i was also very much looking forward to a performance of this absolutely blisteringly vicious rachmaninov piece, and had tentatively scheduled it for the friday (the 17th), but that would have no doubt depended on a number of factors, such as the weather and the ability to schedule things before or after it. skipping this was not an option, though. this is one of the most ridiculous pieces of music ever written, in any style, ever.

there's a caveat, and that is that i tend to be disappointed by american interpretations of rachmaninov, as i tend to find that they strip the music of it's idiosyncratically dour russian existential dread, and replace it with a sort of upbeat american exceptionalism. passages that should make you want to yell, or cry, or otherwise break down into some kind of terrible fit of discomfort tend to be replaced with much lighter emotions that you're more likely to just kind of shrug off. i know that rachmaninov spent some of his life here, but i do insist that americans do not get this guy.

the pianist set to perform the piece has a russian-looking name, but who knows what i was going to get.

i discuss this a little bit more here:
https://dsdfghghfsdflgkfgkja.blogspot.com/2017/01/mar-27-2014-you-want-to-know-why-we_4.html

the above performance was the one i pulled out as most acceptable, in the end. if you've never heard this, i suggest you sit down, first.

i am not familiar with the other two pieces on the bill and haven't spent any time with them, but may do so over the next few days. neither seems to be particularly compelling on first listen, but i'll let you know if i change my mind over the next few days.

if i had gone on the friday, this show would not have been done late and i would have been close enough to the tunnel to walk, so i would have had to make that choice. was there some reason to stay later? or, might i have scheduled the show on the saturday or sunday to line up a double bill, instead? i don't see anything obvious on the friday night or the saturday night.

however, i very well might have waited until the sunday matinee, in order to attend the glitch mob show (across the street) in the evening.

this has not been rescheduled at this time, but i hope it is included in next year's program.

after his recent delves into bass music and a hundred other things all at once, the new squarepusher record seems to perhaps be a return to his classic mid 90s sound, but it also lacks a certain level of intensity, opting instead for something more palatable to a chiptune audience. i almost wonder if he's been listening to something like oxykitten, or if some of this was written with a gaming audience in mind.

it doesn't matter. i missed them when they did movement a few years ago due to the setting (way, way too many people for something like this...and you had to buy a day pass, meaning it was about $70 usd), and wasn't going to miss this. it doesn't matter if the new record sucks or not - which isn't what i'm saying. i'm not sure that this guy is really capable of producing something that is bad, even if this does feel a little stagnant.

further, it's not like he comes over here to tour every couple of months, either. when i missed both 65daysofstatic and future of the left in 2013 while i was waiting for border documents, i had the feeling that it might be the only chance i get to see either of them. and, i don't think either have come back. i was dreading as much....

so, i'm very much shattered by the cancellation of this.

but, it is being rescheduled, thankfully, for december, and we will get our adventure around it at that time.

this show was on a thursday (the 16th), and i would have come home relatively early to be sure i was able to get to the rachmaninov show the next night.

bad religion hasn't changed much over the years, so i don't see what the point of reviewing the new record is, other than to ask whether...

well, ok. maybe, that starting line gives away my bias: they went through sort of a down period when they replaced the really efficient punk drummer they had in their far too short classic period (88-90) with somebody that had a more traditional corporate rock drumming style. they then spent a really long time making records that may have made some cogent points here and there, but didn't have the aesthetic feel or sound of punk rock records and consequently lost a lot of their fan base. i don't want this to be a purity attack, i'm just trying to get the point across that i lost interest, and i know why - they embraced cock rock drumming and, with it, a more muscular style that largely just left me flat out bored.

then, a few years ago, they went back to a punk drumming style, and the whole thing was instantly salvaged - they sounded like bad religion, again. or, at least, they sounded like so many of their fans want bad religion to sound like, even if we all know that they're listening to progressive rock records on the tour bus.

that down period, which is in truth most of their career, then got thrown down the memory hole. it never happened...and bad religion haven't changed in 30 years.

so, the question is - is the new record in their classic style, or is it toying with these cock rock structures that they got into in the 90s? it's kind of in between; it's not their worst record, but it's disappointingly unpunk, after the return to form on the last one.

chances are that you're probably more into the lyrics, though - and that hasn't changed much, and really isn't worth analyzing. if you're not familiar with bad religion, you should start with suffer and carry forward with it. if you never liked graffin in the first place, you probably won't like him much, now; if you're a fan, you don't need my analysis, you can come up with your own.

nobody likes trump. i'm just not sure if i like him less than clinton or not. but, you shouldn't expect any derangement syndrome here, or any baseless or emotional attacks. this band defines itself by it's appeals to reason, evidence and logic. in some ways, i'd actually argue that this is the right way to deal with trump, and the kind of opposition i'd be more likely to be more active in. but, he maybe loses the plot, in a sense, like the best stoics did at the end of the empire - of what value is a critique rooted in reason in a post-truth paradigm?

i'd still rather vent with syllogisms than with tears or screams, but to each their own.

this is from the previous tour:

given all that would i have showed up to the show here on the 15th?

i've been through this before with this band - the ticket prices tend to be a little on the high end.

the answer is probably not, no.

this was in ann arbor on the 10th, and there's a lot of reasons to think i wouldn't have actually made it there, including the distance and the fact that i've never actually heard of them before. but, it seemed interesting enough to check out, and one of the first things i learned is that they've apparently recently opened for mike keneally, which is a choice gig for any musically abstract band to land.

after several listens, i'm remaining non-committal about it. this is fundamentally singer-songwriter music with a heavy soul influence; the abstraction exists in the arrangements, and i'm not sure it really gets to where i need it to get to.

but, i haven't been to ann arbor in a while and, if the weather was nice, i might have used it as an excuse to get out to one of those legal dispensaries - and tell a story while i'm at it.

i wish i had more time to give it a deeper listen, and may actually do so in the upcoming days. given that i knew i wasn't actually going, i didn't find myself prioritizing it....

if the idea of soul-influenced pop with classical arrangements is interesting to you, though, this would be your thing.

this show was on the third, and is a band that has played at the far bar a few times recently, in scenarios that made it hard to get to. i've tried to be constructively critical of this, because i think it's moving in the right direction, even if it's still a little too conservative for me - i'd like to see them open up a bit, and embrace a deeper level of experimentation, rather than merely seem like an experimental act on the surface.

but, this show was at the closest bar to the tunnel, so i probably would have gone...

they were on first.

i don't know how long i would have stayed for the headliner, who seem pretty boring:

this was a friday night, so i'd be stuck with a choice to find an after-party or head home early. as i'd have been so close to the tunnel, i suspect i'd have taken the early bus out, but we can't be entirely sure.

so, i got through a few more calls today...

the pharmacy tried to push the generic estrogen on me, yet again, and actually got a little bit pushy with me about it.

"the brand name is on back-order. what we have is the generic, and that is what you will get!"

yeah. right. just call her the estrogen nazi, i guess. no estrace for me.

obviously, that's not acceptable customer service, and i was hardly going to tolerate anybody talking to me like that. so, i called around, found a store with the brand name and moved my prescription there, instead.

it is a bit of a walk, which is frustrating. but, we'll see how it works out from here. there are literally drug stores everywhere. i'm sure i can figure something out.

i was told it would be ready in the morning (early on the 16th), so i found myself in a bit of a quandary. i wanted to get up and clean, but i wanted to finish my shopping for the next couple of weeks, first. if i couldn't get the pills until the morning, should i wait? i decided i'd be better off doing the shopping today, and getting the pills last thing in the morning.

so, i left a little after 5:00 and, after two heavy trips, was back around 20:00 with basically everything i'd need to hermit until mid-may. i got immediately to putting some of this stuff away, and made some progress on it, before i sat down for a minute to check what time the store opens at.

and, the answer is that the store doesn't close.

"wait. so, that means i could pick up the pills at midnight, then. but, what if they're already bottled, then? if i can get them now..."

so, i gave them a call and they were indeed bottled, leading me to a third trip out around 21:30.

it's a 45 minute walk in both directions, so it's not sustainable, but i got what i wanted, along with a few other scattered things and was home by 11:30 - for the next roughly three weeks, solid. i don't plan to even open the door...

i did not buy any marijuana, this time, so i should be alert and focused and productive for the next three weeks, so long as the computers in the apartment continue to work.

so, i've worked my way through enough of april to put it aside and get to the next thing in the list, which is recalibrating the vlogging.

the shows i would have likely made some attempt to go to over the first half of april are:

3rd - dana 
10th - bent knee (in ann arbor, though. maybe not.)
15th - bad religion (but pricey, so probably not.)
16th - squarepusher (for sure. moved to december.)
17th - rachmaninov's 3rd piano concerto (for sure. cancelled, for now.)
18th - liturgy (probably not actually)
19th - glitch mob (strongly weather-dependant).

now that i'm caught up, i can multitask. so we're on to the next thing....

this is a review of the weeping icon / control top show at deluxx fluxx on mar 12, 2020.

this was a night that was neither supposed to be late nor expensive, but the sudden collapse in the canadian dollar, combined with the closure of the tunnel overnight for maintenance work, meant that going to the show would be more expensive than previously budgeted for, and that there was no option but to overnight in the diner, as the tunnel bus would be out of service from 20:00 on the night of the 12th until 7:00 on the morning of the 13th. once i realized this on thursday morning, i strongly considered skipping the show, but in the end reasoned that the shows at the end of the month would likely end up canceled, anyways, so i'd might as well overpay on one last night out for a long while. so, i caught the last bus of the night over to detroit, which was the 19:00 bus.

all anybody outside wanted to talk about was the virus, and the looming assumption that there were imminent closures coming, indeed that things were being canceled and closing down in real time. people found themselves in the situation where they were just looking for something that was open.

my interest in the show was initially in the second band, control top, but i made sure to get there on time in order to see weeping icon, as well. i strongly considered catching weeping icon the last time they were here, in november:

so, the weather made actually going to this somewhat of a non-starter. i would have had to have dragged myself, and an unknown punk band wasn't going to do it...

it's an interesting proof of concept, but i wish they did more with the electronics than they are. it just kind of comes off as something to distract people while they're tuning or changing busted strings...

purely as a punk act, it's fun enough, if relatively generic.

i actually bet it was fun. but, my impression is that they should be doing more than this, and i hope they do.

https://weepingicon.bandcamp.com/album/weeping-icon

my memory of listening to this record back in november was that i interpreted them as a kind of art-rock band that was under-utilizing it's resources, and seemed to think they had a stand-up bassist for some reason. experiencing them live did uphold my perception of the electronics being used as a tuning distraction, as that is literally what they were used for, but it also clarified the band's intended presentation as very much being that of a punk rock band. it's perhaps worth noting that the band also slimmed down to a bass-guitar-drums three-piece, in noting the minimized importance of the noise and the increased importance of the band's presentation as a punk band.

this is a concept record, and they did play songs from it, but they didn't try to present it conceptually, so my comment that the record is an interesting proof of concept that requires greater elaboration is perhaps not reflective of their future plans - i might expect more straight-up punk rock from them, in the future.

and, as noted, they are in fact intriguing enough purely as a punk band. the guitarist can take up quite a bit of space on her own. it'll be interesting to see what she does with it.

so, i think i caught this band in a state of flux, and less want to make a point of a detailed analysis, and more want to point out what appears to be changing.

control top were an act that i first encountered at the end of the year, via reading through some best of the year lists.

the record is a little generic at points, but this is one of two or three types of music where i don't spend much time worrying about that - it just needs to actually be good and this does that.

they could turn the vocals down a hair. my ideologically rigorous, enlightenment-era approach to anarchism sort of clashes with her post-nihilist anti-intellectualism, but whatever; that's academic, mostly.

that means that i won't grade this too high, but it also means i'd enjoy seeing it more than most of the stuff in the list. 

https://controltop.bandcamp.com/album/covert-contracts

after a few listens, what i found to be enduring about this act is that they actually have punk lyrics in addition to their classic punk sound, which is rare in music of this sort in the current epoch; generally, acts in the punk spectrum with punk ideologies will avoid a catchy and pop-friendly type of sound or image nowadays, while the classic punk rock sound, itself, has largely been appropriated by pop culture and tarnished with bubblegum-pop type pseudo-artistry. perhaps pop culture's recent retreat from rock-era forms has reopened a space for the classic punk sound to be reunited with punk rock ideology. i would welcome that, as i don't tend to get much musical enjoyment from, or have much fun listening to, these hyper-aggressive spins on the style. i miss a more tactile and fun approach to punk culture....

live, the band presented the recorded material without a lot of variation, the high part of the show perhaps being when the singer descended on the floor and directly confronted a number of the male audience members on their hierarchical enforcement of covert contracts by yelling in their faces about it. i hope she wasn't infected, at the time. i was spared this wrath; i received a soft touch on my shoulder, instead.

teener were again booked to play this show, either first or last, and dropped out on the day of.

i didn't really plan the rest of this out very closely; i decided i'd find somewhere open, and kind of wing it. one idea was to just stay at the venue, but it chased everybody out and shut down early under rumours that it might be shutting down for a while - and, indeed, there was a facebook post not long after, indicating the venue would be closing indefinitely.

i had loosely planned to end up at tv lounge until 2:00ish, but they were closed when i got there, also indefinitely. before leaving the venue, i had heard rumours about things being open in corktown, so i took a walk around the corner to ufo and parked out there for the night.

as the concert that was scheduled at ufo was canceled by the band that booked it, the place was mostly empty by the time i got there around 23:00; pretty much the only people that were there were actually staff from other bars that had shut down early for the night and needed to have a drink and chill out and vent.

the people that i'm talking about are reliant on income coming into their respective bars - dishwashers, bartenders. they were rightly absolutely freaking out about what they were going to do if everything got canceled, and simply didn't want to listen to me rationalize with them, they just wanted to vent. so, i backed off a little and listened, and they made their concerns clear, even if they weren't always well-grounded in science, and i had to bite my tongue about it. writing in mid-april, i don't know what steps the government of michigan has taken to help them, but i hope they figured something out.

after however many beers at ufo, i eventually ended up back at the diner, and got something different, a blt, because my usd was running out when i got there. i nodded off for a bit after 5:00, but was out on time to catch the early bus back, make it home before the cold snap hit (again) and make some nachos before getting some rest in.

this is a review of the sunsquabi/floozies show at the royal oak theatre on mar 5, 2020,
as well as a review of the "classical roots" presentation at the dso,
which ended with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, on mar 6, 2020.

in the week leading up to this show, or excursion, i found myself trying to juggle a number of shows into a one or maybe two day escape, and so flirting with going to the concerto on the saturday or maybe trying to fit a double bill in on the friday, meaning i should come home early on thursday - or even just giving up and going to steve hackett on wednesday, instead.

i do feel that the first thing i should acknowledge is actually that hackett concert. the following was posted a few days before the show:

so, this gives me a better understanding of what the steve hackett set on wednesday is going to be about, and whether i want to spend what was $30 usd minimum on it, last i checked (the $25 seats are sold out). this is really a dad show, though, so he's supposed to yell at me for offering to pay my own way, and then insist on buying me food on the way home. alas....

what is steve hackett? well, he was the not-quite-original-but-certainly-classic guitarist for the legendary 70s prog act genesis. mr. hackett left the band in 1977, so he had absolutely nothing to do with the band's somewhat infamous run of 80s pop singles, and in fact only did two records with collins singing, at all. however, he was the band's guitarist for all but one of their string of classic records (he was not the guitarist on trespass) between 1970-1977.

genesis is known mostly for being the initial vehicle of peter gabriel and then of phil collins (who initially played drums, before gabriel left for a solo career), and is generally thought of as a synthesizer-driven band when discussed for it's compositions. however, the guitar work on these records is actually somewhat revolutionary. amongst other things, hackett is widely credited for introducing the technique of tapping into rock music, something that was picked up on most prominently by van halen and has became a staple in rock music ever since.

on this tour, he appears to be starting with a solo record he did in the late 70s and finishing with a set of genesis material centered around the classic record, selling england by the pound, which was the third with the classic lineup of gabriel on vocals, collins on drums, banks on keyboards, rutherford on bass and hackett on guitar.

he appears to have hired younger musicians to do the vocal and drums duties, which is fine and probably necessary.

if i could get cheaper tickets, this would be a no brainer. but i don't want to spend too much on this show and then regret missing a bunch of others, and this weekend may be full of other stuff that i want to get to, instead. if i had a money tree. alas...

i want to decide what i'm doing on the weekend, first. but, if i go out on wednesday, this is where i'm going....

by wednesday morning, i'd come up with a kind of maximal plan that started wednesday with hackett and ended early saturday morning. i had to face the facts - if i were to go to the hackett concert, i would have to cut something out. i also realized it was going to be seated and mostly populated with older men. if i had another $100 to blow, i would have started here, on the wednesday, and ended up at an experimental noise show a little later, before going home and heading back out for the thursday night.

after scratching wednesday off, i then decided that the most interesting things could be strung together starting on thursday evening and ending on friday afternoon, leaving friday night open as a variable, if the weather and my consciousness, as well as my finances, permit.

this was the ideal that i hoped set times would align around:

1) talking ear @ cliff bell's, 20:00-21:30 - first set.
2) take the bus to royal oak for roughly 22:00 and hopefully catch the last two acts, sunsquabi and the floozies. i want this to go late - until after 2:00.
3) get something to eat. it's a thursday, so i don't expect to find an after party. but, the bus runs all night, now. so, i can make my way back to detroit for the morning.
4) the beethoven concerto is running at 10:45 in the morning.
5) go home, shower, sleep.
6) maybe come back for another funk show on friday night at tangent gallery, followed by dancing.

obviously, imagining set times on my blog doesn't make them real, so the next thing to do would be to actually ask the artists what time they're playing at. this is done these days by posting at the event listing.

talking ear indicated that they would actually start at 20:00 sharp, and perform three 45 minute sets, each on the next subsequent hour. so, if i could get a confirmation that sunsquabi were going to be on a little later, i could maybe even catch the first two sets. perfect.

talking ear would also be playing as a four piece, without their singer, who is now their ex-singer. i will admit that much of the charm in the recorded material is driven by this now departed singer, but that's only really a drawback in terms of the uncertainty in direction that it creates; the rest of the band seems capable of holding my interest, regardless, even if i have little to go by in predicting what they actually would sound like. i'm sure i'll enjoy any new recorded material, once it exists.

i grew up listening to fusion records by the likes of holdsworth, di meola, mclaughlin....as well as some non-guitar jazz, albeit not much of it. i've heard ridiculous amounts of chick corea. there were a couple of bruford/holdsworth records with a singer named annette peacock. that's maybe the closest thing i can think of directly, although i should point out that it's also roughly in the same space as a local act name saajtak.

https://talkingear.bandcamp.com/album/talking-ear

i wanted to get up and dance before the end of the night, but i was actually kind of stoked about starting at the jazz club early; that's something i wish lined up well more often.

unfortunately, after some prodding, we eventually got set times for the royal oak show - and learned that sunsquabi were scheduled for 21:00, making it impossible to schedule both shows. i'd have to cut out talking ear from the night.

this opened up some space for me, as i was planning on picking up beethoven tickets on thursday night, before the box office closed, at 17:00. so, i settled on crashing what looked like a weekly experimental dinner time series at tv lounge, that seemed like it might even have free food, before catching the bus to royal oak.

with all that planned, it was time to get ready to actually go. of course, that took hours longer than planned, and so i ended up failing to make even the 5:30 bus, and instead ending up in detroit around a quarter after six, without much to do but crash the dinner series, which happened before the hour, at the latest.

there was indeed free food, some sort of vegetarian burrito type affair, with some chips and salsa. i got a cheap beer, and found myself outside talking about this virus with somebody that actually works in the insurance industry.

he fully acknowledged the error of insufficient testing, and the problems that a large uninsured population would face. was i concerned, though? this seemed to be his interest - measuring my concern. we're all collecting data in our own ways, aren't we? the whole world's a laboratory. i tried to articulate myself as best i could - being that i was healthy, i was not particularly concerned about myself, or my well-being, and would rather consider it advantageous to confront the virus early, but if i were uninsured, or older or suffering from existing conditions, and i lived in the united states, then i could see some potential for alarm. my lack of concern is due to being in a relatively privileged position as a relatively young and healthy canadian.

he wanted to rely on the who mortality stats, which i insisted were an exaggeration; the high mortality rate in the united states may appear to be more in line with a third world country, or a country like iran that's been battered by us sanctions, but that's really just because they aren't testing; it's not really 7%. it's more like a 0.5%. although i'd be a lot more concerned if i thought it was 7%! but, he needed data, not speculation. in his mind, that 4.5% coming out of china was reason for serious alarm. and, i guess if i thought that was a reasonable mortality rate, i'd be alarmed, too.

the artist performing at the tv lounge on this night is also known as the detroit bureau of sound, and tends to frequently do these kinds of early night spotlights that are a kind of mix of high and low art; i've seen him perform philip glass pieces in dilapidated warehouses, and also do pretentious reinterpretations of cage pieces at energy drink showcases. he had an electronic reinterpretation of koyaanisqatsi up for showcase at the detroit institute of art in mid-march that got canceled. i keep an eye on him because a lot of what he puts together is kind of the perfect pre-show event, even if i end up showing up too late to catch it more than half of the time.

on this night, he appears to have set up a large amount of analog gear in the bar, and decided not to do much with it. i would have to label what i saw as a brap, albeit not a particularly lively one. so, i ejected from the situation a little bit before 20:00, with the intent to catch the early bus out.

i just had to get up and around the corner to temple, down the street to woodward and - hey, there's a bus...no....wait.

gah.

so, i had 20 minutes to wait to catch the bus i initially planned to take, to get to royal oak a few minutes after 21:00, and into the bar by 21:15 - hoping they're running late. when you miss the bus by seconds, the wait for the next one is of course maximal. but, even so, it would take as much time to drive there as it would to bus there, according to google, so i wouldn't actually be saving any time by driving. once i was able to get the driver to stop and let me on, it did run on time, and did get me to the neighbourhood of the venue at very close to 21:00, as expected.

i feared i'd miss the first song when i got there, but i actually showed up with plenty of time to spare. in fact, i'd been in and out for a few smokes, including finding the kind i like, by the time they came on, after 22:00. if i knew they weren't going to be on until after 22:00, i could have caught the fusion band after all.....

sunsquabi are a fully instrumental three piece white-boy funk band that also take strong influences from some specific guitar-driven progressive rock acts, like tangerine dream and pink floyd. while there are lots of bands that are vaguely like this out there right now, sunsquabi caught my attention due to the musicality - which is not to say that this is particularly technical, so much as to point to the wide musical vocabulary. so, they tend to make good use of abstract rhythms and syncopation, for example, in ways that would be better described as playful than technically impressive. the result is a convincingly fun sound that is also more than interesting enough to keep a nerd engaged, one that i tend to enjoy dancing to, as i get lost in the shuffling beats and the soaring guitars. i'd recommend this to anyone, but it's going to be especially intriguing for all those that exist in that intersection of the electronic with the guitar....

i found myself back outside between sets, and this is when the giant blunts started getting passed around, leaving me feeling fairly spaced out before the floozies set. this bar will make you leave your $8 beer on a table, in a room with hundreds of people, before you go for a smoke, and then who knows what's going to happen to it when you're gone. it was against my better judgement, but i did what i had to, and seemed to make it out of the venue able to walk.

the material i'd heard from the floozies also included a horn section, so they seemed a little bit stripped down on this night, as a two piece. this hemmed their sound into something that was a little bit more generic and formulaic, from a modern "edm" template. so, you had lots of dubstep wobbles, for example. i took it for what it was, and kept dancing in between the guitar licks, which were less plentiful than i'd have liked, but the truth is that sunsquabi is a hard act to follow.

my stark suggestion to the floozies is to make it a habit to bring a horn section with them when they tour. they're just not pulling it off as a two-piece.

a lot of people may consider a show that ends a little after 1:00 to be a late night, but it left me with some time to blow, as i could either find a late-night speakeasy in royal oak and ride it out until the morning buses started up or evacuate the suburbs and go back downtown early on the late night bus out. if this show had lingered past 2:00 to 3:00ish, it would have been relatively seamless to catch the early morning bus out, right from the venue. but, the earlier night had me wanting to catch the late bus out, instead. i had time for a beer, before the bus came, a little after 2:00.

i had picked out a couple of divey bars that i thought would be open, but neither were. instead, i found myself at a sort of sports bar, as they were the only thing around there that seemed to be open. it was moments after i ordered my beer, though, that they were yelling at everybody to finish their drink and get out.

the place was actually fairly well populated on a thursday, so it was maybe a bit weird that they were aggressively shuffling everybody out at 1:35, but i had little choice but to drink my beer quickly and be sure i'm not the last one out.

outside now, at 1:45, i'm having a smoke and am approached by a woman who remarks that she likes my red overcoat (indeed, the coat is a bit of a hit) and wishes she could straighten her hair as well as i do. she then proceeds to speak to me in what i presume is some dialect of hebrew, although i would be unwise as to advise on which one.

i have a complex ancestry, and i do get recognized sometimes, most often by native americans, but also by italians and also by people that are from the northeast of europe. i used to get teased for looking jewish when i was in high school, years before i realized i was, actually, of some ancestral hebrew heritage. i've never, however, been identified as a jew on the street and then spoken to in hebrew, with the assumption that i'd understand it.

"i'm part italian and part jewish, so i do have very wavy hair. i wouldn't call it curly, exactly. it's actually also really light and fine, due to the norse ancestry on my mom's side. so, it's more like a thin, fine and wavy hairtype than thick, heavy and curly type. and, i certainly don't speak hebrew..."

"you're not really jewish, then."

(she was disappointed)

"no, not culturally. except i kind of am like a secular american jew in my politics and in my tastes in art, which is sort of a different jewish culture. i'd bet the number of jews in new york city that are bilingual is pretty low nowadays. so, you could think of me like that, and it's not totally wrong. but, i'm only really vaguely aware of my actual jewish ancestry and don't really prioritize it over my other heritage."

"i still like your coat."

"thanks."

after some further late night banter, and an eventual dispersion from the closing bar, i did catch my late night bus out of royal oak, which tricked me into thinking it was going to take me downtown and then dropped me off at the state fair transit centre instead, to await the regular city bus going back downtown.

waiting for the woodward bus at 3:00 am at state transit in detroit is maybe not the most enviable situation to be in, but i can be friendly enough with the other riders, whoever they are. so, one of them wants a smoke, and i give it to him. it turns out he's recently been released from hospital, and nursing a gunshot wound that just missed his vitals; both lucky and unlucky, as he claims, at least, that he was an innocent bystander, and essentially struck by a stray bullet. the doctors told him he should have been killed. right now, he needs to get downtown to get to the mission, which is where he's staying until his wound has healed. and, i can have some of his vodka if i want (i passed).

he carries a sleeping bag around with him on his back, stuffed into his coat. says he needs it to keep the cold out.

"no, you use it to keep the warmth in."
"yeah, gotta keep the cold out."
"it would probably be useful to you on a day-to-day basis if you actually realized that you keep the warmth in, you don't keep the cold out."
"gotta keep the cold out...works good if you get bundled up right...."

eventually, the bus comes and our gunshot victim actually wanders down the street the other way, before he's coerced back by the driver. i admit that i sat in a place that would force him to sit elsewhere.

it's pushing 4:00 when we get back downtown, and i find myself getting off a stop early, due mostly to badly eyeing the stops - i knew where i was, but didn't know where the stops were. as it is, i'm walking south on woodward to the diner when a man in a wheelchair rolls up to me and asks me for a smoke. and, he needs me to put it in his mouth and light it for him too.

obviously, this guy probably shouldn't be smoking. but, what is the use of denying a dying man a smoke?

so, i give him the smoke, and i light it, and i turn around to walk off, but he asks me to come back and help him get a bag out of the side of his wheelchair. i initially thought he meant out of a pocket on the external side of the wheelchair, but after some discussion it is clarified that he meant a bag that was lodged between himself and the seat of the wheelchair. i am able to oblige this request relatively painlessly.

he tells me he's pulling a cup out of the bag to take a piss, right there, in his wheelchair, on the side of the road, on woodward avenue, in midtown. he wants me to get another bag out of the back, and i can't see where, and he's yelling at me to hurry up....

what's going through my mind at this point is a kind of self-righteous indignation as to why it is that this clearly severely sick man is in a wheelchair on the side of the road at 3:00 am and asking a canadian tourist to perform unpaid volunteer work as an orderly. any concept of dignity had left this man behind. everything else aside, that was what had me angry and almost shivering, the fact that i was forced to suffer this man of his lack of dignity so badly.

i eventually walked away, and went straight inside to wash my hands. there's a virus going around, they said.

this man was eventually wheeled into the diner, which was no doubt an unacceptable sanitation decision, but i said nothing. it was hovering around freezing outside.

i always get the same thing at this diner and wanted to take a closer look at the menu, so i didn't end up ordering until well after 4:00, but i ended up getting my breakfast special, anyways, nonetheless. it was barely 5:00 by the time i was done eating, so i just got a lot of water and a lot of coffee and camped out.

of course i nodded off a few times, but they were punctuated by smoke breaks in the cold air that did a good job of waking me back up.

i was lucky that i got the specific waitress doing the overnight shift that sees me as harmless local colour, and doesn't seem interested in chasing me out. i just told her up front that i was waiting for the symphony to start and would probably be there until after 9:00, and she seemed to register it and then said nothing to me about it.

i got some french fries around 7:00 and munched them slowly on purpose.

the food, the coffee, the water and the brisk smoke breaks actually had me largely sobered up by 9:00, when i ordered one extra large coffee to go (the specific waitress had been refilling my cup all night for free, actually) and made my way out to the box office to get a ticket for the symphony.

i was aware that they were doing a specifically african-themed event on this day, something i didn't look too deeply into, and also noticed that they were initially planning on doing the same ravel piece i saw the previous month, which minimized my interest in the whole thing. however, the pianist performing the ravel piece had to withdraw at the last minute due to tendinitis, and they replaced it with a performance of beethoven's fifth piano concerto, which i hadn't seen yet. that all of a sudden became a priority when i noticed it; the whole thrust of the adventure is really centered around making sure i can get to the symphony at some point that weekend, with the friday morning show being identified as most tactical, due to there not being a great follow-up show on the saturday and there not being a sunday show at all. this let me get to the two things that were most interesting to me, sunsquabi & the concerto, in one long & epic trip, rather than piecing together two or three half-nights in order to stretch it out.

i still didn't really look into the african themed first part of the show, though - i decided that i'd just go and check it out. i had a vague expectation of something religiously themed, but i otherwise didn't really know what to expect.

they started the show off with a piece called lift every voice and sing, in which the expectation was that we would all know the words (i did not. sorry.) and that we would all stand together and sing it (i did neither. sorry). it seems as though this tune has some political significance in the black community. i just have this aversion to choir-singing for some reason; i don't like the group think, the unity of action, it gets into my skin and makes me squirm. it doesn't really matter what it is, if i'm instructed to stand and participate, i almost certainly won't.

the piece itself sounded like an orchestration of a gospel tune, which i gather is what it actually is.

i'm not sure if this is the exact arrangement, but i think it is.

this was followed by an arrangement of ave maria. is ave maria black? it seems somewhat farcical on first glance, but i take it that this particular arrangement must have been constructed by a black american. it's still a little bit of a curious pick.

these pieces were running into each other like a medley, or, i guess, like a haphazardly thrown together symphony; these were movements, and the third was....a meditation on the word 'hallelujah'. it has a very minimalist feel to it in the reich or glass sense, but i was almost cracking up, really.

they then went into two pieces by a black female composer called nkeiru okoye, the first of which is supposed to be a hopeful reaction to 9/11 but actually kind of comes off as a walt disney megahit, to me, which is perhaps just a topical reflection - if america were to produce a hopeful response to 9/11, it would have to be in the form of a disney film. you can and i might suggest should imagine heroines singing soliloquies into their mirror in the middle part, psyching themselves up for their task. the big band perhaps gives it a downtown manhatten feel, but it kind of just comes off sounding like 49th street massacre.

https://soundcloud.com/nkeiruokoye/voices-shouting-out-1

the second piece by this composer was apparently a world premiere of her piece black bottom, which is a sort of opera in several short movements about the northwards adjoining neighbourhood in detroit, which is also currently the party district. i didn't even try to follow this, but i generally have no interest in opera, so i was not a good test subject; to me, the piece seemed sort of disjointed and didn't flow well, but i'd probably say that about most opera. i think that the dso did have this at their youtube site previously, as it is in the google cache, but it appears to have been taken down; as it was the world premiere, this is probably the only extant recording, as of this time.

the fifth piano concerto started up after a short intermission, and at that point i became cognizant of the nature of the audience - it was black, but it was also very young and apparently in attendance due to some kind of function. it clapped between the movements of the concerto.

this was my write-up, a few days after the show:

so, we didn't do a preliminary review of beethoven's 5th piano concerto.

the reason i didn't catch this earlier was that it was added at the last minute. the program was initially supposed to start with what the dso decided was specifically "black music" (and i'll have a bit to say about that when i do the review) and end with the same ravel piece i saw a few weeks ago, but the pianist had to drop due to tendinitis. so, they brought somebody else in at the last minute to do what is one of beethoven's most classic works.

i hope they didn't pick beethoven in order to buy into the urban legend that he was black. the arguments i've seen would lead to the conclusion that he might have maybe been distantly arabic - if you want to pull something out of his tonality, that's really what you pull out, and these reaching deductions about some paintings at most have him looking a little tanned, rather than black. it's supposedly due to the idea that his mother came from an area that was once under moorish control. in fact, the idea that the moors were black is itself just a eurocentric myth that should really be vigorously corrected across the literature; european art constantly depicted the moors as dark-skinned, and they of course were, but they were dark-skinned in the sense that an arab is, and not black like subsaharan africans. that is an anachronism that we've picked up fairly recently. so, shakespeare's contemporary audience would have actually known that othello was an arab. what the moors really did was create a neo-carthaginian state that was fundamentally semitic in every way, not african. but, i don't think anybody actually takes this idea seriously as it isn't based in any hard evidence, and i'll remind you that there is an urban legend that mozart was black, too. rather, this idea seems to get it's support from a strain of historical revisionism called "afrocentrism" that essentially argues that everybody was black - including historical figures like darius (iranian) and cleopatra (greek) that quite clearly were not. maybe, though, there were good reasons to pull the ravel from a concert about black music...beethoven was at least about liberty, equality and fraternity, even if his mother was actually polish and he was, actually, pretty much lily white.

this piece is perhaps beethoven at his most cliched, and you can kind of interpret that in a variety of ways. is it therefore beethoven at his peak? or does it get a little bit expected, in a sense? regardless, it's impossible to deny the sheer enjoyment of it, if you love the aspects of beethoven's work that he is still best known for all of these years later - the raucus piano parts, the sheer fucking with christian tonality and the nice, catchy melodies that he wraps all of that into. we get beethoven as barnstorming revolutionary, beethoven as purveyor of catchy tunes for the masses and beethoven as epic, brilliant troll all at once. it's hard to present an argument against such compactness.

but, it is a little predictable in terms of following his own previously established form, for better or worse.

if you ever get a chance to see this, jump at it. there's a magic to it. really. i'm glad i stayed up all night for it...

i was aware before i left that the weather might turn on friday night, but it was also supposed to hit a peak of niceness on friday afternoon before rapidly deteriorating. in fact, the wind was already starting to pick up when i got out of the orchestra hall around 13:00, enough that it was somewhat of a difficultly cold walk home.

i was finally back in before 15:00, a little less than 24 hours since i'd left, and this ritual did end properly with nachos, a shower and some good sleep.

so, i was just thinking about the last time i got sick (i'm actually feeling just fine right now), and i referenced the giant joint handed to me at the party where i got attacked by a vcr. it took a few days to feel it, but i picked up something fairly virulent that night.

and, then i remembered back to the write-up i did about the seven seals, and joked about the oncoming apocalypse.

i also recently posted something about locusts in africa, suggesting that they just eat the damned things.

well, maybe i did get the seventh seal, which means what, exactly?

i was never particularly religious, but in my pre-teens found myself with the conundrum of all of a sudden having a born-again christian (ex-alcoholic) stepfather who dragged everybody to church with him, so i took the step of sitting down and actually reading the bible, top to bottom, at around the age of 10 or so.

even then, i was actually approaching the thing as an anthropologist. when i was very little, i had a fascination with dinosaurs, as so many young people do. that managed to develop itself into an interest in ancient civilizations, i guess you could say the humanities, well before i turned ten years old. this was still before the internet, so i took advantage of the tools i had before me, which was mostly an encyclopedia set. i would read through the articles on the romans and greeks and follow the footnotes out to the carthiginians and scythians; i especially enjoyed reading about the punic wars, or that's something that i have a clear memory of, at least. when i got a little older, i could take books out of the library, and these compendiums of ancient cultures were the thing i tended to head for.

so, the jews were an ancient civilization, and the bible was their book. to me, it was just like reading any other history book.

i think this also fed into my interest in the game civilization, which i first played on my stepfathers old computer, in the middle of the night, as it was stashed away in the corner of the basement, just outside my bedroom.

i did actually read the thing, though, and it is what it is - a genealogical saga adopted from a variety of sources. but, i didn't actually believe any of it, not any more than i believed in romulus & remus, or in any other origin myth. i've often remarked that i dispensed with christianity fairly promptly by simply reading the source material; it was just impossible to take seriously, even down to the vicious portrayal of god, which was just nefarious.

despite my rationalist tendencies, though, i have to say that it was immediately clear to me that the revelation is an eschatological text; that is, that it is intended to be a description of the end times, however inappropriately, and not a prophecy that has already happened. i would have to assume that any theologian that is attempting to assign the revelation to an already existing historical event, as realized prophecy, has a strange interpretation of the apocalypse, relative to accepted pan-christian dogma.

that said, if this is an end times prophecy, then it leaves it's exact meaning open to interpretation, especially considering how many times it's been retranslated.

so, i'm going to just be literal about this - the seventh seal is when the eighth angel comes in and destroys, or at least severely damages, the earth with a sceptre full of fire, which is so very pagan, isn't it? these trumpets appear to me to be part of this angelic ritual sacrifice of the earth, rather than any message of any sort. really. what the passage describes is a ritual destruction of the earth by the gods, articulated here as angels. see, and i'll let you bring in the neoplatonism here, even if i won't let you assign the events to the neoplatonic period.

if that's my seal, i can work with that.

"oh, the earth? it will be gone, soon."

metaphorically, is that what i'm actually doing, though, in my analysis of the situation?

i've been quiet.

i've been tired....

at the end of the second day of shopping, which was the 1st, i took a walk downtown in search of soy milk and found two cartons (fwiw, the repackaged organic vanilla soy good has the same stats on the side, but has lost it's distinctive vanilla hue. i initially avoided the rebranding because it looked like they weren't fortifying it as well, but they seem to have fixed that. first, we lose strawberry, now we lose vanilla.....ugh.....and, this stuff was truly the most deliciously healthy elixir you could imagine, too. you should be forced to drink three glasses of this stuff, daily, by law. instead, there's no market for it. because we're collectively a bunch of fucking idiots.). while i was there, i picked up a gram of marijuana at the new store that was downtown, and a small pre-roll for the walk. this was actually mostly medicinal - i know from experience that walking substantive distances with a limp is a lot easier when you're a little bit stoned. so, i smoked through the rest of that on friday, but the combination of things - the panic attack, the overexhaustion and then the marijuana - meant i was mostly using it as a sleep aid. i'd go for a walk, and be out for three or four hours within minutes after coming back in.

on the one hand, i think that i clearly needed some sleep and rest in general, and if it helped with that then great. on the other hand, the day felt sort of wasted overall - i wasted the time, i wasted the pot.

so, i went back on saturday and got myself my biyearly quarter, a ritual i haven't observed since the beginning of 2018. there was no head cave over the summer of 2018, as i was in a straight edge phase, as i sought smoke-free housing. there was no head cave over the winter, as i was still living straight edge. by the summer of 2019, i found myself more interested in partying in detroit than hermiting with a head cave. and, we skipped that this most recent winter solstice as well - partly because i was sick, but mostly because i was laser-focused on trying to get a lot of work done.

i was very sick with a weird pneumonia in october after beethoven's 5th (something i attributed to smoking cigarettes the wrong way due to being handed a 40 of vodka earlier in the night) and again after the plaid/armed weekend in december (something i attributed to a massive joint that was handed to me). i was around a lot of people that had recently traveled, on both weekends. who knows; what i want is an antibody test. it could be a while before we figure out where this thing really came from.

i was planning on getting a small amount for 4/20 and maybe headcaving in july. but, on friday, they announced plans to close the stores indefinitely, so i got my quarter in while i could. it cost me $65 cdn for a quarter of 15% thc marijuana, which is a little on the high side, but not terrible. i'm used to paying $55-60 for a quarter. in fact, it was $59 + tax.

after getting a lot of rest on friday night, i got some cleaning done in here early on saturday morning before i headed out to the store to get the quarter. my knee is better, but it's still bugging me, and it's developed a lot of bruising around it. i don't explicitly remember anything happening, but i must have smashed it into a shopping cart or something. my feet are getting better, but the walk was still a little bit challenging.

and, i was able to locate four more cartons of soy as well, bringing me up to 8, meaning i probably have enough until mid-may. a carton lasts me about 5 days, on average. so, i go through around 6 a month.

i guess i was still exhausted, because i didn't last very long after my first roll on the quarter, and slept more or less the entire afternoon.

what about internet usage?

when i checked yesterday morning, it was the second that had no stats, not the first. oddly. reasonably low stats came in for the 3rd, but they seemed to be offset by a time frame at the server, as it logged 0 hours in off peak (and i know i was online in the morning). so, the numbers have gone down to something more reasonable and expected, but the server and modem also seem to be out of sync. i'll have to check again soon.

am i awake now? let's hope so. but, i may need to sleep this off a bit more, too.

so, what's happened over the last few days?

after realizing that the unauthorized traffic on my network was now using my router as a relay, i decided that right then was as good a time as any to go and get groceries for the month, so i completely dismantled everything in the apartment and was out to get some groceries by 7:00 in the morning, with the intent to get everything done with by sunset.

it was on my fourth trip out, around 13:00, that i ended up moving towards the far store, on dougall. i only intended to get some wholesale salami at the deli and then come back, but the deli was closed indefinitely, so i decided to just keep walking, in order to get a specific brand of soy milk. by this time, i'd been on my feet, often lugging bags full of food, for more or less six hours straight, and my feet were incredibly sore. i'd also picked up a slight sprain in my left knee that was giving me a mild limp.

i'd been to the two closer stores earlier in the day, and they were regulating the number of people in the store, but they allowed for more or less free movement within it. the far store, though, was like entering a compound. you begin your entry procedure by lining up around the corner, separated from each other by increments of ground that are defined by tape on the ground, two meters apart, no doubt with substantive error if actually measured, before being given hand sanitizer and then handed a sterilized cart on the way in and slowly making your way into the store, where these restrictions are suddenly lifted almost entirely, until you get into the checkout line.

something unexpected happened as i was in line to enter the store; i felt very faint, and had to sit down for a good twenty minutes or so, where i shivered in a cold sweat. observers no doubt interpreted me as symptomatic; that would be false, as i actually haven't experienced any symptoms at all. i'd been inside for two weeks, solid, remember. rather, it became clear to me right away that i was experiencing an anxiety attack from the lockdown measures put in place, and i was having trouble dealing with it due to overexertion.

this attack hit me a second time, when going through the checkout line, but i was able to shake it off until i got out of the store, and sat down there.

worse, they didn't even have my brand of soy milk.

anxiety attacks are not merely psychological trauma, they are a physical event. the nausea, weakness and sweating i was experiencing took a strong physical toll on me, leaving me exasperatingly exhausted; i did manage to drag myself home, but then i needed to sleep it off, immediately - and, i did. for roughly 12 hours...

after getting myself something to eat and taking another nap, it was all of a sudden 8:00 am all over again. i was absolutely still exhausted, but i wanted the shopping from the month done quickly, so i pulled myself out of bed and went out to finish the task.

the soreness of my feet took minutes to reassert itself, but i was actually able to walk off the limp after a few hours. after a few productive trips, i found myself in possession of everything i needed, except one thing - i couldn't find my brand of soy milk.

the soy i buy is a canadian brand called soy good that is fairly heavily fortified with vitamins. unfortunately, the silk brand seems to be taking over shelf space in most stores, and this brand has lower amounts of vitamins and nutrients than the soy good. i was considering compromising on chocolate soy good over vanilla silk.

i decided to try one more spot downtown - and was successful in locating two cartons. by the time i dragged myself home in the afternoon, i was so exhausted that i passed out yet again for another lengthy sleep. when i first woke up, around 3:00 am, i wasn't sure i'd be able to stand up for a day or two - it was hard to walk to the bathroom, even. but, after eating some food, i was alert and strong enough to get out one more time.

so, for a third day in a row, i found myself ready to get out of the house for groceries at 7:00 am.

at this point, i had everything i need, including soy milk. but, i drink 4-5 cartons of soy milk a month, so i needed more than the two i had been able to locate up to that point. where could i find some? i'd just checked the store downtown, i'd just checked the far store....

it made more sense to me to try the far store, first. did they have my brand? nope.

so, i took a walk south to the walmart. did they have it? nope.

so, i walked around to fred's. nope.

the last place i tried was the close store, where i was going to compromise on the chocolate, and they actually had what i was looking for. so, i grabbed four cartons and brought them to the cash...

"there's a limit of two items for soy milk."

in fact, there was no sign in the section. but, i didn't want to argue with them...

for a third day, i was so exhausted that i had no choice but to sleep - and, for the third day, i woke up feeling like a newborn fawn learning how to walk.

so, i finally turned my network back on on thursday night, after i'd slept the walking off a little, and checked my usage stats early on the 3rd...

i dismantled my network early on the 31st and had it off all day, so i should have had minimal traffic. teksavvy logged a large amount of traffic on this day.

there should have been exactly no traffic on the first. while teksavvy logged some traffic on this day, it was actually a recognizable amount of < 2 gb.

there should have been a small amount of traffic on the 2nd, about what teksavvy logged for the 1st. but, there was no traffic for the 2nd at all...

at that point, i realized what i'd done - i'd confused the server by keeping my modem off for so long, and it then logged me in under the wrong date. so, it logged my stats for the second and filed it under the first. in the process, it seems to have undone whatever was creating the problem.

while i initially was convinced of a police listener, and these outcomes are not mutually exclusive, the isp appears to increasingly be the culprit.

we'll see what happens in the morning.

i should be able to get back to writing that sunsquabi review very soon.