pointless.

i have a old school german army jacket that i sometimes wear. see?:



anyway. i was on bart yesterday, in this jacket, coming home from a long and beautiful day of sf independent study: gg park, bicycle festival with crazy shoe tire bikes, buffalo, ocean, japantown, french thriller ("tell no one". its good!), cheese steak. i was sitting with my bike, when this guy boards, hes big, 30ish, wearing unseasonal flipflops and a baseball hat. he looks like a frat oaf. so then:

"hey. HEY! where'd you get that jacket?"
pause
"a thrift store"
long pause
pause
"you like wearing that jacket?"
"yeah"
long pause

and we go through the tunnel etc. silence. i go back to my book.
finally my stop arrives, i get up. hes in the door, so i have to go past him. i look him in the eyes just once.

"you better be carfeul who you wear that jacket around buddy.
you got a lot of balls wearing that jacket.
...
asshole."

i couldnt resist a small smirk. but thats all.

what is this, really? a jewish thing? its really my only guess...the guy certainly didnt look it though. maybe just a patriotic, american wwII old axis thing?

geesh.
i just wear it cuz it looks cool. and i like a lot of german composers.
geesh!

i am surrounded by small sprawling piles of paper nostalgia.
im moving to nyc in the fall, but this very week j&j are driving a giant silver bullet cargo van across the country. so im purging, the biggest purge of the last 8 years, and packing up all my big things, instruments, fancy clothes and worn-through books. and of course the box of unthrowawayable nostalgia.

i havent gone through this box in a long time, and its hitting me hard (doesnt help that im listening to the beatles, complete in chronological order, to maximize my nostalgix state)(btw, what the fuck is with all the clapping in "words of love"?). such a bizarre and arrogant swirlstorm of creativity my friends and i were! there are printouts of old email correspondence from dps, and, mat and more (including a few if i might say so quite beautifully understated love letters to a girl named jen henkin, whom i cant remember at all); there are cassettes and minidiscs of old college bands, early four track noise, a 7th grade "day in the life" documentary, and middle of the night cruise ship piano sessions, complete with elegantly mournful sighs of frustration when i time and time again cant lay down a single perfect chorus of "when i fall in love"; there are 8 years of old datebooks, with entries like "some new pants" and "telepathy/lobster claws/apocalypse"; and there are photos, and bizarre magazine cutout mailings, and old plays and scores, and frantic intoxicated illegibilities.

and above all, there are IDEAS; huge, lofty, horrible, wonderful ideas. looking through my old music notebooks is pretty wrenching when i focus on the specifics, all of these angular, atonal funk lines, unsingable jazz choir music, lots of different ways of notating "noise", 10 pages of random chord progressions created by dps's computer science genius. but the ideas, the ideas them selves are pretty amazing sometimes. there are outlines of complete, bizarre, unrealized music/theater pieces: "the wooden staircase", a ten movement masquerade of robed figures, closed doors, steeplechases and balloon men; a five year conspiracy art piece involving intentional mistakes by a major film company, symphony orchestra, book publisher and new york times columnist; there is "put all your eggs in one basket, put an entire cake in one bag".

all of it tingles and drips with the truth-is-right/stream-of-consciousness-is-truth early twenties idealism, with kerouac, with electric kool-aid, with phish lyrics, stockhausen and stravinsky, with dada and the rat pack and buddhist near-misses. aw god i got plenty old all right, and sure the art has gotten better, but there is that frenetic importance to it all that i miss. there is this urgency to all this creation of the past, this dire stakes, this attitude of love above all and !smash the glasses on the floor! that makes me want to head right out to north beach and find some brandy and a flapper-girl and take the piano out for a post-freebebop spin all over again. all those monkey truths may have had their strings and holes revealed over time, but the exuberant joy is still valid, and essential, and missed.

my favorite thing right now is this scrawled bit from a notebook dating from not too too too long ago, 2002 maybe:

--------------------------

GRANT WRITING TECHNIQUE
higher academic-
but enclosed
a small sealed envelope
special paper
unlabeled (or "the truth"?)

-i just have these things in
my head
and i need some $
to get them out.
i think it would
be good to
have
them
out.

-------------

i still kind of wonder if that would work.

"by KonArtist on 08-30-2002 @ 03:33:38 AM
Im more of a rap fan, so if i like a song like this u know that its good. This song is probly the greatest non rap song i ever heard.

by Skippy921 on 06-14-2005 @ 03:20:17 PM
This song to me means that there will be a change in your life and sometimes you have to step out and look from a far at your life and deciede what you want to keep and what you need to let go of. And sometimes these things we choose to do are impossible and not popular, but you have to stick to them or you will end up in a rut of life not wanting to be there, but you are because everyone else wants you to be and you lose sight of who you are and where you came from and going back home again means finding your roots and who you are and who you want to be, you have to think back to when you were as pure as a child and thought like a child and what you wanted back then. then with your heart racing you gotta do what makes you happy. trying to find "your one true swing" something that cannot be learned only remembered.

by TasChiBandGirl on 03-04-2003 @ 09:16:31 PM
Tough song to put together. I think it's about somebody who is having a sort of crisis. Not sure exactly what type. They're up at the hill or what not, thinking things over. It coudl be the possibility that the person got their heart broken and is contemplating everything, and their father and friend are trying to bring the guy back to their place, to realize that everything is okay, but they're too destroyed by the ex-love. Then they realize, that they do have to leave it all behind, thus the last line. Of course don't take my word for it.

by LoganNYC on 09-25-2002 @ 06:12:08 AM
well every time i hear the line
"son, grab your things, i'm hear to take you home" on
the radio, i get chills.
let's just say, i was in a situation where my father was in a position to say words similar to those to me, and the rush of emotion from one line is amazing.
music is a very powerful thing.

by Thursdaylove on 03-24-2006 @ 09:52:49 PM
A friend of mine just got out a prison a week or so again and when his parents went to pick him up, they played this song. So whenever I hear it, I always think of a kid getting out of prison.

by SongMeaningGuy on 06-11-2004 @ 03:02:50 AM
This is a stirringly visceral and spiritual song. Whenever I hear it my eyes fill with tears of joy. Sometimes I think I would like this song to be played at my funeral. The idea being taken home at the height of a mystic vision is profoundly moving.

by Aight on 04-28-2007 @ 10:31:52 PM
I have always considered these lyrics to this song to be totally about drugs.

by cyrolophosaurus on 04-04-2007 @ 01:30:12 PM
I used to think it was about suicide, but that was my own morbid interpretation of it. It was written as Peter was leaving Genesis and looking to become the solo artist that he is today. Just because it is about him leaving a band, certainly does not make it less deep or meaningful. The lyrics are inspirational and meant to open to individual interpretation. He wrote about his own feelings and experiences but let it be vague enough so that others could apply it to their own lives.

Sorrow on 06-12-2002 @ 07:43:00 PM
I could be wrong, but I always thought this song was about Jesus. And I'm not even christian.

by jnb987 on 01-08-2005 @ 03:16:10 AM
I heard that the eagle that flew out of the night was Bruce Springsteen. Apparently, Gabriel decided to go solo after seeing one ot the Boss' legendary mid-70's epic shows. "He was something to observe" and Peter "had to listen had no choice."

by kenba on 10-04-2004 @ 02:30:58 AM
this ain't steak... it's 'solsbury'"

whenever i spellcheck,
the suggestion
for
"davemalloy"
is always
"dismally"

cmon!!

Some thoughts on modern music distribution and rarity,
by Hoi Polloi Musical Director Dave Malloy

Hi!
So. Hoi Polloi Artistic Director Alec Duffy recently won the Sufjan Stevens Xmas Xchange Contest, with his song "Everyday Is Christmas" (official site here). First off, let us say that all of us here at Hoi Polloi are just pleased as punch and beaming with joy for Alec's honor and Sufjan's kind words. We have all been huge fans of Sufjan's work from the first (Alec first told me about Sufjan right after Michigan's release, when he discovered that they worked in the same building, making Alec rather girlishly starstruck. I was initially a bit confused by Alec's excitement, because I thought that he was talking about Cat Stevens, and that Sufjan was Cat's new Islamic name; Alec soon corrected me, and I became smitten myself. And that moment in "Feel the Illinoise"..."I cried myself to sleep last night..."...oh thank you, Sufjan!)

Anyway. As winner of the contest, Alec (and thus Alec's theater company) is in sole physical and legal possession of an original Sufjan Stevens track, "Lonley Man of Winter".

And it has raised the interesting question: well, what to do with it?

We've talked about it quite a bit, and we've come up with an approach. Alec has asked me to write a little bit about it.

Already Alec has been approached by a few websites, offering to host the song. Certainly the easiest and most immediately gratifying thing would be to share the song with all the world through the all inclusive, world absorbing internet. It's the great hallmark of our age that everything is so easily accessible to all (well, all economically and socially able to access a computer; but that's another rant). And it's a lovely thing, this vast world of information and art at our fingertips.

However, there is a part of us here at Hoi Polloi that mourns a bit for something lost. For the not so instantly available, for the hard to find. For the labor, the anticipation of seeking something out. For the rarity.

My two record collecting obsessions as a kid were The Beatles and Prince. It was clear to me growing up with my parent's record collection that was something wrong with the (American) pre-Rubber Soul Beatles catalog. My only source of information was the scattered record stores of Lakewood, Ohio, which had an abundance of even more confusing alternate titles...Something New!...Beatles '64...Love Songs...all with just one or two different songs on them! How could i just simply and easily (and on a $5 allowance) get all the songs? How could I get every song The Beatles had ever made? The discovery of the record Rarities in a Detriot record store increased my curiosity and insatiability...I wanted it all. Every new vacation town was scoured for used record stores, in the hopes that some new track might be found.

With Prince, my obsession took a slightly different flavor: the 12" and the B-side. The realization that "Erotic City" wasn't on Purple Rain opened me up to a whole new medium, the dance single...and man that weird piano solo on the "Let's Go Crazy" extended mix! I was hooked, taking buses to Yellow Pages found record stores in Shaker Heights, Bay Village, Parma. "Shockadelica"? The 22 minute "America"? This shit was INSANE; and I was one of the few people to know about it. It was like knowing a masonic secret.

It was special.

And then CD's came. The British catalog, Past Masters Vol. 1 & 2, The Hits/The B-Sides and the gaps in my collection were finally filled. And I felt happy, sure. Years later, Napster and Limewire filled in the final 12" mixes, and I was Prince complete (pre-93 that is, I'm not nuts). And I've got every Björk and Radiohead B-side, easily BitTorrented, easy easy easy.

But the romance, the romance of the unfound, the unknown!!

So. We'd like to do something unique with this track.
And so, in an effort to rekindle the flames of rarity, it is not our intention to release the track over the internet.
We'd like to make the hearing of this song something truly special.

Thus, we are holding off, and preparing a holiday show for 2008 in which the song will figure prominently.

After that, who knows? Like Sufjan's own 50 states project, we have high-reaching, long term visions for this project: a song thats passed on over the years from person to person, a hermetic grail, never being ripped into the world of the digital. Absurd, sure. But we think that Sufjan's artistry will stand the test of time, and we'd like to add to the mythical world of musical legend with our curation of this song: the song that will never be uploaded.

It is not our intention to hoard the song; we feel the delicate balance here, the danger of seeming like the cruel older sibling dangling the toy out of reach. No, no, we want this to be nice! And so if anyone feels the desperate desire of a fan to know sooner, we invite you to email us and arrange a special hearing. We're in Brooklyn. We'll have cookies and tea.

It is our intention to do something truly special, something new for the world of music and digital media. We hope you'll all join us on the ride.

Hoi Polloi

UPDATE:
fansite response is here

bah humbug! and scrooge mcduck!!

which are really not the spirit of our idea at all. the idea is to share it, just in non-massmarket/internet ways. like in the old days. (canary pointed out this really interesting article by david byrne- the stuff on music as a social event- dig?)

anyway, i think the original manifesto doesnt properly emphasize that we would love to share it with people before the holiday show, but in a special way, in person special.
with tea and cookies.

so drop us a line...im in berkeley, alecs in brooklyn.
its a really lovely song.

my hugest, gushiest, most sincere grin-plastered-on-my-faceiest outpouring of joy to my dearest friend alec duffy, who won the sufjan stevens xmas xchange contest:

http://xmas.asthmatickitty.com/

alec really does deck the halls every day.
hes the prince of peace.

last night ps and i set out to go to a new french restaurant in town, la jardinaire. a few friends had recommended it, with a coy hint to an out of the ordinary experience. it was a pleasant autumn night - berkeley allows itself fallen leaves and brisk breezes - so we decided to walk. ps and i were in a bit of a mood. joyful, daring, delirious. like teenagers on pot. we set out into the world laughing and stumbling, going to get us food.

the address was an odd one, on a residential street. we arrived at an ambiguous building, quite unlike a home or a business, somewhere in between, inviting awning bewitched by glass door, concrete walls adorned with deep wood mailbox and private small plants. we entered, up a staircase, and arrived on a dark and uninviting landing. the lights were out, the door before us unmarked and shut. it seemed that the restaurant was closed.

my mind registered a touch of disappointment. we looked at each other silently, our night suddenly unhinged. and then we clicked and turned to the door, just to be sure.

the door opened into a dark hallway.

"i don't think anyone's here?"
"well the door's open"

ps started to walk through, and i followed.

we found ourselves in a home. there was nothing restaurant about it; it had all the trapping of a modest family home. but it was the right address.

to our left was a kitchen. in the kitchen we found a large silver refrigerator. the food inside was magnificent - fancy bacon, endive and leeks, marinades in exotic bottles. also several cheeses that we couldnt name. a lidded glass bowl of homemade hummus. in many ways, this was the food you always hope to find in a strange refrigerator.

ps went into the living room and starting pounding out "claire de lune" on a small church organ, banging his head like he was a a rock star. he was really happy that we had found all this amazing food, and that we were going to have our restaurant experience after all.

me, i wasnt so sure. part of me felt like we had made a mistake: that we were in someone else's private home, and were about to burglar their food. it seemed wrong, mean.

but ps was so happy. this night couldnt have turned out any other way. the universe is all for us.

i went to the refrigerator and pulled out the cheese, first thing. there was a leather couch i was looking forward to sitting down on. i prepared the food while ps continued his recital, now picking out some angular talking heads melody. we didnt talk; we had mastered the evening, and we didnt put words on it.

to the right of the front door was a long hallway into darkness which we had been neglecting. a few times already we had heard noises from down there, metallic nosies, but we had ignored them.

but now a man cam running out from the hall. he was a fat italian looking man wearing a red one piece long thermal. he looked like luigi from super mario bros 2. he had a black wooden bat in his hand. he started yelling at us, spittle flying from his mouth. his violence was immense.

ps and i started to scream as the man approached us, shaking the bat. he was blocking our way back to the front door. i didnt think very hard; i threw the plate of cheese straight up, with the idea of creating a diversion. amazingly, it worked, to some extent; the man looked up at the airborne cheese. ps and i ran straight at him, hoping to squeak by his sides. at this moment, my vision is very sharp.

ps like a star quarterback pulls a fake and gets by on his left side. im not as agile; he swings as i pass him and i smell bourbon, then he gets me on the shoulder, hard. i barely feel it though; we are at the door and racing down the stairs, leaping them five at a time. we spill out onto the street and continue bolting, not looking back.

we ran about five blocks and collapsed in front of a parked ice cream truck.

anyway, we got away. we rolled onto our backs, breathless, and laughed at the moon. it was fine. but the next morning, my shoulder hurt so fucking bad. something went wrong.

last thursday night i went to see philip glass's appomattox at the sf opera. let's talk about what was good first. well, first it was just fun to go to the opera. i was alone - my date had caught the sniffles and none of the friends i contacted last minute were available/down with paying $25 to listen to a bunch of triads for 3 hours - but still there was a certain romance, seeing san francisco's wide range of style, velvet black gowns nestled sweetly against no-one's-gonna-turn-me-away-in-my-san-francasual-jeans. i was wearing black jeans and a proper gray sweater. i sat next to cute single girl in a floral dress and only looked at her once. sigh!

appomattox centers on the signing of the civil war peace treaty...its best scenes involve the interplay between generals lee and grant, played by two mesmerizing actors, giving the pedestrian details of diplomacy such grace and depth with their paired bassos. it was refreshing for me to see how engaging sung text can be; these scenes are just straight dialogue set to music, with no attempts at rhyme, meter or repetition. its just words set to non repeating melodies. and thats surprisingly beautiful...the time that it takes, the time it takes to sing something as opposed to saying it, gave everything such slow motion weight. weight to an actually heavy thing...the event itself, the end of a war, thrived in this slomo meticulous (went to the darjeeling express {limited? incident? the fact that i still cant remember the title is a hint to my critique [it was fine, delightful, unimportant]} recently and was all, jesus christ wes, maybe just pick 5 slomo scenes per movie>? wouldnt 5 be quite enough? couldnt you do that?) i loved these two guys, and wanted them to negotiate over horses for hours.

horses, though, ugh/ you know that thing, where an expensive theater show has a big prop/set piece, and they use it, and even though the symbolism and actual aesthetics of the piece are dead on beautiful, nevertheless youre just watching and going "wow, theres their expensive set/prop piece"? helicopters, chandeliers, revolving barricades...appomattox had inverted horse corpses, dead, realistic, gruesome. and belabored. oh well. also, a small fire on stage during the burning of richmond was so fucking laughably tame...this is san francisco for gods sake, fire art capital of my world. come on! though really after seeing "crude awakening" at burning man this year (the giant oil rig explosion) im probably pretty much spoiled on fire art for the rest of my life (nebunele on that burn: "It is the most viscerally powerful experience of art I have ever had or expect to have." amen.)

so yes. great singers, and the music itself, while not really notable, was at least pretty. i could go off on philip glass not really evolving at all, in fact having gone a little dry, gone are the playful arpeggios of youth, but thats a little old hat. hes an old stagnant man...frustrating though to have those pieces that transcend his safe zone (im thinking here of music from the screens and kundun) be so fucking good, and yet here he is in 2007, writing distilled late mozart. really well though. let us move on.

to what was so fucking BAD:::::::
black men directed by a white man singing a white mans words set to extremely white music by an extremely white man. about slavery/freedom and all. i mean, what?

ive got a real problem with artists speculating on profound things that they dont have any actual first hand experience with. its fucking insulting. even anderson's playful caricatures, so apt when applied to the upper middle class of rushmore-tennenbaum-aquatic, when thrust on not-his-india left me feeling a little queasy.

so white lutheran male childless me, im not gonna go write a piece on slavery, the holocaust, breast cancer, raising an autistic child, any number of a million hard difficult things in this world that i dont have firsthand experience with. i mean id get it wrong! i have no idea! "you dont own this". its true. and it belittles it to think that my imagination is enough to communicate the actual pain. and while i can certainly dig writing about any of these things from an outsiders perspective (eg im reading lethem's fortress of solitude right now and wow is it great, all about growing up white in 70s black brooklyn), to actual pretending to present the viewpoint of another race that has been oppressed by your own race and try to convey their emotions through the music of the oppressors? it just seems royally fucked/dishonest/bad to me.

maybe the principle of the thing could be skewed to seem reasonable if the music itself werent so hilariously white...most egregious the penultimate rousing chorus, "100 years/we still ain't free/were marching to/montgomery" set to the most pompous white aristocratic theme i can imagine...the operatic and thus totally unvernacular diction on "ain't" alone was enough to make me cringe. what were these black actors thinking while singing this? did it really resonate? wynton marsalis (who i hate in so many ways, but goddamn hes a brilliant arranger and his opera on slavery was a fuck of a lot better than glass's) has famously critcized louis armstrong's later work as uncle toming, soulless concessions to a white consumer market...and while i cringe at even writing the term, i gotta admit its all that was running through my head watching these black men white-emote. (interestingly this chorus had quite a few white actors in it too, two right up front and the rest mostly staged towards the back, and i swear with very subtle ambiguous darkening makeup on. i guess cause racism makes us all not free. and the principals all cast according to strict white/black dichotomy, with the lone asian exception on stage lumped unceremoniously with the whites, portraying lees daughter. what?)

and what were these white authors thinking? there was some heavy white guilt going on onstage, thats for sure. and that im totally down with, cause they own it. the last scene, an aria based on a bigotry filled letter/black murder bragging account written by a ku klax klan leader in the 60's, was awesome, super uncomfortable and honest and astonishingly portrayed by phillip skinner in a wheelchair and a crazy ugly makeup job. white guilt gets such a bad rap, its such a pittance compared to all the luxuries of white privilege, but it can really get in there, and it was powerful to see that so lovingly/hatefully owned and dissected and displayed in all its distastefulness.

hmph.

oh yeah, and supertitles are weird.
its in english!


----------------


on another note, i made my own pickles last week.
its easy!
they came out a little too salty, but i have high hopes for the next batch.
celery seed, dude.

last night i went to see the HOTTEST SHOW ON BROADWAY, spring awakening. it was pretty great, though the second act seemed strangely non-existent. microphone rock dancing, teens pounding their boots on the floor, working really hard, very exciting. the mics are a nice touch...especially when the guys put them back in their breast coat pocket when they are done. though one cant help but notice that the voices are mysteriously miced even off mic. hm, blech.

the much hyped sex scene is certainly exciting and dangerous- thank god broadway is taking chances like that, a furious blinding grope on a teen breast. even more dangerous is the girl duet hard rocker about child abuse, which just fucked with me in so many ways...these two teen girls are singing about what happens to them at night, while behind them the 30ish white male drummer is rocking out. just totally joyously obliviously rocking out. whoa. (while talking about the band here, ill also note that i have a monster crush on the uncredited, im guessing sub, pianist/conductor {uncredited unless her name is adam} the way she would duck down and groove, very hot. call me!)

one thing thats been really scaring me lately is the idea of genius decay...the late works of artists getting worse and worse. miles's 80s-90s studio albums are a fucking joke; paul mccarteny is recording for starbucks. what the fuck? cant they hear any more? the gradual blindness into mediocrity, its a scary thing, and i fear the day it happens to me. i already have the seeds of it, i know: the artistic blind spot, that moment that in retrospect is just so obviously terrible and yet cannot be seen at the time of creation. spring awakening has two of them...the first are the absurdly horrible schoolteachers, complete with funny, overpronounced german names, facial ticks, and most horrendously the single moment of "lets party" dancing during "totally fucked" that we all saw 20 years ago in a hundred teen comedies, the crusty old dean finally cracking a move at the final jubilee. are you fucking kidding me? when so much else in the show was so real, do we really need the adults to be trite, totally unbelievable caricatures? do you really need that cheap laugh so badly?

worse for me though was the act two homosexual seduction scene, which is played strictly for laughs. after such a tender and true, awkward and terrifying hetero dance in the first act, to go to cheap "im like a pussycat, i skim off the cream" land, with two again caricature voices, is just fucking insulting.

cmon! if youre gonna go for it, FUCKING GO FOR IT. actually much of the show seemed to play this uncomfortable dance, lodging it in this strange netherworld where parts took bold chances and rocked, while other elements felt like halfbaked concessions to an earlier broadway, one of overacted hilarity and euphemistic broadness to gloss the unease. one can imagine the agehardened producer trying to inject some lightness, something familiar into the show. or maybe the creative team had their own issues with bipolar pussiness. who knows.

its just so weird to me; how can someone (myself included) create something so very very good and yet have such egregious lapses? is it because we see too much, or not enough? i guess i know the answer to this...theres not just the forest, not just the trees, theres the roots, the incredible complex system of inspiration and thought that bubbles underneath, that looms so blindingly large in the artists mind but that the audience never sees. id like to take this blog out with one of my trademark "new hyperplatitudes", but am now plagued with doubts that those are artistically poor. and even more plagued by how exactly the phrase "forest for the trees" maps out metaphorically. too plagued to continue.

dude i love matthew dear!

after rehearsal thursday night we went out for a drink at showmans, on w.125th in harlem. there was a hammond organ on stage, which alone caused me enough excitement to overlook the 2 $9 drink minimum; the band started playing some perfectly capable standards, and the waitress brought us our drinks, double jamesons all around (i just learned that ones choice of irish whiskey is a political statement. though my choice honestly has less to do with politics than with a mother-inflicted soft spot for a good rebel song), and free hot dogs, made on a foreman grill in the corner.
so were chatting along finely, when im startled by a new crystalline sound; and i look up at the stage to see that there is now a tap dancer, an old old black man in white pants and a loose bowling shirt, with a knowing gleam smile on his face, and his legs and arms unstrung puppet loose. its really, really wonderful tap dancing, cause hes dancing with his face too, all the tiny expressions of joy and surprise, like a balinese dancer. and his taps are a good three octaves higher than any taps ive ever heard, giving the whole thing a decidedly fantasy oz feel. weve all stopped talking and are mesmerized by this man with id guess 50 years of experience at his art, and im marveling about that; the new unknown to me realm of synthesis and confidence that comes with age. artistic wisdom, unwavering.

he heads towards the edge of the stage, and im disappointed that the tapping is about to end, but instead, as soon as he leaves the stage a young japanese guy in a long black shirt takes his place. his taps are at the usual octave, and his dancing is quite different; a little stylish and aloof, but still quite good. he does most of his dance with his back to the audience though, which annoys me and sends my attention drifting...so im surveying the audience and hear two guys talking, the one saying "im not going after you"...and then i look down at their feet, and see shiny shiny shoes. and in fact i look all round us and see that theres over a dozen people sitting near the stage in suspicious shoes; and it dawns on me that somehow weve stumbled into a tap dance open mic night. holy shit.

what was amazing to me was how varied each dancers style was. heres a pretty limited palette, basically just rhythm and dynamics, but each of the 14 or so dancers we saw (all, by the way, taking two choruses of an unending "its always you"; one can only imagine what the organist was thinking after a half hour of this) was quite distinct; some swung threes and some shuffled fours, some reveled in the silences, some pyroed their way through each beat. it was so much more then just "this guy was fast and loud, this guy slow and soft"; instead these amazing personalities on their faces were somehow translated directly into strings of sixteenth notes. one young guy in dreads and patent leather boots (boots!) teetered on the edge of losing the beat the whole time, acrobatic polyrhythms never acknowledging the one but nevertheless staying convincingly grooved. there were two women, one a silent film star pinwheeling but always abbreviating, the other fiesty firecracking in a too short skirt. the other japanese guy was strangely effeminate but for his charlie chaplin moustache, and his tapping was from another time and place, like a termite picnic. one super old guy milking the silences absurd. two out of place and slightly apologetic white indie kids nevertheless shuffling just right. an old old cowboy, white hair and a studded shirt, messy but firm. then the wizard got back up, his shoes again jingling high above reality, took a interim chorus, and then they traded fours. then like five of them got up and tapped all at once, tap tap tap! to take it out.

the wizard said thank you, thank you, and come on back and bring your shoes, we do this every thursday.

personalitys a wonderful thing to see in someones feet.