I spent much of the day cleaning up my inbox. If you ignore your inbox for the better part of a week it can take the better part of a day to read through everything.
I’m beginning to unravel the mystery of where my days go. It’s all Quora and Pinterest and spam.
The highlight, then, was a little bike ride in the evening. What a great way to bring in a weekend during a week off!
I’m trying to not think of my work inbox, which has also been neglected for a week.
So I distracted myself on my bike ride by going down a road I normally ride up. Up and down are generally relative, of course, but this one has a certain downhill feel to it in this direction.
It was interesting how a simple change of direction on even a seldom-used road changed the tenor of the ride. Indeed, my wheels were humming differently through there.
That road took me out toward the local dirt track, which was ready to make their Friday night noise.
The only problem there is that for almost a mile in any direction the speedway races drown out the sound of any cars coming up behind me. This was most disconcerting.
But, oh, what a pleasant 20 miles. A light and easy way to bring in the weekend.
Welcome to September. Like you, I have no idea how this happened, or how it occurred so quickly.
Today I taught someone a foundational trick of a technology that’s now more than 30 years old. Happy to do it. It makes me rework the analogies I use. If you, for example, haven’t figured out how to do a basic thing that’s existed during the entirety of your professional career, I need to find a frame reference you might understand.
So remember when Chevy Chase …
Otherwise, this whole thing is hopeless.
An equally impressive highlight of my day was going up one floor to get a remote control, and then taking that remote and its DVD player to someone else a few floors away.
Just kidding. The real highlight of the day, maybe the week, was lunch. I walked down to Chipotle and ordered some takeout. This was the second lunch I’ve purchased during the work week since February or March of 2020. I figured a day or two of something other than a peanut butter sandwich will make the return to peanut butter and bread seem all the more exotic again.
If you are what you eat, I am destined to become a big smear of peanuts.
In other work miscellany, the next time I will show you progress on the removal of the nearby Poplars Building I expect will look a lot different than this. This has been the story since Monday.
They’ve been working on the rubble, and some of the lower part of the building obscured from our vantage point. But I bet they won’t be doing anything tomorrow. It’s a three-day weekend, of course, meaning everyone is making it a four-day weekend.
Let’s jump back in time to Monday night, when we caught the Barenaked Ladies show in Cincinnati. On Monday, in this space, I shared a bit of the opening act from Toad the Wet Sprocket. If you were here on Tuesday you saw a brief bit of the brief feature performance from the Gin Blossoms. Yesterday there was a bit of classic BNL. And here’s a bit more from the 2018 inductees of the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
This is “Man Made Lake,” from last year’s Detour De Force. The drummer, Tyler Stewart, says:
it is an allusion for drowning in man’s creations, as opposed to losing yourself in nature, which is often very therapeutic.
I think that it’s a very raw vocal, very personal and up-close. It’s the first song that we recorded for the album, and I think it really set the tone for those acoustic sessions, and obviously, it’s a standout on the record.
And that’s all well and good, but there’s just something about that simple bass drum that haunts the whole song. It’s a curious, and telling, heartbeat, if you will.
Detour De Force, their 13th studio album, was produced just before the pandemic began, and later that same summer, is the album this tour was meant to support. So just imagine, right about here, three or four paragraphs of navel gazing about how the pandemic impacted the arts.
This is from the song “Looking Up,” off 2017’s Fake Nudes. It’s a live show song, I think, a bridge between one mood and another in a concert. And this is the only interesting part in a song of saccharine pablum.
The big finish is a cover medley. There’s some instrumentation changes, some Led Zeppelin, Devo, a web meme and a nod to the late, great Biz Markie. And we always celebrate Biz Markie.
I am running out of ways to vamp for this demolition project. No big updates on the Poplars Building today. It is amusing, a few people on social media have marked the occasion — one gentleman flew his drone over it — but no one is lamenting the building. One of the best, and kindest mentions, is from what’s left of the local paper, which called it “a city landmark with countless, shifting identities.”
Now they’re just shifting rubble.
The saddest part of all of this, truly, is what’s happening to the local paper, which has never been in that building, but it is similarly being pulled apart.
The late nights begin again for me. It was a 6 p.m. production, which wrapped at 8 p.m. today. One production and two shows down, 41 shoots and 72 shows to go.
I’m exhausted already.
But I did get a nice evening view of the sun streaming into the building at one point.
We wrapped everything up and I rode my bike back to the house in the last bit of the daylight. There was less traffic, meaning I got to go faster, and I did the whole trip — including three stop signs, six red-light intersections, a roundabout and a left turn — without putting a foot on the ground.
I’ve done that three times now, so I need a new goal. Please submit your ideas.
Time for a few more songs from the Monday night rock ‘n’ roll show. The headliner was Barenaked Ladies, and because they were the main attraction I’m stretching this content a few more days.
This song, Enid, is 30 years old. And the band genuinely looks like they still enjoy this one. Huge hit in Canada.
It was their second single, and off their debut album. Their first single was a cover of a Bruce Cockburn classic. That same year, and also from their debut album, they released Brian Wilson. Here’s the beginning and end of that Monday night performance, because I enjoy the search for a coherent mesh point.
Brian Wilson covered that song, by the way. How cool is that?
More music, and perhaps some other interesting stuff tomorrow.
Funny, how quickly back-to-normal gets you back to normal. I’ve been a bachelor the last two weeks, but my lovely bride returned from a much-deserved family trip yesterday. We, of course, hopped back in the car and went over to Cincinnati for the rock ‘n’ roll show. We got back just around midnight last night. And this morning it was the alarm, a quick bike ride into work, and watching the work over at the half-gone Poplars Building.
I wonder if I can call it the Pop Building, then.
This evening it was leave promptly for a quick bie ride back to the house. We had to return a rental car and that place closes at 6 p.m. After that, dinner, catch up on the new Game of Thrones show, House of Exposition And Time Jumps and then get ready for bed.
Back-to-normal happens quick.
Yesterday in this space I shared some clips from the rock ‘n’ roll show. Toad the Wet Sprocket opened the show. Here’s photographic proof. They had an eight-song set.
I’ve been listening to them for almost 30 years, now, and I’ve seen them twice. Both this summer, 18 songs total. Worth the wait is a weird expression here — particularly since the first show was supposed to be in 2020, and the Monday show was a spontaneous add-on that was, itself, postponed from last month, and — why did I wait to see a band I enjoy? Surely, somewhere along the way, there were intersecting opportunities. Right? But who knows?
Toad opened the show, and the Gin Blossoms were the featured act. They did a six-song pure nostalgia set (down from the nine songs we saw from them in July). And that was fine. I’ve managed to see them a half dozen times, I think. Same jokes, same material. You’re there for the vibe, and to try to reclaim the unreclaimable feeling of a younger day. It’s illusive; it’s Sisyphean; it’s impossible and melancholy.
So, then, Gin Blossoms are perfect for that.
That’s a hasty, from-the-hip mix I made on my phone just now. I am surprised how well it works.
The rest of the week we’ll fill out this space with Barenaked Ladies. (Lots of clever lyrics for titles, too!)
