the girly who shall end all girls

realized that i often cycle on and off with DW posting and that it's kind of seasonal.* there's too much and i find that i start with a thing i want to write about and then i start trying to backfill all the the things i didn't write about and ...death spiral.

anyway, C and i went to a show last week. first time in a long time, and damn it was a good time. it's been almost 20 years since i could walk to the Croc and it's a very nice thing to have back.** we actually went to their smaller downstairs venue Madame Lou's,*** where we saw our favorite band from the internet, Sub-Radio. they did not do any of their charming parodies, which is fine because they write remarkably perfect pop music. i feel like they're a tv show needle-drop away from being famous. this is the new single:


anyway, the set was tight, high-energy (only one slow song!) and filled with queer joy****. we danced and sang along and it was delightful. the room was well-ventilated and cool; they said it was sold out but we never felt crowded and had wonderful sightlines to the stage.



we also enjoyed the opener, Doublecamp, who were new to us:


the real difference between 20 years ago and now is that we went straight home instead of getting post-show eats at the 5 Point.



*if i were buhrger i would crunch the numbers but that's not really fun to me. although i have been meaning to play with some of the Python visualization libraries like Bokeh and Seaborn...

**for locals, if you're as out of it as me, The Croc is now in the old El Gaucho space and they've turned the Cuban Room and The Big Picture into venues as well.

***also for locals, which is NOT the home of the chocolate chip orgasm and excellent deep dish pizza.

but the old Big Picture bar is a Tat's outpost? need to figure out which one is closer the next time I'm craving a cheesesteak and tastykakes

**** the vocalist is bi, which gives you both "Caroline" and "King of My Heart"

They did the full song, there are more verses!

I got this t-shirt I've wanted for years: it's the art from the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, but it says

Depeche Mode

Boys Don't Cry.

Makes me smile every time I see it, but it got better: I wore it to work today and on a video conference call it looks absolutely radioactive 😂

Stephen Sondheim is dead. he was in his 90s, it was a good run.

few have been so great or influenced so many.

that's the thing - he was an artist's artist, making expensive and cerebral cult classics...it's difficult to lift any song from its context because they were so firmly woven into the scene and characters, and his shows rarely ran for long on Broadway. he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II and he went on to mentor many others including Jonathan Larson and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

i always loved singing his music, which was full of uncommon rhythms and harmonies that flirted around dissonance. every story he told was bittersweet. i deeply admire him, and the news hit me hard.

he was the pinnacle of the "book" musical and we won't see his like again.

i was going to share some songs, but as noted above they're not the same out of context. i'll try anyway:

when my niece A was only a few years old, i made a couple mixtapes of "adult" music with kid appeal so that her parents wouldn't go entirely insane listening to The Little Mermaid in the car. they were played for ten years until they deteriorated; then A asked if i could recreate them on CD. she sent me the tracklists, i did, and made her a couple more "grown up" mix CDs. i noticed on my last visit that a) she has a car with a CD player (no bluetooth) and b) one of those second-wave discs was on the top of the stack of discs in the car. A said she would like more, so i brought blank CDs with me and burned a new mix because i guess that happens about every ten years.

( Really Big Chickens )

not too surprisingly, good for repetitive work.

it's been a tense few weeks between the election and a reorg at The Eyrie. Biden won, i still have my job, but i'm still pretty adrenalized.

***

in the before times i used to go to a dance party called Bootie. they've got a Twitch channel going, and last night i finally tuned in due to an email with the phrase "trigger warning: hair metal".

man, it was so nice to see Adriana dancing and smiling, and there's something kind of delightful about her being able to converse with folks chatting at her while she works.

these were two gems from the set:
Bananarammstein

Whole Lotta FDT, Jack (lyrics NSFW)

the weather is mild, and someone facing our courtyard has been playing the piano with the window open on and off all day. currently playing Mad World, but there's been everything from Debussy to songs from Moana.

i think my favorite was The Black Parade, though.

the Met is streaming Wagner operas all week including the Ring in its entirety.

tonight was the first time we tried tuning in - i thought that they would be livestreaming, but they're not, it's just up for free at a specific time of day. when you start it you start at the beginning, which is especially nice when you're in a different time zone.

i like the aesthetic of tonight's Tristan and Isolde production, but it's very dark and nearly monochrome. all the subtle details pop in the recording, but if we were watching from the house at Lincoln Center the actors would just look like floating heads.

i'm bummed that i have class during Das Rheingold, which in spite of not having the breakaway pop hit is probably my favorite part of the cycle (mermaids! treasure! not paying your contractors! a trip to the underworld!).

a new Captain Marvel clip dropped today

but now I'm excited about the potential soundtrack.