. Thank you.

As I mentioned earlier, this week marked my 20th anniversary at WXDU. I was too preoccupied (and subsequently exhausted) by Hopscotch to make any big plans, and I don’t know...

I’m standing at the Pinhook listening to the 2nd dude singer-songwriter of a 5-band bill. The other three aren’t dude singer-songwriters, at least.

So it’s September. It was like 93 degrees today & is supposed to be 95 tomorrow. I feel like 23 years ago, when I moved here, things weren’t as hot. If only there were some way to keep track of that stuff.

Work is in that brief respite between students leaving and interviews starting back up again. I’ve taken advantage of the lull to migrate to a new laptop, one that is absurdly thin and ridiculously lightweight and I’m still not sold on the whole concept, primarily because I almost never do anything but schlep it from home to car to work to car to home, and it has only two USB ports and no CD drive.

I wish I has a pithy opinion to share about US or world politics, but mostly it all seems like it’s falling apart, everywhere. I’m looking forward to the 2016 elections primarily because things seem broken enough for something really interesting to happen.

I think more about what other country I would move to than what we could possibly do to fix this one. Although John Paul Stevens laid it all out in his book Six Amendments. If only everyone would read it & agree.

We’ve been using the handy Metacritic lists of movies to shape our home movie watching. It has been kind of a mixed bag. ’71 was excellent. A Strange Little Cat was somewhat less so. I wish I could say I was ready for the return of the Serious Movies of Autumn, but honestly they’re just as hit and miss as the supposedly dumb summer stuff. So we’ll take it a week at a time, as always.

OK, the singer-songwriter is done. Back to the parade.

I’m standing at the Pinhook listening to the 2nd dude singer-songwriter of a 5-band bill. The other three aren’t dude singer-songwriters, at least. So it’s September. It was like 93...

As in previous years, here is a Google Calendar with all of the Hopscotch shows on it — day parties and nighttime shows. Links:

XML
iCal
HTML

To add this to your Google Calendar, click on the boxed arrow to the right of “Other Calendars” (in the left column), and click “Add by URL,” then input this URL:

https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/rossgrady.org_9ufvqhq7k39kli38t76dgp4bds%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

 

As in previous years, here is a Google Calendar with all of the Hopscotch shows on it — day parties and nighttime shows. Links: XML iCal HTML To add this...

Let’s blame this extended gap on my Neko Atsume obsession.

 

Sunday the 12th we watched the slight, but thoroughly enjoyable documentary about Carroll Spinney, the man who has played Big Bird for the entirety of the character’s existence. He has an understudy now who apparently works ~25% of the gigs, I guess. Poor guy has been the understudy for like 15 years, too. Yet he genuinely didn’t seem to be seething with hatred for Spinney, probably because Spinney is a genuinely nice guy, I guess.

Work is busy busy, so most nights I get home & eat & have to catch up on all the nerding out I might otherwise have snuck in during the day. This week, after finishing that Charlie Stross novel, I couldn’t figure out what the next logical & compelling read was going to be for me, until I remembered that I had some comic books sitting on my hard drive from the last Humble Bundle I bought.

I have dabbled in comics off & on in the past, typically almost entirely of the indie/underground variety. My bookshelves contain all the usual suspects: Watchmen, Maus, a bunch of Drawn & Quarterly & Fantagraphics stuff. But it’s only recently, with the introduction of a full-size tablet into the house, that I’ve delved into the world of reading comics issue by issue, on a weekly/monthly basis.

So anyway, I had the complete run of Locke and Key just sitting around & I hadn’t even started reading it yet. That is emphatically no longer the case.

The plot is kind of hard to explain — it involves three kids, a spooky house that has been in the family for generations, a whole bunch of supernatural keys, demonic possession, and high school. The artwork by Gabriel Rodriguez hits what is for me a sweet spot — thick lines, in a clearly “comic book” style, but rich & detailed backgrounds & color work. And the scripts — by suspense novelist Joe Hill — are complex without being convoluted.

It’s good. Check it out.

Wednesday we watched the Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. The thing about this movie that I had to keep reminding myself is that it’s not really “about” metal, or is at any rate much less about metal than the first one was about punk. The first one captured many of the bright lights of the LA punk scene in its prime, but Decline II hits the LA glam metal scene after it has already begun to be eclipsed, on the mainstream side by Guns N Roses (who don’t appear in the movie, but who sit in with Alice Cooper to cover “Under My Wheels under the closing credits), and on the True Metal side by Metallica, Slayer, and all their ever-more-extreme compatriots.

The only thrash band who appear in the movie are Megadeth — was it because Dave Mustaine’s hair was poofy enough? Otherwise, there are the old pros (Kiss, Alice Cooper, Ozzy), the actual glam successes (Poison, mostly) and the also-rans (and never-really-starteds).

The point is that it’s not a documentary about “metal” — it’s a documentary about fame: what it means to the people who have it, and what it means to the people who don’t have it but desperately wish that they did. In that, it succeeds wildly, which is to say it’s equal measures hilarious and profoundly depressing.

Thursday I came down with a wicked sore throat, which lasted through the weekend & into Monday. By Sunday morning I was sufficiently worried about strep that I hauled myself over to the CVS on Hillsborough Rd to visit their Minute Clinic.

I didn’t have strep. It was fascinating. The Physician’s Assistant who was singlehandedly running the place was a diminutive self-professed germophobe (as would I be, if I had to spend an average of 30 minutes per patient locked up in a windowless room half the size of my bedroom at home). She took the shorthand version of my medical history, did all the data entry, checked my vitals, swabbed me for strep, interpreted the test results, ran my insurance info, asked me what I do for exercise & gave a strong positive recommendation to a $30 hand or foot pedal contraption from Wal*Mart.

Her bedside manner tended slightly to the neurotic, but she was smart, efficient, and genuinely concerned. It was clear that she’s well aware that the majority of her patients, unlike me, likely don’t have primary care physicians & probably have scattershot & uncoordinated interactions with the health care industry. She did her best to play all of those roles, and I salute her.

Sunday night we watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, which I had never seen. It absolutely lives up to its reputation for rip-snorting seafaring action. Even if you don’t believe you crave rip-snorting seafaring action, you more than likely actually do, and just don’t realize it, due in large part to the dearth of such in most movies made after the 1930s. It’s great. Rent it.

In other news, since I’m going to the Afropunk Fest in Atlanta in October, I spent some time putting together a YouTube Playlist of all the artists.

Let’s blame this extended gap on my Neko Atsume obsession.   Sunday the 12th we watched the slight, but thoroughly enjoyable documentary about Carroll Spinney, the man who has played...

Monday night I went to see Phil Cook & his new band the Guitarheels, along with some special guests, at Duke Gardens, the first night of a three-night stand, culminating in a play-through of Phil’s upcoming solo album.

To be perfectly honest, I was really only there to see Frazey Ford, the Canadian singer/songwriter whose 2014 album, Indian Ocean, is one of my faves of 2015.

I was feeling guilty about having completely missed Indian Ocean when it came out last fall, but subsequent conversations with friends, as well as a visual survey of the crowd at Monday’s show, have led me to believe that nearly *everyone* missed it.

For the folks at Monday’s show, that is emphatically no longer the case. The album was recorded in Memphis with the Hodges brothers, who were mainstays of the Hi Records house band, aka Al Green’s backing band for his classic 70s albums. It’s deep and funky and soulful and mournful and angry & joyous.

At Duke Gardens, those awfully big shoes were filled admirably by Phil & his Guitarheels, especially James Wallace on keys. Frazey sang a half-dozen songs with the band, several of them from Indian Ocean, and judging from the response (& what I saw at the merch table when I was leaving), I’m guessing she flew home to Vancouver without any leftover copies of the album.

Monday was also the pub date for Mark Maron’s WTF podcast interview with President Obama. It’s great. Go listen to it. They touch on policy here & there — particularly racism & gun control in the wake of the Charleston terrorist attack — but the primary focus is on Obama the man: his history, his self-image, how he sees the world, how he is able to function as a father & a human & a black man & also as the President of the United States. It’s a deep & insightful & funny conversation.

Tuesday & Wednesday were spent in part looking forward to the fall (and winter, and spring): Duke Performances 2015/16 tickets went onsale on Tuesday, and the Hopscotch 2015 schedule was released on Wednesday.

We bought a *lot* of Duke Performances tickets. Somehow gradually over the past 10 years we’ve transitioned from people who go to lots of rockshows in bars, to people who go to lots of performing arts series events which begin at 7:30 p.m. in auditoriums with semi-comfy chairs. Pretty much OK with that.

Speaking of comfy chairs, this week I got a Japanese Blu-ray copy of Prince’s Sign O the Times movie. I saw it in the theatre in Greenville, SC, in late ’87 or early ’88, with A. We had either just started dating, or were about to. I remember being totally ecstatic about the movie, although that might also have been attributable to A.

In any case, watching it this week triggered surprisingly few feelings of nostalgia about high school, or A, or anything, really. But I think that’s because that album has been an on-and-off friend of mine since the day it came out, so I don’t really associate it with a particular time in my life. I still know most of the words to most of those songs, and I listen to the record at least once or twice a year. And in my head anytime I want.

It’s a pretty good concert film, although the mix is weird. The drums are really loud — which is actually a pretty accurate representation of too many kick-drum dominated rockshow mixes I’ve endured over the years. It probably sounded awesome in the theatre, though.

In other news, the Supreme Court settled the marriage question, and Scalia very nearly blew a gasket. It’s kind of remarkable that he hasn’t literally suffered some kind of stroke or aneurysm, given his level of rhetorical apoplexy around the various Big Decisions of the past couple of seasons.

Reading the New York Times this morning, I was struck mostly by the coverage of the Republican presidential candidates — people who are ostensibly attempting to win the votes of a majority of Americans. They were not, generally speaking, generous or moderate in their reactions to the court’s decision. This despite the fact that something on the order of ~55% of Americans now support marriage equality (a number that is likely to continue to climb once people chill out & actually experience married gay people in their daily lives).

Is this just the ultra-polarized American politics of the 21st century? An open acknowledgement that their party’s nominating process absolutely demands endless pledges of allegiance to the views of the radical nutjobs at the far righthand fringe?

Or do they really believe that the sky is falling?

It reminded me of a discussion I read a number of years ago, as the FCC, Congress & the courts were trying (again) to grapple with the question of profanity on the nation’s airwaves. In 2002-2003, there was a series of un-bleeped cuss events on TV awards shows — Bono said “fucking brilliant!,” Cher said, of her critics, “fuck ’em,” and Paris Hilton talked about how fucking difficult it is to get cow shit out of a Prada bag.

Rather than launching an investigation into how & why these nitwits were being handed awards on national television, the focus instead landed on whether the use of common expletives in non-sexual/excretory contexts could be considered indecent under the FCC’s current guidelines.

This question wound up at the Supreme Court in 2008, which means there was quite a bit written about it at the time.

Unfortunately, all of my googling this morning failed to yield the specific article I remember reading. The crux of it was some quoted discussion, in which some participants (Congresspeople? FCC commissioners? lawyers? judges?) steadfastly claimed that *every time* they heard the word “fuck,” they immediately visualized an actual act of sexual congress in their minds.

The psychologist Steven Pinker has actually written about this topic, at length. Here’s a good one from the New Republic.

Anyway. This came to mind this morning because it occurred to me that there could conceivably be some segment of the population who literally cannot prevent themselves from visualizing graphic images of dudes blowing each other any time they even hear the phrase “gay marriage.”

And apparently some portion of that segment of the population must find this to be intensely uncomfortable.

It’s really the only conclusion that makes any sense to me. I can’t imagine that Jesus would have cared all that much one way or the other.

Monday night I went to see Phil Cook & his new band the Guitarheels, along with some special guests, at Duke Gardens, the first night of a three-night stand, culminating...