On Saturday afternoon it was 80°. This morning it was 26°, and there’s a freezing rain alert out for tomorrow morning. The kind that could, depending on how the thermometer swings, end up in ice on power lines and trees. In March. In Texas.
When I moved to Texas 25 years ago, I went to a lot of concerts. A new pavilion opened close to where I lived and a lot of great acts played there, people I’d always liked but never had a chance to see live. Then I went through a phase where I hardly went to any shows. In the past six months, though, we’ve gone to three concerts, and they couldn’t be any more different from each other. First there was Sarah Brightman last fall. She was the original star of The Phantom of the Opera and combines opera with classical and classics. Then a couple of weeks ago we saw Gordon Lightfoot.
Saturday night, we experienced Shpongle, in the person of Simon Posford. I discovered Shpongle after Posford collaborated with Alan Parsons on his album A Valid Path. They’re a trance band, heavily drug influenced, mostly instrumental, and I love to write to them. To my surprise, my wife likes them, too, so when the concert was announced last fall, I snapped up a few tickets. They played at the House of Blues, a place I’ve never been before, and the price was right: $20 per. I’ve seen a few of their concerts on YouTube with the whole band: it’s quite a show. Here’s one song: Dorset Perception. I was hoping for a big performance like this, but it was a one-man DJ band, which was okay in its own way. The opening group, Desert Dwellers, consisted of two guys with laptops and a whole mess of cables. At one point I thought one of the DJs was checking his email or, perhaps, his twitter feed. They were okay, but they didn’t quite have the musicality of Shpongle and their hour-long set outstayed their welcome by a good 30 minutes.
Posford came on at something after 10 pm in his Shpongletron, which looked something like the ELO space ship from way back. His DJ station is in the midst of it (see photo), and the periphery is a screen upon which things are projected that look like a cross between the cartoons of Monty Python and the weirdness of Hieronymus Bosch. There were growing mushrooms and floating molecules and snakes and all manner of things going on. The music, much of it could be a playback from one of their recordings with some improv thrown in, but it was an experience unlike anything we’ve ever had before. We splurged on a VIP table, which put us in a restricted area with a table and a server, whereas the rest of the audience was in front of us in an open standing area. Part of the experience was in watching these people, including one guy who was dressed like a dog or a sheep or something. There were a surprising number of people approaching our age, but they mostly hung out on the periphery. By the time the show ended (after midnight, well past my normal bed time!) we were well and truly Shpongled.
I didn’t watch the Academy Award presentations. I’m sure they were fine, but I’m content with a list of winners and a clip of the best moments that can be watched in five minutes or less. Instead I watched The Amazing Race. I’ve never seen a pile-up like that on the mat. Often teams have no idea in what order the others arrived or when, but everyone was there to see the Kentucky team go home after they forgot a backpack and had to go back to reclaim it. Tough call.
Was it just me, or was that one of the worst episodes of The Walking Dead ever? The poor actress who plays Beth isn’t terribly good, something I noticed before, and to have to carry a two-person episode, well, she wasn’t quite up to the task. Normally Darryl-centric episodes are the bomb, but this one just bombed.
So, we’re down to the final True Detective episode and we have at last seen the face of evil. It’s good to see the two guys becoming friends again. Talking. They’re both lonely men, so I think the chance to talk to another human being is welcome to them. Marty proves his mettle as a detective. I’m always amazed by those scenes where someone is shown a storeroom full of file boxes and then the skip-cut to later, with the results. Seldom do you get to see the drudgery in between. More philosophizing: Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing, so you have to be careful what you get good at. And Rust’s observation about the backwaters of Louisiana where they end up at the heart of the case, which forms the title of today’s post.
Only two more episodes of Banshee, too. Hood’s war with Proctor is heating up. “We’ve all been living in the dark long enough.” And then there’s Emmett and his test. And another crack at Rabbit. It’s gonna be tough to beat last season’s rocket launcher finale, but I’m sure they’ll give it a shot.
