Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Stop burning time on the Internet reading idiots like me. I'm carefully designed to waste your time and leave you no better off than when you began." -- theferrett, 2005-05-24 in an entry that has more general advice than that in it as well, which makes my suggestion of reading it ironic, I realize...

Behind on communication (nearly a week behind on LJ reading, going on three weeks behind on LJ writing that isn't in the "dash off quickly between other thoughts" category, and uncomfortably behind on email). Trying to catch up a little today, but also have other things that need doing.

Not a good week for my feet (though it could be much worse) -- Friday I tripped going up a stair and tore my right fumbnail big-toe nail (trying out using "fumb" for "big toe", decided I haven't seen/heard it enough times for it to look right to me yet) nearly halfway across, about halfway down. Ouch. I built a fugly patch out of laters of tissue paper impregnated with cyanoacrylate (Krazy Glue), and that's holding up well enough that bouncing around on it at Saturday's gig didn't hurt. (But the edges are rough and catching on things -- I need to take the Dremel and a grinding bit to it.) Then last night I tripped going down stairs, landed in a thigh-bruising manner, and folded my left foot up badly enough to worry about more serious damage (as in, "Now I have to wait half an hour and see whether it swells up, to know whether it's broken or not; hope I can walk later"). Fortunately that was just a close call, and the foot just feels a little stiff today. *whew*

Saturday was not a good day for BaltoWash area highways. In addition to the eitage that had me stopped in I-95 when I was already behind schedule (northbound closed, southbound stop-and-go with two lanes (out of four) blocked), I ran into similar traffic for an even longer stretch of I-66 (cause not apparent). And as far as I could tell from listening to WTOP, an Even Worse accident must have happened moments after I passed Wisconsin Ave. on I-495. And then there were a slew of other major bang-ups reported in places that didn't affect me.

But the gig went well -- not the most energetic or demonstrative audience (hey, we weren't the reason they were there, it being a wedding, not a concert) but lavish with the praise when speaking to us one or two at a time during breaks and at the end -- everybody but Jim was present (he had a lute gig elsewhere). The biggest problem was that I was (and still am) missing some of my index cards. As stage glitches go, that's a pretty small one.

I've got the chord changes for most tunes on index cards -- one card per set. For some tunes I'm reading off the card, trying to maintain a connection to the audience despite looking down to read. For other tunes all I need is an "Oh, that one" reminder or a quick check of the key at the beginning of each tune (or, more often, just the first tune in the set). And for the rest, the card is just insurance. Well, most of the sets whose titles start with 'J' are missing from my stack of index cards. My first guess -- that Perrine had knocked them off the bed when I'd been going through them upstairs recently -- turned out to be incorrect, so I'm still looking for them. Argh.

Yesterday, and a good chunk of today so far, was spent recovering the spoons I spent Saturday.

And that's enough "pretend to take a break by babbling on LJ" time for the moment; I'll have more to post later.

"It's time for the 'Five O'Clock Shadow', where we play a cover tune, followed by the same tune performed by the original band, and you write a two-page paper comparing and contrasting the two ... Just kidding, you just sit back and enjoy."

The song today is "Street Fighting Man" (originally by The Rolling Stones; I didn't catch the name of the cover band). Since I'm a lazy blogger Since I should really be doing other things, I'll make it a two-paragraph paper...

The cover struck me as something a bunch of historical re-enactors might perform a couple of centuries from now based on sheet music and descriptions and some general knowledge of the musical techniques and styles of the era but without having heard the original. There was inflection that indicated understanding of the lyrics, but a certain softness to the performance, more Monkees-crossed-with-Simon&Garfunkel than Rolling Stones. It lacked ... "edge". (Not that a cover should be a duplicate of the original, mind you (uh, unless you're Todd Rundgren showing off), but since I started listening with "compare and contrast" in mind, this was the impression I had.)

But then the original came on, and I was startled to notice that that recording is itself much "softer" than the mental impression of it that I'd been comparing the cover to a moment earlier! It's still a little harder, somewhat crisper, a little bit angrier-sounding than the cover, certainly more forceful vocally, but by nowhere near as large a margin as I was thinking as I mentally composed the previous paragraph. In retrospect, I was actually comparing the cover to my own imagined "personal cover", my own reinterpretation of the song which had incorporated stylistic influences from punk rock into it, not to a faithful recollection of the Stones' recording.

This tells me that a) I should form a band to record my interpretations of my favourite songs, and b) I'm not listening to my LPs often enough.