Infinitive Splitter

I last saw the Shins when they opened for the White Stripes at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in the fall of 2005. It’s entirely possible that my perception was skewed by my proximity to the band (about a mile away, on the lawn) and the several 24-ounce beers I drank between sets, but I recall that I was much more impressed by the White Stripes.

Massive outdoor amphitheaters like Merriweather are fine for Jimmy Buffet drinkapaloozas, pop-orchestra summer concerts and meandering jam-band head-bobs, but most indie bands, like the Shins, have too intimate a sound to fill the endless space.

Before last night’s show at D.A.R Constitution Hall, I’d heard lots of complaints about the (indoor) venue’s acoustics: in a recent Washington Post chat, some commenters suggested that the hall is acoustically suited for high-school commencement ceremonies (which it hosts every year) and nothing else. I wasn’t in a great position to judge the mix, since I was in a balcony box slightly in front of the stage and directly under the 15-foot, stage-left tower of speakers, but it sounded pretty good to me.

The seating, though, sucks big time.

Constitution Hall has no real orchestra pit; its first row of seats is two feet away from the stage, so even the “pit” crowd has to fill seven rows of rigid chairs instead of a freer space (one that might, on other nights, accommodate an orchestra). The entire floor of the venue has immovable seats, so every person has four to six square feet of reserved space.

The restriction is awkwardly stifling. The Shins’ catalog comprises several dozen bouncy, feel-good pop songs, but at D.A.R. they played to a crowd of full pockets that applauded after each song but stood mostly still for the music itself. Apart from a handful of carefree types who jumped in place for most of the set, my view from the box — where, like most people on the tier level, I remained seated for the duration — was of a static sea of smiling white faces.

Awkwardness aside (and with indie-pop music, when is the awkwardness ever really aside?), the show was well played and well received. The band curiously soft-pedaled a couple of their more energetic tunes — a companion noted that they were playing “Girl on the Wing” at an “adult contemporary” pace — but mostly they stuck to the album versions. At the end of the night, the band’s return to the stage for an encore sparked a cheer that was markedly louder than any that had followed the songs — not an unusual occurrence, but until that moment I’d had trouble figuring out how much fun the crowd was having, and I suspect the band had similar trouble.

Auditorium seats don’t mix with rock and roll.

(Thanks to Simon for making a ticket to the long-ago sold-out show available!)

This is one of several time-irrelevant posts of which drafts have been lingering in my WordPress editor for a while. The excerpt below is too fascinating to stay hidden in the decades-old book in which it appears, so, apropos of nothing other than today’s installment of Married to the Sea, here we are:

In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson writes:

According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. … Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience.

I often think of this when people say a word “isn’t a word,” since it should be obvious that the only way to create new words is to use a word that’s never been used before. There are cases when such obstinance is fair — irregardless is universally rejected because regardless and irrespective already exist, and the offending writer usually means to use one of those — but in general I think it’s best to take a liberal approach.

The Oxford English Dictionary adds new words all the time: on December 14, 2006, adhocracy, corporatize, fugly, unelectable and hundreds of others earned its recognition, and regular readers will recall that I wrote previously about last June’s additions.

But no one — not even the editors of the OED — has the power to confer or deny legitimacy in any meaningful sense. As Bryson, again, writes in Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: “One of the abiding glories of English is that it has no governing authority, no group of august worthies empowered to decree how words may be spelled and deployed.” Indeed, of the four “new” words above, only adhocracy isn’t already in fairly common use, but its meaning is instantly apprehensible. (Fugly, for the unfamiliar or the terminally highbrow, is popular among internet gossips).

None of this is particularly relevant to anything else at the moment, but I think it’s quite interesting, so this is the blog I’ve blogged for today.

In honor of its official release at midnight, I took the time to listen to the whole of the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible while doing nothing else but reading along with the lyrics. I rarely do that; the last time I bought an album and listened to it straight through without doing anything else was in 2003, with Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief.

Neon Bible, of course, is exactly as epic and poetic and wonderful and life-changing and rock-saving as everyone else with a website or a microphone or a commercial printing press has already said it is, so I’ll spare you my full and revealingly ignorant review.

Instead, here’s my proposed tracklist for a single-disc “The Best of Oasis” compilation (in chronological order, as I would arrange it):

1. Columbia
2. Cigarettes and Alcohol
3. Slide Away
4. Don’t Look Back in Anger
5. She’s Electric
6. Champagne Supernova
7. D’You Know What I Mean?
8. Don’t Go Away
9. It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)
10. Flashbax
11. Go Let it Out
12. Force of Nature
13. Lyla
14. The Importance of Being Idle

It isn’t just a “greatest hits” mix, but it isn’t totally oblivious to the hits, either.

Saturday night at my house featured lots of gin, lots of bourbon, and lots of music and discussion thereof. Sunday featured headaches. So when a friend called late in the morning to ask if I wanted to see Mikal Evans at Iota in the evening, I didn’t jump at the chance.

“I know it’s Sunday,” she said, “but it’s a low-key acoustic set. We can sit in the back and have a drink.” OK.

As it turned out, all the seats were taken when I showed up a few minutes after Evans started playing, but it didn’t matter. Her performance was just the thing for a low-intensity Sunday night — mellow and understated, but very beautiful and very compelling.

Of a January performance, DCist said:

Evans’ style is best summed up by an observation from one audience member: “This reminds me of a really good P.J. Harvey song.” Well, Evans may drop her “g”s more than Harvey does, but the point is that it’s tough to do the indie-singer/songwriter shtick without blending in with the likes of Joss Stone, Liz Phair, and oodles of other talented women.

DCist called Evans an “Appalachian songstress,” and indeed my first impression brought Alison Krauss and Emmylou Harris to mind. Evans, who alternates between acoustic and electric guitars (despite my friend’s description), was accompanied by another singer-guitarist, named Justin,* whose surname I didn’t catch but who complemented Evans perfectly — think of Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina” (Heartbreaker, 2000), if Harris had had the melody and Adams had sung backing harmonies. The depth of their combined sound belied the fact that it was just the two of them up there.

I very rarely buy CDs at shows, but I was disappointed when Evans announced that she had none for sale. There are four recordings on her MySpace page, but none of them do justice to the performance. A proper album will come out in the fall; look for it.

*Correction: The accompanist’s name is Timothy Bracken.

I wrote yesterday that Joey Porter, who made news last fall for calling Kellen Winslow a “fag” during an on-camera interview, was “not really a guy I’d want to get too close to,” even though I still like to watch him play football. I can overlook athletes’ politics and their ignorance about modern decency (John Rocker and, more recently, Tim Hardaway are two beyond-the-pale exceptions) because most of them are semi-educated man-children whose sole purpose in life has been to excel at a physical activity not connected to their ideas about human interaction in general society.

When the Porter story broke, as I recalled yesterday, I saw it mostly as an example of shoddy journalism, since early reports led with the fact that Porter had called Winslow “a derogatory name,” but they didn’t say what the name was. (If the insult is newsworthy, the news report should tell readers what the insult is.)

Mere hours after I published yesterday’s item, right-wing heroine Ann Coulter took the stage for her much-anticipated address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which wraps up today.

During her speech, she said: “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m — so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” As the video at Think Progress shows, the audience reacted with a Jerry Springer-style “OOOOH,” and then strong applause.

Later in the day, Coulter appeared to endorse presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who had preceded her on stage and spoke of her thus: “I am happy to learn also that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing. Oh yeah!”

So how did the wildly popular, shockingly offensive remark by the unbelievably beloved right-wing kingmaker at the most important conservative gathering of the year go over with Washington’s top political reporters (many of whom were there to cover the event)? Eh, they must have missed it.

In its page A11 report, the New York Times’ only mention of Coulter comes in paragraph 11:

The conference drew thousands of attendees, many of whom waited in a long line out the door for a late-afternoon appearance by Ann Coulter, the conservative author and commentator. Still, the tone of the conference was less excitement about the 2008 campaign than concern about the ideological credentials of the three leading contenders for the Republican nomination.

The Washington Post’s A4 story doesn’t mention Coulter at all. Dana Milbank’s column on page A2 has this paragraph, which relates more to the convention’s general tone than to the implications of one of the right’s most popular figures using the word “faggot” to describe a candidate for president:

In the session preceding Romney, Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) said of Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq: “She’s an idiot.” In the session after Romney, Ann Coulter used an anti-gay slur to describe John Edwards (the line drew applause) and asked: “Did Al Gore actually swallow Michael Moore?” When a questioner asked Coulter why she praises marriage but broke off so many engagements, she responded by calling the questioner ugly.

So much for the big two. At least the LA Times got it:

The day’s most controversial speaker proved to be conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who at the end of her speech — which followed Romney’s — used a slur to refer to Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards.

Coulter said she had intended to comment on the former senator from North Carolina, “but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I … can’t really talk about Edwards.”

When Joey Porter calls someone a “fag,” it’s newsworthy because Joey Porter shoots from the hip and sometimes his shots go wild. But he’s a professional athlete, and his pronouncements — while damaging in light of the number of people for whom sports figures are role models — aren’t terribly relevant in the larger world. But Ann Coulter is very much a face of the American conservative movement. She is, with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and a few others, one of the movement’s popularly appointed voices for tellin’ it like it is. The presidential candidates who sought CPAC approval this weekend know exactly what Ann Coulter means to the most powerful branch of the Republican party (which, you may have heard, still controls the White House and the federal judiciary, and maintains considerable strength in the United States Senate).

Ann Coulter is their spokesperson, and it’s time for the press to understand and reflect the unfortunate weight of her words.

The Pittsburgh Steelers cut trash-talking, heavy-hitting linebacker Joey Porter yesterday, in an apparent attempt to avert potential leadership problems for newly appointed head coach Mike Tomlin.

Porter, perhaps the Steelers’ best overall defensive player in the 21st century whose play helped win them a Super Bowl 13 months ago, was due a $1 million roster bonus by Tuesday and a $4 million salary in the final year of his contract. That, and other factors, prompted the Steelers to release him.

“Unfortunately, sometimes you have to terminate a good player, just to make it all work,'’ said Kevin Colbert, the team’s director of football operations.

Although no one on the Steelers would say so, the threat by Porter to hold out last summer played a factor in his release. Team officials did not want to burden new head coach Mike Tomlin with that kind of threat to his authority. Even though Porter was scheduled to make $5 million in the final year of his deal, he was unhappy with his contract and there was a chance he might boycott some of the minicamps and then training camp had he remained with the team.

If you don’t recognize his name, Porter made headlines last year on these memorable occasions:

• In September, two of his dogs got loose and killed a neighbor’s miniature horse.
• In December, he called Cleveland Browns receiver Kellen Winslow a “fag” (some initial news reports about it were unclear), an insult for which he clumsily apologized thus: “I didn’t mean to offend anybody but Kellen Winslow.”

Not really a guy I’d want to get too close to, but he was always fun to watch on the field.

This is the kind of thing I normally post to the Quick Hits on the sidebar (and if you haven’t been following them, you’re missing most of the best content on this website), but I couldn’t find an excerpt short and relevant enough.

Elton Beard, “Polite Fiction”:

I got this email a while back promising a nice sum of money if I just helped this Nigerian government official move his inheritance to an American bank and to make a long story short, it hasn’t work out so well for me money-wise. So my neighbor Brett said I told you so, I told you if you believe this guy you’ll be wasting your money. And I said back no way, dude! I did not waste that money! To say the money was wasted is an insult to the money, which had nothing to do with the decision that resulted in its loss! I demand you apologize for denigrating innocent money I said, emphatically.

There’s more; read the rest.

(If you haven’t been following the news recently: there’s a war going on in Iraq; Sen. Barack Obama, a candidate for president, said it has resulted in “over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted”; when his political opponents howled, Obama said he regretted his choice of words; several days later Sen. John McCain, a candidate for president, said, “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives”; when his political opponents howled, McCain said he regretted his choice of words; and today the war continues.)

On Friday night, 800 of my closest friends and I watched Middle Distance Runner bring the house down at the 9:30 Club. I can say totally objectively that it was the most fun I’ve ever had in six years at that venue (full disclosure: I live with three members of the band).

Saturday morning, I awoke a few minutes before tickets for the May 4 Arcade Fire show at D.A.R. Constitution Hall went on sale, and I immediately spent the next five or six minutes refreshing the Ticketmaster page every four seconds. When the time came, my first search for two tickets in “best available” seating came back with a couple on the tier (upstairs) level, and in my first important decision of the day, I stupidly rejected the offer.

In a further, inexplicable extension of my presumptuousness, I specified in my second attempt that I wanted tickets on the orchestra level. When my search got to the front of the line (no later than 10:03), I was told to get real.

Sufficiently sobered, I retried the original search, knowing that the results that were unacceptable the first time had become my hoped-for best case. No dice on that, of course; by 10:06 there were no pairs of tickets to be found. In desperation, I tried for just one ticket — anywhere — which somehow returned a seat in the orchestra section with an “obstructed view.” Good enough!

(So anyway, if you were planning to ask me for an extra ticket, you’re out of luck.)

I spent the balance of the weekend importing into my new computer many of the CDs I have collected in the last 12 years or so — and which have gone largely unheard in the MP3 millennium. I look forward to reacquainting myself with the albums I liked well enough to pay for back when my paychecks didn’t have to go toward groceries and rent.

Hello again, Odelay. Been too long, Definitely Maybe.

I spent part of a snow day last week watching Crash, the last of last year’s Best Picture nominees I had yet to see, and it was exactly as over-hyped and Hollywooden as everyone said it was.

This year’s Oscars ceremony is on Sunday, and once again I haven’t seen nearly enough of the nominees to make predictions or recommendations of my own (of those nominated for major awards, I’ve only seen Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, The Departed, and Borat). But cheat sheets are out there, and I have to admit to availing myself of one of them in making my office-pool picks today. For the awards too obscure or mysterious to merit mainstream odds, I did what I imagine even some of the lazier Academy voters do — I checked random boxes.

There’s no need to announce all of my picks (except to say that I think The Departed should earn Scorsese his long-overdue Best Picture), but I do want to use this space to make one caveat about my choice for Best Actor. In accordance with conventional wisdom and overwhelming odds, I chose Forest Whitaker, but I can’t help thinking that Peter O’Toole might ride in on a dark horse and take it away. Oscar voters are notoriously sentimental, and many of them surely remember O’Toole’s reaction upon hearing, in 2003, that he would be honored with the Lifetime Achievement award:

Since I’m still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright, would the Academy please defer the honour until I am 80?

(He later decided to accept it anyway.) When asked about this year’s nomination last month by the Daily Mail, O’Toole, now 74, gave this answer:

“To be considered is okay, but it’s not enough: it’s winning the bloody thing that matters.

“So if I win the bugger, great. If I don’t, then tant pis. I shan’t lurch around in agony and despair.”

Maybe true, but I would not be at all surprised if the Academy declined to make him prove it.

Via Deadspin (of all places), I learned that Kurt Cobain would have been 40 years old today.

I was never really that into Nirvana; my favorite song of theirs is “The Man Who Sold the World,” which is, as Cobain acknowledged after they played it during their acoustic set on MTV, “a David Bowie song.” Unplugged in New York is the only Nirvana album I ever bother to listen to.

More relevant to me are the discoveries that Noel Gallagher will be 40 in May, Beck Hansen and Rivers Cuomo will be 37 this summer, and Cake’s John McCrea is already 41 or 42 (as of this writing, even Wikipedia isn’t sure).

I started listening to some of those guys when I was 11 or 12 years old, and by the time I was in junior high school I had at least one album by all of them (but not Nirvana — in 2003, a girlfriend gave me a used copy of Nevermind after I admitted to being the only American child of the 80s and 90s who didn’t own it). For some reason, I always thought of them as being the same age as I was. As Nick Hornby might point out, it’s probably because the stuff they were singing about was the same stuff that had recently begun to roll around in my own head.

A 39-year-old Noel Gallagher seems a lot further from a 24-year-old me than a 27-year-old Noel seemed when I was 12. But I suppose that happens when rock stars move directly from late adolescence (where many of them seem to spend more time than most people) straight past young-adulthood and into gray-haired middle age.

Small wonder that none of my favorite songs are about moving from entry-level jobs to truly rewarding careers, or the importance of keeping up with friends from high school and college, or how to decide where to live, or whether to go to graduate school.