Category: Arts

Concerts I had been to but have not written about or maybe only in passing

I like to write notes here, for my own reminiscence, about interesting concerts I have been to. However comma some concerts pre-date this web site and I think of them often and so want to let them be counted. Most of the dates I list are from memory and what I can find on the web, so some may be a different venue, and a different year, and wildly inaccurate, but still my experience of the concert is there. Their documentation is only as poor as my memory. [ed. I made a partial reference to some of these in 2009 and 2016].

Elvis Costello at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1989. This was his King of America tour and the first concert I ever went to. I know. KoA was mostly country–his foray into the Nashville song-writing scene–and not my favorite, but a great opportunity to go with my brother and his then-girlfriend who was, unfortunately all I remember, a very likeable goofy blond pot smoker. We were in the upper balcony?

Some punk bands at 688 Club. It closed in 1986, so it must have been my first or second year in college. I remember being freaked out having never been to any place like that. Things have changed. That locale recurs as concert-related because it’s an urgent care location and I had to go for a freaky looking spider bite I got at one of the Piedmont Park Music Midtown festivals.

GWAR at Masquerade in Atlanta. First mosh pit and hanging out with metal heads from college and some weird drugs and yeah. GWAR spit “blood” and threw “maggots” (dye and rice) on the crowd so clothes were trashed by the end of the concert. And the pope raping scene was… something else. This is where I fell in love with the group dynamics and camaraderie of the mosh pit. I miss that and know I cannot again be a part of it at concerts as an older (?) person. Recommended, though.

Music Midtown several years when it started in 1996. It was at where the Federal Reserve building is now (just up the street from where we live now), then where the Georgia Aquarium is now, then off Piedmont and Pine (near Central Park where Shaky Knees is now).

Philip Glass solo piano at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in 2000. This was when I worked at a company in the king (or queen?) building and we went with another couple from work. They sat in the front row of a very intimate setting and left in the middle of the performance. I hate that that’s my prominent memory.

Robert McDuffie performing Philip Glass’s 2nd Violin Concerto at Spivey Hall at Clayton State in Morrow, GA. This I can’t find anything about but I know I was there. Reduction for violin and piano. The joy of the composition was matched by his enthusiasm and passion for the work.

McCoy Tyner at the Variety Playhouse in 2010. I remember his performance being a mix of blocky, forceful and dissonant jazz with the multi-voiced, polyrhythmic complexity of Prokofiev. It was eye-opening.

Terry Riley improvising on the Tennessee Theater’s Wurlitzer organ at the second year of the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, 2010. His performance was hypnotic. Solo on a theater organ performing phased, minimalist feats of brilliance. One of a kind. Lisa’s mom, Mickey, owned that city’s events and so got us free tickets to everything. I was the only one that could go. I missed the first year, with Michael Gira and Philip Glass. It was/is(?) an amazing rock/experimental festival, more so being in Knoxville. Weird, huh?

The band Afterlife

So in college I met some great guys (where?) that were in a band called Afterlife. I wasn’t a real performer but would have liked to have played with them, and so I eventually hung with a different group of friends and more loosely disciplined musicians and they fit my casual undiscipline and let’s face it skillessness at the time. Still…

(The bassist from Afterlife, Jonathan, and I hung as pals and got into girlfriend shenanigans and partied and watched our first John Waters film together, perplexed and laughing, and generally slacked, and dated roommates to greater and lesser results but had an experience all the same. Some good times; some weird.)

Afterlife has been releasing in the last five years or so new albums. Again: discipline pays off. Full discography is:

  1. THE FROZEN SUN (1988)
  2. THE AWAKENING (1990)
  3. CURTAIN CALL (1991)
  4. COMPASS ROSE (2013
  5. BRAVE NEW WORLD (2016)

In our era of purging, I found two cassettes of their first two releases. “The Frozen Sun” and “The Awakening”. I don’t remember purchasing them, but I think the sticker for “The Awakening” says $5.00!

Do not be alarmed by the rectangular shape, these are cassettes!

They have several points of presence online:

I need to decide what to do with those classic, self-produced cassettes.

  

(Odd note: back in 2004 I had posted a random reference to one of the members. Completely unrelated subject though.)

Three works of classic literature

Updated 25 Dec 2018 (movies)

Updated 24 Feb 2019 (notes on The Canterbury Tales)

More lit when I purged my CDs. Beyond the pulp sci-fi were a few classics I’d never read but should have:

The Decameron, Beowulf, and The Canterbury Tales

The Decameron

First up: The Decameron. The edition I got is a translation by Mark Musa and Peter Bandanella, with 21 of the 100 stories (novelle) and essays spanning his contemporaries (seven, including three by Petrarca) and more modern ones dating from the 1700s to the 1970s and closing with a tight summary essay by the translators. The inclusion of the wide ranging essays was the primary reason I got this edition and sacrificed a copy with the entire Decameron. Quoting the preface:

The modern criticism includes a representative selection of past and current critical approaches to Boccaccio’s Decameron. Some essays reflect important historical interpretations (Ugo Foscolo and Francesco De Sanctis). Others illustrate particular critical methods–the philological (Auerbach), the philosophical (Scaglione), the formalist (Clements), the structuralist (Todorov), the rhetorical (Booth), the archetypal (Cottino-Jones), and the historical (Bergin).

While reading, I rewatched the light, fun indie film from 2017 called The Little Hours [ IMDB | Metacritic | Rotten Tomatoes ]. It takes a few of the stories from the book and combines them into a relatively continuous whole. The movie is set in the time the stories take place (mid 1300s) but it filters them through a modern prism. Recommended.

From one of the essays I learned that there’s another, more faithful movie version directed by Pasolini from 1971. I can’t find a good copy streaming online so I’ll probably purchase The Criterion Collection’s set called Trilogy of Life which includes The Decameron [ IMDB | Rotten Tomatoes ], The Canterbury Tales (perfect for when I read that next), and The Thousand and One Nights. (The latter I had failed to read fully a few years back from my Everyman’s Library edition titled The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Haddawy.) The Pasolini trailer for The Decameron looks bonkers, and the 70s music is… something.

Notes I had taken while reading the essays:

Frame story

7 women, 3 men, open and close by the author, 10 days, 1 narrator per day, 10 stories each day

Opens with a detailed, grim description of the plague in Florence. Stories taken from classical sources, farce, fabliaux (fabliau/fabliaux/fablel/fable, obscene and humorous), Florentine gossip, anecdotes. Each day has a theme. Common with novella. Sometimes explicit theme, sometimes uncertain. Peril and wit, strife and good fortune, unhappy love, treasonous wives, etc. Villa as middle ground between the stifling city and the open country. Day 1 and 9 have no specific theme and act as bookends, day 10 deals with noble deeds and how man can be moral in a secular world.

(novella has more varied characters, locations, and social class than in fablels, the novella definition changes, short, “Unity and verbosity are mortal enemies.”)

Populated by all classes, ~338 characters, 83 women mentioned by name, >250 men, compare with Dante’s Comedy 50 years prior which had ~20 women and most were historical, not contemporary.

The Decameron is the human comedy cf. Dante’s The Divine Comedy

The Decameron is an accomplishment of such decor and vigor as to make the minor creative works seem anemic by comparison and to overshadow the pedantic virtues of the compendia

Also:

Dante closed one work and Boccaccio opened up a new one.

Placed between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages priest and knight were supreme, as was Christianity. This changed to the pragmatism of the merchant class. The story of the Jew and the duplicate rings he gave to his sons (I, 3) viewed as a metaphor for the equality of all Abrahamic religions was unthinkable prior. From a time of spirit to that of nature. Move from spiritual to earthly leaves behind the prior’s structure, Decameron is chaotic with different stories, no unity of style.

Depicting man’s passions and ingenuity over spiritual supremacy and devotion. Women cleverly flouting conventions for appearance and not being judged: hiding infidelity from their husbands, being kidnapped and having sex with multiple men but being presented as a virgin, being evil and lying but then saving another’s social standing. Saving appearance is a virtue. Noble woman is chastised by her father for having an affair with a commoner. Her reply: “we are all made of the same flesh.” Social leveling.

No donna angelica, untouchable. Sexual desire becomes acceptable as the beloved.

Boccaccio later wanted the book burned and was talked out of it by Petrarca. Boccaccio became a misogynist. Boccaccio’s change in styles throughout his life matched his change in cities and surroundings. Courtly to allegory to merchant class.

Writers at the time memorized stories like musicians memorize music.

The lives of the great Italian writers overlap:

Major works:

Boccaccio:

Naturally skilled in grammar, educated by Giovanni, father of his friend Zanobi da Strada, Boccaccio’s father made him go into accounting (common in Florence) then the law.

Greek teacher Leonitus Pilatus from Thessaly, Petrarca learned from the monk Barlaamo from San Bacilio Cesariense.

Very poor most of his life, had to transcribe books, they later became part of a library.

Boccaccio’s writings:

  • 4 works of lesser quality, ~1330s, exaltation of love
  • 4 skilled written in Florence, 1340s, more allegorical
  • 4 learned studies, reference for men of letters, 1350s, often revised, sometimes difficult to classify, essays, biographies of ancients and contemporaries

Other works:

  • Filocolo, book five was also a frame story told by young aristocrats, “written between 1335-36. It is considered to be the first novel of Italian literature written in prose. It is based on a very popular story of the time, Florio e Biancifiore.”
  • Eclogues
  • Ninfale
  • Teseida
  • The Love of Areita and Palemone
  • Fiametta
  • Ameto, frame story, Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, 1341

Updated 25 Dec 2018 (movies)

Got the movies, realized they’re Blue-ray and I don’t have a Blue-ray player, purchased Blue-ray player.

Booklet and three movies

The Decameron was much better than I expected. The trailer was cheesy 70s escapades; the actual movie was beautiful, sometimes static, sometimes sweet. The film is constructed of stories from the book threaded together into somewhat of a whole. Though characters may not know each other, they exist in the same world and may pass each other in the street. In many of the stories, Pasolini expressively lingers on characters’ faces and expressions. There was much casual nudity that felt of the time (1300s). There’s an added story of Giotto painting a mural that was threaded though the actual stories taken from the book. His process of inspiration included some wonderfully framed shots of the city and the people populating it, and the ending with him was perfect.

Updated 24 Feb 2019 (notes on The Canterbury Tales)

Finished The Canterbury Tales. Notes.

Three Jean Rollin films

I had heard of him tangentially but had never followed the leads until I saw several of his films on Shudder. French, stylized, a bit low-budget yet attractive. A good reference for Rollin’s films is DISCOVER–where to start with the films of Jean Rollin from IMDB. I went with three in the vampire series, minus his first feature “The Rape of the Vampire”:

The Nude Vampire (1970)

The Shivers of the Vampires (1971)

Requiem for a Vampire (1971)

Continue reading Three Jean Rollin films

Three Carlton Mellick novels

I had purchased Mellick’s novel “The Haunted Vagina” on a lark along with Chuck Tingle’s (yes, that Chuck Tingle) book “Buttception.” I had a nonsense plan to give each to friends of Lisa when they came into town for vacation shenanigans. On receipt of the books, I realized that they had toooo much shenanigans and kept them for myself. After reading “The Haunted Vagina” I was hooked on Melick and got two more. All contain a mix of bizarre yet elegant humanity.


The Haunted Vagina

It goes in one direction and then another that you cannot anticipate then further. That’s a very generic description but an accurate one w/r/t Mellick’s gross, magic realist prose. I was intrigued then disgusted (not really) and yet surprised, and finally fascinated. No spoilers, but what starts as a story of a man crawling into his girlfriend’s vagina and finding a world, a la lions witches and wardrobes, turns into a tale of love emerging from a previous, failed relationship. Failed relationships inform subsequent relationships as if they were birthed from them and here, in a way, they are. The humanity is hidden in grotesque honesty.

Every Time We Meet at the Dairy Queen, Your Whole Fucking Face Explodes

Another relationship story. Here, a teen boy falls in love with a quirky, loner girl. They start dating and, as referenced in the title, when they start kissing or she gets sexually excited her face boils and then explodes. Skin and muscle and maybe her tongue or an eye flies off, also causing damage to him too if he’s too close. Her father reconstructs her using flesh from odd human-faced dog-like animals that they keep in the cellar. Eventually, she acquires an exotic, mottled face after the stitches heal and disappear. A special drug in her blood blocks her pain and his if he’s in the line of fire.

This condition was passed down from her mother–now distorted from years of reconstruction–and from all previous generations of women in her family. The boyfriend becomes concerned about her differences, including the spider-infested bedroom she sleeps in, but he’s truly in love and they eventually can be together for longer periods of time, though without having sex. That’s held off until the truly odd, gross, sweet ending. Mellick really has a knack for that.

Neverday

This is I think his most recent book and is a much more conventional sci fi story. Like the movie Groundhog Day, a man relives every day after he falls asleep. Unlike Groundhog Day, a large portion of the population suffers the same affliction and periodically more people “awaken” to live this repeated immortality.

To stave off the chaos of consequence free theft, murder, or rape, laws and a police force are created. Some people are hundreds or thousands of years old and have forgotten most of their lives. Newly awake people must go to group therapy to deal not only with the idea of being immortal, but being immortal with a hangover, horrible injuries, or as with one woman we meet, being nine months pregnant and knowing you’ll never see your child. This is a considerably more grim and more realistic Groundhog Day. The ending is as carefully human as that of his other two books I read, just less bizarre.