undecided

Recently, I was telling marios about someone when he interrupted me after the first sentence to exclaim, “You’re really going to lead with that?!” Later on, I realized that I tend to describe people using their most discriminating feature (i.e. what makes them most different from everyone else… good or bad) rather than their most characteristic feature. I’m going to try to change that. While I suppose I won’t refer to as many people in the superlative, I suspect I’ll do a better job conveying the essence of the person I’m trying to describe.

Please let me know if you have a more effective way to describe someone.

A while ago now Elle took me to see Glen Phillips at Joe’s Pub - certainly one of my favorite places to see a show. It’s such an intimate space and the acoustics are great (except for the faint sound of the occasional subway rumble or police siren to remind you that you’re in the city).

Glen played a perfect mix of the new stuff and the old classics (Walk on the Ocean is one of my all-time favorite songs). He seems like a reluctant performer, but he has all the polish of 20+ years of stage experience - yeah, Toad the Wet Sprocket was a long time ago. He plays with a deliberate passion, is amenable to requests, and chats comfortably with the audience. It’s also easy to see how I could identify with the source of the music with all the banter on random number generators, psychology experiments, and relationships. At one point Glen even stopped the show for a few minutes to measure the feedback from talking on his cell phone with his friend who prank-called him from the crowd. Oh, and these days he looks a lot like our friend Douglas Fordham (pictured right).

When we left, I told Elle it was the best show I’d seen in a long time, but she didn’t seem as impressed initially. After a bit of discussion, we decided it was the best show either of us had seen since Matt Nathanson (who deserves his own post) played at the cutting room but that she hasn’t seen any other shows since then.