The Greatest

I was moseying around the internet last July when I saw that Cat Power was playing that very night at the now defunct Avalon. The Avalon was a great spot for artists who are too big for the Middle East, but don't necessarily want the formality of the Orpheum. It's a nice, big general admission place with a really large dancefloor, which I love. I hadn't been to the place in years, but it suddenly seemed like the time to get just a little bit out of my rut, and go see a good show. So, I scoped some tickets and headed down the way.
I hadn't actually been down to Lansdowne St. since I moved back to Boston, and I didn't want to get to the show too early. I was by my lonesome, which used to be my favorite way to see shows because I would always meet such interesting people, but now I'm too anxious in crowds to really meet people. Anyway, my friend Ami and her boyfriend Josh, who have become my partners in crime on the show-going scene, weren't around, so I was flying solo. I know that may seem weird to some people, and undoubtedly it is a little bit. I really like to spend time alone. I don't necessarily mind people, but I'm a bit of a lone wolf.
Okay, so enough of the freakaside, it is surely clear that I'm a strange one, but on the dancefloor I think that's a good quality. A little insanity gives you a little something extra in yr dancing shoes. If you watch those old anthropological shows on PBS and you see those dancers in the rainforests and jungles, yo, the ones who are dancing are probably what we in Nacirema here call chemically imbalanced. Those cats can freak, too. Alright, I've gotten totally away from myself here. Not entirely uncommon, especially when I'm trying to justify myself. I'll get into the show next time. Same Cat time, same Cat channel.

The old soul feel

If there's any artist today that has that old soul feel, it would have to be Cat Power. The haunting etherealness of her voice, the tender intensity, the minimalistic nature of what is ultimately really powerful music. I'm totally enamored with her, so it was no surprise that I jumped at the chance to see her live. I hadn't been to out to a concert in quite a while. The last thing I had seen was some friends of mine playing in a bar in Memphis almost two years ago, which for me is a long time between engagements. There's a lot to that, but I don't want this blog to be about all the crazy shit that became of me in Memphis. Let's just say that I was struggling to survive and mingle with the normal people, and that carried over to my return to Boston. It wasn't until I saw Cat Power was playing that I decided it was time to get over my people fears and venture out.

The intensity of my freak

Okay, so before I get into actually talking about and reliving some of the unbelievably righteous shows that I've seen in the past six months, I wanted to expand a little bit on a theme that I started in the last post. I was trying to describe what it's like to throw some major intensity on a dancefloor, and how that effects a band. One of the things that has changed for me over the years is that now I almost exclusively go see shows in bars or smaller venues mostly because I like to get right up where the action is and get my freak on. I'm almost without fail the first, and on occasion the only person to lay the freak down. Mostly people pick up the energy and will move, but there are those indie-rock shows where people seem to be too hip to get down. I say that with all due curiousity and misunderstanding. What is the deal with that? Do ya'll just really not like to dance or what?
I can't even fathom, although I did see someone in the paper talking about how obnoxious the guy standing next to him at some concert was who was dancing when all he wanted to do was watch. I'm sure that guy, if it wasn't actually me, felt the same way about you. I know it drives me crazy to be squished in with no room to dance, or, horror of horrors, to have everybody sit down. I mean, I'm not gonna be the obnoxious guy. I'm really not. I'll sit down if that's the prevailing attitude, but understand that I could, in all seriousness, have a heart attack from the stress of it. I won't take more room than is there, but if you give me some space, I'll show you what it means to be a fanastic freak.
My experience has also been, from the musicians that I've discussed it with, that bands and musicians love it when people dance. They always tell me how much they love the intensity I'm willing to put on it because I go full bore from the first note, and they feed off of it, so the show ultimately will have more energy and be more exciting when people are dancing there arses off. So the point of all this was GO...Dance yr arse off to some live music, tonite!

Intro the outro

I had it in my head that I was going to include this articleish bit of prose I had written several months ago. It was actually the first thing I ever wrote with the intention of going blog with, so for sentimental reasons I had wanted to include it here. It was called, Does Boston Rock: From article to blog and back in thirty seconds, and that was kind of the spirit of the thing. I was really trying to talk about what my experiences have been going to shows and dancing my arse off, which is what I do when I go see live music. I was gonna include it as is bookended by commentary posts, but in rereading the thing it's just not fit for even semi-public consumption. It really was all over the place trying to describe what music is like and my physical reactions. The one sort of difficultly is in describing my participation in the music because when you dance with the intensity and with the years of practice that I've had, it effects the music, and I've always been a little shy about trying to express that. I struggled with that in this piece, and ultimately that is what made it unsuccessful. So I pulled back at the last minute, and I'm gonna blow it off, but I do want to explore the original notion: Does Boston Rock? The original article in my head was from years ago and was called: Does Memphis Rock? The essential point being that Memphis was full of great music and a really vital garage rock, alt thing going on, but the audiences from those shows were way to hip to dance. At least, that was the impression that I got from going to see a lot of bands from that genre. It really felt like the cooler-than-thou attitude was inhibitory to any kind of dancing because to dance you have to be fearless about making a fool of yrself. That's just the way it is. If you want to learn to dance, you have to go through a time when you look like an idiot, and without a live band, it is just not the same. Well, just a few off the top of my head kernels on the subject of dancing. Next on the agenda is to get into specifics about the shows from this past year.

Currently listening to: Lupe Fiasco's The Cool

Manifesto of Intentions

Okay so, why you might ask (if you cared or existed) is this guy setting up yet another blog? This is the third blog I've started in less than a month, and one solid reason is that I'm hooked on the whole concept. I've always felt that life is an art, and as a writer it has always been my thing to try and turn my life into written art in some form or another. Now the blogform gives us an opportunity to integrate these two ideas a little closer in presenting aspects of a life for exhibition in a semi-straightforward way; the lifeart of existence and the written art that comes as a by-product of that lifeart now also begets a written journal of the lifeart. That was a little convoluted, but I think my point is basically made.
The reason I'm starting another blog is simpler. I started my first blog as a catch-all for whatever tidbits float out of my head and into the keyboard. It seemed like the thing to do for me, but quickly it became clear that I wanted to start a more structured blog that was specifically about the process of writing and would be a journal of my attempts at various different projects. So far I'm still working out how that's gonna go, but the blog thing is structurally really loose, which I love and have embraced fully.
Anyway, this blog is meant to catalog and describe another aspect of my life that I feel I should spend some time on and go back to sort through, which is concert going and dancing. In many ways that is the thing for me. As much I enjoy and am fond of writing, it's still a lot of work, even when it's fun and off the cuff like blogging. Dancing is never work. It's always this intense, ecstatic experience. In many ways it is very spiritual. I'll get into the whole argument about that in the future. For now it's enough to say that the world would probably be a better place if more people were willing to let loose and shake their bones a little bit.
So there's plenty to talk about: the spiritual nature of dancing, it's connection to traditional religious rituals, it's relegated place in modern societies, etc. Mostly I'm going to start just going back through the year 2007 in concert-going. I had laid off on going to many shows for a lot of reasons, but the last few months of '07 were just chock full of great shows. So that's were I'm gonna start. Go back through those times, dredge the old memory storage and see what shakes out, and then take it from there. All vey loose with a basic structure, just what the blogger ordered.