What I Learned This Weekend

  • The Allman Brothers are a lot better than I ever thought. Side 3 of Eat a Peach is a revelatory experience. And then there’s “Melissa,” one of the best ballads ever. Magical stuff.
  • David Lee Roth will never change. He will always be a vaudevillian egomaniac. Even while playing state fairs. I was playing with Superflux at the fair on Friday and checked out Dave’s set during a break. He leaned on his musicians’ backing vocals a lot, but he’s still a showman, although his age is catching up with him. Less kicks, less high notes, and he started losing his pipes early on. Still, it’s Dave. You either appreciate his complete lack of self-awareness or you don’t.
  • Playing guitar in cold weather makes it hard to play, and if you’re bleeding, you may not realize it for some time.
  • Biking is fun! I don’t know when the last time was that I rode a bike. I inherited Matt’s mountain bike and have only now gotten around to buying the necessary bolt cutters to remove the lock, and getting the tires aired up. I rode across the Big Damn Bridge yesterday. It’s a beautiful thing. My legs need to get into shape if I’m going to be walking all over NYC next week.
  • Marie Antoinette was a beautiful film, but kinda boring. Apparently there was this girl from Austria and a lot of stuff happened to her in France, but I’ll be darned if I really learned anything about what separated her from any other aristocrat of the same period. Maybe she’s supposed to be unknowable. Maybe that’s why she was so appealing to so many. Anyway, I thought that Sofia Coppola was going to break some rules of time and fashion, but if she did, I didn’t notice. Given the 80’s post-punk New Romantic soundtrack, I was expected a more stylized treatment a la Romeo & Juliet. To me it just seemed like a movie about the French artistocracy spoken in modern colloquial English with a soundtrack by Bow Wow Wow.
  • A house with no heat really bites. My heater’s motor died last week and Airmasters won’t be able to get the part until Monday or Tuesday. As I am typing this, I am very cold.