“Hi. I’m Laura, and I’m here to entertain you.”
Elle and I saw Laura Marling last week at the Mercury Lounge. The cherubic 18 year old stoically sang her impassioned lyrics, but the supporting Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons (playing countless instruments) may have stolen the show.
My advisor’s advisor was trained as a musician. As such, I can’t trace my academic genealogy back to early mathematicians or scientists like some of my friends. My lineage can, however, be traced back to some very famous musicians. Paris Smaragdis, my academic uncle, traced his musical lineage back to the 1600s (see [here]). According to Paris, I’m 9 steps removed from Beethoven, 7 steps from Liszt, 10 steps from Haydn, and 13 steps from Bach!
Although if you consider that Thomas Quatieri supervised my advisor’s masters thesis, my genealogy becomes a who’s who of signal processing, and my lineage can be traced to Kant in 9 steps.
Pride is a very funny thing, and the whole exercise reminds me of the Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the other.”
Matt and I went to Brooklyn twice on Saturday — first to run over the Brooklyn Bridge (which nearly turned me into a popsicle) and second to see The National. The show was great, and I haven’t stopped listening to them since. Thanks, Kelly, for giving us the tickets rather than resorting to black-market commerce!
Elle took me to see (a slimmer) howie day at joe’s pub tonight. Nobody broke any phones and britney wasn’t there, but the whole night I felt like I was participating in or transported to my college life (but with better beer, better food, and better seats). The show was great, but short — a nice balance of the classics and new stuff. I’m still a sucker for the live fusion of acoustic and electronic music in the ghost->beams of light transition. It’s hard to believe it’s been seven or eight years since the first time we saw him. Thanks Elle!
I’ve worked on music research with mike and marios for years now, but since we have such disparate taste, we’ve never all been to a concert together… until tonight. We went to see The Flight of the Conchords, “New Zeland’s fourth most popular folk-parody duo.”
After only just finding out about the show today, we turned up at the venue without tickets and were welcomed by the “SOLD OUT” billboard. Undetered, we proceeded to the box office where we were informed that there were two tickets left. After a few minutes pleading with the salesperson, making various financial offers, and finally discussing which two of us should go in, they let us all in… for free!
We got in just in time to hear “Business Time,” a song that has sustained an uncountable number of inside jokes for my friends and me over the past few months. (Who plays their most popular song at the beginning of the set?) The show was hillarious - we belly laughed the whole time. My only regret was that they didn’t play the “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros” gangster rap battle, but for the price I can’t reasonably complain.
You can watch the first episode of their new hbo series here.
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.
I went to see Alexi Murdoch at the Mercury Lounge the other night. There’s just absolutely something I love about seeing live music - a guy battling on stage armed with nothing but a guitar and a clever rhyme. It’s one of the greatest sources of creative inspiration for me. A good performance can give me that Saturday morning “I can take over the world” kind of feeling like nothing else. Alexi’s smooth, soulful style made braving the cold worthwhile, and the set-list-free set (”because it isn’t interesting when you know what’s going to happen”) reminded me that I need to go to more shows.
The banter quote of the night, “Contrast is the path to a long life.”
