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Like you didn’t know what we’d do tonight …
Our friend Emily came to join us.
We had a later dinner. Pretty sure the pie was on the table at 9:26:53, so we had the ultimate 3.141592653 day.
This just reminds me that we’ve been having Pie Day for almost 10 years, with dozens of friends. Some of the best days ever.
Last night we were at The Tabernacle in Atlanta to cash in on my Christmas present. The Yankee got us tickets to see Guster play. I fell in with the band on their second album almost 20 years ago. Her god-sisters are also Guster fans, probably from college too, but, somehow, my wife never caught onto the band.
She knows about three of their singles with something more than a passing familiarity, but she may be converted after this, her first show. It was my first Guster show in years — you can forget how much you enjoy a specific band if you don’t see them often, I realized.
It was my introduction to this guy, Kishi Bashi:
He’s doing a one-man show, looping vocals, beat boxing and his violin and running it through a sample-loop device at his feet. This just works better to see it. Here’s a sample:
Each song takes a bit to build up because he has to build the layers — and how you keep that in your mind must be a fairly impressive feat, I’d think. Some of these are very pre-determined, but he’s also just experimenting, as well. It is all very happy — there’s a song serenading a particularly tasty cut of steak — and it probably helps that we were surrounded by Kishi Bashi fans. It occurs to me that if the guy isn’t from the future his art is a bit futuristic. Who needs a band anymore if you can make a full sound right there on stage, all by yourself?
He’s playing, with his full band, on the Letterman show next week, by the way. Go see Kishi Bashi.
Also last night, of course, was the featured act: Guster.
I’ll have a few clips from them tomorrow.
I forgot I had this. It runs 36 seconds and it is worth every bit of that much of your time.
Just imagine yourself in a warm place watching these people doing this:
You know, when you look back on it, that’s an enviously pretty view.
Miami from sea.
The phones had just died and we stood there on the deck talking in a small group and wondered how far away we were, how the distance and your perspective is skewed because your mind and your eyes are so limited. That’s just right over there. Look, you can see the buildings!
Trouble is, you can see so many buildings. So many small buildings.
But, you know, if you dropped into the water, here, this is a traffic lane. And at least seeing the shore and all of those distant buildings would give a boost to your morale. Better than being surrounded by empty horizon.
You think of that story of the football player who swam nine miles to shore, because he had an indomitable will.
I tried to tell, and told it so poorly that I just stopped, the tale of John Aldridge, the 45 year old crabber who fell off his boat off Long Island. He could really only remember the boots and the buoy, but the details woven into this january 2014 story remains impressive.
The news about Aldridge was also spreading through Montauk’s fishing community. Much of the town’s commercial fleet was out on the water that morning. Some fishermen heard Sosinski’s anguished first call for help. Others heard Sean Davis’s pan-pan broadcast. And then word traveled from boat to boat, back to the dock and then all over Montauk. The mood in town was grim. Everyone knew the odds: a man overboard, that far off the coast, would very likely never be found alive.
He was in the Atlantic for 12 hours before they found him. Said he’d spent his career conditioning himself for that moment. Surely, though, it wouldn’t take you 12 hours from that shot above to the coast. No way. And this picture is from Miami, not the north Atlantic.
I got the boots part of the story wrong in my telling of Aldridge’s story. (It has been a year since I read it.) But they were important, and I did remember that part.
Hey, it’s Friday.
I don’t know if it every came up in the show, but if the Flintstones had trading cards, they probably looked like this:
Sadly, it is not in mint condition.
I found this in Miami. If you have any idea what it means …
