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Unsolicited thoughts and opinions of William Cole, instructional technologist and sometime student of hypertext and literature, broadcast from an undisclosed location within the asphalt jungles of South Jersey. Except where explicitly stated otherwise, all opinions stated here are entirely my own. I make no promises of either timeliness or coherence. Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
In my usual late-to-the-party fashion, I am still working on my favorite albums of 2011 list (it's a smaller field than 2010 was, but a lot of the albums came out—or I only acquired them—late in the year, so my feelings on a lot of this stuff are still a bit unformed). In the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to look back on my 2010 list (which, embarrassingly, is only two posts ago) and see if I still agree with myself.
(As an aside, one of my gripes with most professional 'best of' lists and, indeed, with most record reviews in general is that in my experience, the first, second, or even third impression of an album is rarely definitive. Some of my favorite songs are ones that I barely notice the first time I heard them; other songs that excite me on first listen gradually lose their luster with repeated playing. I've seen lists of 50 or more 'top albums', some posted as early as November of the year in question, and my first thought is always, how many times did the author actually listen to any of these records? I realize professional and wannabe professional music critics are obliged to post reviews as soon as possible, but I wouldn't trust my own snap judgment on any record, so why should I trust theirs?)
Following the format of my original list, here's my self-assessment a year later.
Cream of the Crop
Not much change here. The Monitor is still, far and away, my favorite album of 2010, and at this point, it's probably safe to say that it's one of my favorite albums of all time. The biggest change is that Los Campesinos!' Romance is Boring, which I only awarded Honorable Mention status a year ago, steadily grew in my estimation to the point that I would move it all the way up to my #2 slot. No small part of this is probably the fact that I became completely obsessed with the song "The Sea is a Good Place to Think about the Future" during the fall (when I was, in fact, spending a lot of time thinking about the future). Seeing them live for the first time in November also helped cement my affections.
The other entries in this category remain largely unchanged. If anything, I'll just go on record as calling it a three-way tie between Frightened Rabbit's The Winter of Mixed Drinks, Best Coast's Crazy For You, and Sleigh Bells' Treats for the third spot in my ranking. Three very different albums, each of which I found compelling in its own way.
Second Tier (New)
The ascension of Romance is Boring bumps Tokyo Police Club's Champ out of my top 5. It's not that I like Champ any less, but my appreciation of the others continued to deepen while this remained more or less static. Meanwhile, a couple other albums from the Honorable Mentions category seem to have inched up enough to be more or less on a par with it, so if I were doing my rankings now, I'd add a Second Tier including Champ, The Soft Pack's The Soft Pack, and The Thermals' Personal Life.
Honorable Mentions
As already mentioned, a few of these albums managed to climb my personal chart. Of the remaining entries, most—Gogol Bordello, Trans-Continental Hustle; Girl Talk, All Night; LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening; Screaming Females, Castle Rock; The Vaselines, Sex With an X—remain in a tight cluster of good-but-not-top-shelf albums. Only Belle & Sebastian's Write About Love perhaps falls out of the standings, being replaced by one of my Ask Again Laters: The Extra Lens's Undercard (Top Tracks: "Cruiserweights" and "Only Existing Footage").
Ask Again Later
These were albums I found very late in the year and didn't think I'd given enough time to to really have formed an opinion. The Extra Lens fulfilled my prediction of making it to Honorable Mention status. Male Bonding's Nothing Hurts and Surf City's Kudos, despite coming to me with excellent references, never managed to make very strong impressions on me (no really standout songs, quite a few indifferent ones). Das Racist's two offerings—Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man—both have their high points ("Fake Patois" and "Ek Shaneesh" from Shut Up, "All Tan Everything" and "You Can Sell Anything" from Sit Down) but get diluted by numerous merely average songs (few bands can get manage to put out 37 tracks in one year and not have some clunkers).
Addenda
Since my original poost, I've picked up a few more 2010 releases but none that broke into the upper echelons of the year's albums. I'll mention a few though because they are local (Philly) bands that I discovered over the past year, mostly as openers at various shows.
Reading Rainbow, Prism Eyes. I'd heard quite a bit of buzz about this band and finally saw them open for Los Campesinos! last fall, which is when I bought their CD. The album sounds like a bunch of other bands who are mining the same general surf-pop aesthetic: pleasant enough but not very memorable. Live, however, I thought they had a harder, almost Sonic Youth-y edge to them. Recently, they changed their name to Bleeding Rainbow.
Slutever, Sorry I'm Not Sorry [EP]. I keep bumping into this self-described 'bratpunk' duo (opening shows for JEFF the Brotherhood, The Baseball Project, and The Coathangers) and have become a fan in the process. This EP is available as a name-your-own-price download on Bandcamp. The one song that really stands out it is "So Prone"—although I actually prefer the newer version of the song on their recent 7", Pretend to Be Nice—but there's enough going on with the rest of their stuff that I'm interested to see what they do next.
Dry Feet, Philadelphia Beach. Another band I've run across opening a couple of times (both for JEFF the Brotherhood as it happens), Dry Feet take the concept of 'surf punk' to the extreme of performing in Jams, tie-dye shirts, and/or goggles and snorkel. The style's not especially original (think of Man or Astro-Man? played half again as fast: the entire 8-song 'album' clocks in at 12 minutes), but they have a certain exuberant charm. In any case, the albums's available for free on Bandcamp, so why not take a listen?
Final Words
It's reassuring to see that I haven't radically altered my assessments from last year, although the case of the Los Campesinos! album is a classic example of how some music takes longer to get its hooks into me. I haven't really paid close enough attention enough to say whether there are particular stylistic factors that have that effect, or if it is just a matter of timing, context, or other ephemeral factors. I've been contemplating for a while writing about how I actually rate music (a question I've expended way more thought on than can really be justified), but one of the mysteries that continues to confound me is why a given song makes that jump from 'good' to 'great' to 'amazing' in my estimation. In the end, it's essentially a visceral reaction. Some songs go straight to the viscera; some work their way there slowly.
It's been a week or so since the Phillies clinched their fifth straight NL East championship. Expectations for this team—both among fans and within the team itself—are almost impossibly high: anything short of a World Series victory will be counted as a disappointment. I'm as excited as anyone, but I'm keenly aware that there is a fair chance that the Phils will NOT win it all. Not because they aren't capable (carrying baseball's best record for most of the season despite a number of injuries to key starters shows that they are more than capable); not because they have a major weakness for opponents to exploit (the Hunter Pence acquisition seems to have plugged their only offensive hole, and despite some recent hiccups, I feel safer handing the ball over to this bullpen than I have in a long time); not because they've celebrated their title with a six-game losing streak. It simply comes down to this: playoffs, especially in baseball, are a crapshoot.
There are a lot of clichés in baseball (the one that got me thinking about this was yet another invocation of the adage "pitching wins championships"), but perhaps the truest is that it is a game of inches. An inch—or less—can be the difference between a routine fly-out and a game-winning homer, an RBI single and an inning-ending double play, a critical strikeout or the walk that paves the way for a big inning. These minute differences aren't exactly random—great players are the ones who (thanks to some combination of superior mechanics, decision-making, and sheer physical prowess) are able to consistently be on the favorable side of that inch—but games often seem to turn on a handful of plays that could literally have gone either way. Over the long haul of a major league baseball season, the impact of these "lucky breaks" is minimized, or evens out. In any case, by the end of a 162-game season, it seems reasonable to see teams' records as expressions of their respective talent, rather than the vagaries of chance.
Playoffs in any sport present the classic "small sample size" problem: the more we restrict our focus—to a single series, or game, or period—the more a single anomalous event skews the overall result. And baseball offers arguably the smallest "sample" of opportunities for its contenders to compete in of all the major American sports. To win the World Series, a baseball team must win 11 out of a potential 19 games (best-of-five Divisional Series and best-of-seven League Championship and World Series). That is, the baseball postseason is, at most, a bit under one eighth the length of its regular season (between 6.8% to 11.7% to be exact). By contrast, the NBA and NHL both play a season that is roughly half as many games (82) followed by four best-of-seven playoff rounds, for a postseason that can run up to a third as long as the whole regular season (no wonder these sports' playoffs seem to last forever). In the NFL, the champion must win four direct-elimination games (three if they get a first-round bye), which is a quarter (18% for the bye teams) of their 16-game regular season.
To put it another way, you could say that each regular-season football game is "worth" as much as 10 baseball games. If that's the case, a best-of-seven series could be likened to to playing a 40-minute football game, with the option of ending it at various points past half-time if one team gets sufficiently ahead. (The divisional series are, by that logic, like playing only half a football game that could end any time after the first quarter.) How much different would football history look if you simply dropped the fourth quarter from every Superbowl?
Obviously, given the differences in game mechanics among the sports, none of the above is an apples-to-apples comparison, and I am by no means saying that any of these systems are better or worse than the others (well, hockey playoffs are too damn long, but that's an issue for another time). But I do think it highlights the fact that baseball's regular season is very much a marathon and its playoffs are, if not exactly a sprint, certainly a different kind of race. The things that make a team good over the regular season (scoring runs and preventing runs) should still give that team an edge in the playoffs, but the impact of each individual play is magnified, and there is much less time for aberrations to be averaged out. Other sports have their share of upsets and Cinderella champions, I guess, but baseball has produced some truly memorable ones (the barely-.500 '87 Twins beating the Cardinals in the prime of their "Whiteyball" days; the Dodgers knocking off the seemingly unbeatable "Bash Brothers" A's the following year; my own beloved Phillies ousting the Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz Braves in the '93 NLCS).
The unexpected and the improbable make for great drama, and I wouldn't necessarily have it any other way. But there is a danger in assigning too much importance to these critical moments. It's literally impossible for for one play out of hundreds to decide the outcome of a multi-game playoff series, and yet we frequently use these moments to measure not just the skill or talent of a player, but even his moral fiber. Be on the right side of the one of those inches and you're an instant hero; be on the wrong side and you're a bum (a phenomenon that is at least as old as the New York Giants' Heinie Zimmerman being declared "the newly-crowned Monarch of all the Goats that are" for his role in a botched rundown play in the 1917 World Series). That has never seemed fair to me. As crushing as Joe Carter's homerun off Mitch Williams in the '93 Series was, and as glorious as Brad Lidge's final strikeout in 2008 was, those are just two pitches among hundreds of thousands that were thrown in major league baseball those seasons, each of which contributed its own small piece to the the whole.
In any case, come playoff time, I will root for my Phillies, and yes, I'll be disappointed if they don't go all the way. But win or lose, I'll know that a myriad of other outcomes were only a few inches away.
I have not made a practice of doing yearly "Top Albums" lists. Usually, I am so far behind on and so slow to form opinions about new releases that any such list would have to be woefully incomplete and/or laughably late in arriving. This past year, however, I actually did manage to listen to a good bit of the year's music and had at least a few strong opinions about what I'd heard. I tweeted a provisional Top 10 countdown in the waning minutes of the year, and I probably would have left it at that, but the Grammy awards (and the hubbub over The Arcade Fire winning album of the year) got me thinking about this again.
So for what it's worth, here are my favorite albums of 2010. Out of deference to convention, I've ranked my five favorites, but aside from my top album, I wouldn't put much stake in the actual positions. I cobbled together a kind of "system" for ranking the albums (discussion of which will have to wait for another day), but I am not sure I am sold on it, and in any case the distance between the #2 spot and the #10 or even #15 spot was not especially great. Hence the large "Honorable Mentions" category.
Titus Andronicus, The Monitor. I've raved about this album already. It's my hands-down favorite of the year, and I'm confident it could hold its own in just about any other year. I love every last second of its 65 minutes, recitations of Civil War speeches included.
Best Coast, Crazy for You. I found this album instantly likable in a way that's extremely rare for me, and it stood up to several months of pretty heavy listening. People knock Bethany Cosentino for the simplicity of the lyrics (and yes, she leans pretty heavily on easy rhymes like crazy/lazy, end/friend, kiss you/miss you), and the band is working a retro-surf vein that is suddenly very popular and perhaps already in danger of being played out, but there's a plaintive edge to these songs that sells them for me. Plus, the video for "When I'm With You" is worth a few bonus points all by itself. Top Tracks: "Crazy For You," "I Want To," "When I'm With You."
Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks. It took me a long time to warm up to this one. 2008's terrific The Midnight Organ Fight (which, you will recall, became something of an obsession for me at the time) set a pretty high standard that I don't think this album quite reaches, but it is still a fine effort. Like it's predecessor, it's a melancholy record, with a core of regret and heartbreak blanketed in lush layers of sound that make the pain palatable. The bitterness found in earlier songs like "Keep Yourself Warm" has mellowed a bit, and there's actually a couple of up-tempo songs here — though with lyrics like "And though I dreamt with a rapid eye / By day, I hope to rapidly die / And have my organs laid on ice" (from "Living in Color"), it would be hard to call them upbeat. This album probably got a an extra bump in my estimation from the fine live show Frightened Rabbit put on back in October. Top Tracks: "Nothing Like You," "Living in Colour," "Things" (especially the sparser "alternate" version that closes the record).
Sleigh Bells, Treats. It's hard to find a frame of reference for this album. "Noise pop" seems to be a popular label. There's the aggressive dissonance and distortion of, say, Sonic Youth, but it is beat-driven and dancey. Lyrics are minimal and repetitive. And there's some samply stuff going on. All fused together into something that probably ought to be completely unlistenable, but for some reason isn't. So, yeah, I am basically at a complete loss for how to describe this, but it won me over. Top Tracks: "Tell 'Em," "Rill Rill," "A/B Machines."
Tokyo Police Club, Champ. I have this completely irrational block with this band where every time I hear their name, I picture a poster I once saw for the German boy-band Tokio Hotel (with whom, just to be clear, these Canadians have absolutely nothing in common). Despite this affliction, I find this album thoroughly enjoyable. This is pretty much straightforward indiepop, energetic and upbeat. Top Tracks: "Favourite Colour," "Big Difference."
Honorable Mentions
These are albums I certainly liked and would recommend, but which didn't quite distinguish themselves like the preceding. I haven't bothered ranking them. It's probably safe to say I like them all about equally, although often for very different reasons.
Belle & Sebastian, Write About Love. Top Track: "Write About Love."
Girl Talk, All Night. Top Track: "Triple Double."
Gogol Bordello, Trans-Continental Hustle. Top Track: "Immigraniada (We Comin' Rougher)."
LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening. Top Track: "Drunk Girls."
Los Campesinos!, Romance Is Boring. Top Tracks: "Romance Is Boring," "The Sea Is a Good Place To Think Of the Future."
Screaming Females, Castle Rock. Top Track: "Ghost Solo."
The Soft Pack, The Soft Pack. Top Tracks: "More or Less," "Flammable."
The Thermals, Personal Life. Top Tracks: "I Don't Believe You," "Only For You."
The Vaselines, Sex With an X. Top Track: "Mouth to Mouth."
Ask Again Later
Some interesting records I only got my hands on recently and haven't really formed opinions about.
The Extra Lens, Undercard. John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) and Franklin Bruno (Nothing Painted Blue) collaborating under a new name (they used to call themselves The Extra Glenns). Looks like it could slip into the "Honorable Mentions" category.
Male Bonding, Nothing Hurts and Surf City, Kudos. The first I even heard of either of these was in a friend's year-end top 10 list, but I respect his judgment immensely.
Das Racist, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. Formerly known primarily for the goofball hit, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Das Racist seem to have gone for maximum saturation in 2010, releasing two full albums, for free no less. They might benefit from being a little more selective, but if they keep spinning out rhymes as insane as "Nancy Drew, Nancy who? Nancy Reagan in a fancy pantsuit, dancing bear in cahoots with the man who shotcha," who am I to question their methods?
Conspicuous Absences
The problem with making lists like this is that they are, by nature, exclusionary. "Omissions," as Marianne Moore would say, "are not accidents." I like to think, however, I have grown out of the need to define myself more by what I reject than by what I love. So I offer this list as a selection of the year's music that made me happy or got me excited. As for the omissions, accidental or otherwise, let's just say they did not elicit the same excitement, and leave it at that.
And Finally
I made an 8tracks mix of some of my favorite songs form 2010. It includes many of the "Top Tracks" referenced above (8tracks rules only allow two selections from the same artist or album per mix) as well a few other standout singles. Happy listening!
The following is an assignment for my class in Interaction and Interface Design at the University of Baltimore. The basic parameters were to find and summarize two articles from the ACM Digital Library on the topic of MobileHCI as an initial step in a larger research project connected to group projects we are working on. My group is working on a mobile application that would incorporate an element of sharing personal progress through a users' social network. As I have taken on the User Research Lead role in my group, I was particularly looking for articles that dealt with this social component. it's clear that the growth of mobile computing and online social networks have gone hand in hand, and a prominent activity in this domain is the sharing of personal progress of all sorts, from the infamous "what I had for lunch" tweet to games that broadcast players' achievements to publicly tracking one's progress toward personal fitness goals. I am especially interested in the motivations behind this behavior. While the particular search for this exercise may not have been optimal for finding research on this topic, I did turn up a couple of interesting papers touching on it. Here, then, are the summaries:
Leitner et al., How Online Communities Support Human Values (2008)
The stated aim of this study was to understand the "why" of online communities: to "show which human values and underlying behavior motives refer to online communities." It is grounded in a body of previous research on "value-sensitive" and "value-centered" design, which assert that the worth of products is tied to their ability to "deliver values" to the user. To ascertain the values that are served by online communities, the authors used the technique of "Laddering Interviews" (itself grounded in Gutman's Means-Ends Theory). In these interviews, participants were prompted to explain their participation in online communities in progressively more abstract terms, moving from attributes of the community itself to consequences of those attributes and finally to the values that made those consequences desirable. The results of these interviews were then aggregated and analyzed to discover recurrent patterns of connection.
From their results, the authors identified "three thematic pillars of online communication": a communications chain ("People want to be informed and to communicate upon certain topics"); a friendship chain ("People want to overcome certain space limitations to maintain and strengthen relationships"); and a self-reflective chain ("People want to learn from other people for self-reflecting reasons"). It was this last set of connections that the authors found most significant. They speculate that participants use online communities to establish benchmarks for measuring their own status and position in society. They note that this would explain the wide-spread practice of "lurking" in online communities. This self-reflective component of online communities would also seem to provide an explanation for the practice of broadcasting personal progress through social networks. One caveat, however, for this study is its relatively small sample size (only 26 subjects were interviewed). Although the authors are confident that their findings would be supported by broader studies, it would be premature to conclude that their "three pillars" are either universal or exhaustive.
McNally et al., The Effects of a Wireless Online Community Network on Social Capital (2005)
This study concerned the interaction between online social networking and real-life social capital, which the authors define (following Cunningham) as "a resource which allows individuals to co-operate with each other and co-ordinate their actions." They site a number of previous studies showing the possibility of using electronic communications to encourage face-to-face social interaction, in particular Resnick's concept of "Socio Technical Capital": the ability of technology to facilitate social interaction by removing constraints of time and place.
The study itself was conducted among student government representatives at a "third-level" educational institution, half of whom were given access to wireless PDAs and an online network for discussing issues outside the body's regular face-to-face meetings. The effects of the mobile devices on the students' "Social Capital" was measured both through a survey instrument and by direct observation of meetings. While the survey showed a "moderate" correlation between the use of the network and increased social capital, the authors felt the observational findings were even more conclusive. As they state: "A vital implication from the study is the importance of examining a community from both an on-line and physical point of view, when examining the effects of an OCN. It is critical to take a holistic view of the participant's world."
While the scope of this study is somewhat limited and not, in itself, of particular interest for the project I am working on, the connection they assert between online and offline social activity is a significant point, and the social capital foundation they are building on ought to have broad applicability to other forms of social networking.
Last week, I went to see Titus Andronicus (along with The Tough Shits and local boys Free Energy) at the First Unitarian Church in Philly. You may recall that I wasn't entirely happy the last time I saw them (last year in Louisville) and I skipped them in favor of the Thermals when they came through Philadelphia this spring. Nevertheless, I headed to this show with some pretty high expectations, based on my ever-deepening love for their latest album, The Monitor. I am happy to report that Thursday's show exceeded even those expectations. They were, in a word, brilliant.
Of course, it was a bit sloppy (and there was something weird going on with the sound on the keyboards), but where the previous show was sloppy to the point of distraction, this one stayed right at that point of frenetic chaos you hope for from a punk rock show, where you lose yourself in sound and motion and energy (and heat: the Church is a notorious sweatbox, and this was the by far the hottest show I've seen there. By the end, the entire floor was slick with sweat, I was dripping from head to toe, and it took, literally, two days for the clothes I wore to the show to dry out). Even the slower songs (or sections of songs) contributed to the energy by providing a chance to catch one's breath (something this 42-year-old found particularly welcome) before the next burst of fury. My only complaint would be with some of the beefier male audience members, who apparently don't know the difference between "slam dancing" and "running headlong into crowds of people like an asshole," but those types can be found at almost any punkish show, and in this case, the behavior stayed mostly at the nuisance level.
So why the transformation? The band's composition has changed significantly since 2009, but since my biggest complaint then was with frontman Patrick Stickles, that doesn't seem like the best explanation. The enthusiastic and appreciative audience (excepting the assholes mentioned above) probably helped—Amy Klein, one of the newer band members, tweeted afterwards that it "was the best show of my life!!!!!! " The fact that they were close to home and wrapping up a cross-country tour might have helped amp them up a bit. But I think I would chalk most of it up to the growing maturity of the band both personally (Stickles was conspicuously chugging Gatorade rather than beer during the show) and musically. Especially musically.
I liked 2008's The Airing of Grievances a lot. There are some terrific songs on it, and an undeniable energy. But The Monitor is a quantum step forward. I'll let the Dean do the reviewing for me:
Their debut was one of those inexplicable accidents in which some dysfunction-channeling young malcontent recaptures the halcyon days when every punk band had something to say by simple virtue of existing. Usually these malcontents run out of jokes or tunes pretty quick. Seldom if ever do they then channel their dysfunction into, for instance, a concept album that squooshes an interstate breakup saga into a bunch of Civil War references. That's New Jersey returnee Patrick Stickles's project, only channeling is for punks and he's some indigenous emo-Springsteen hybrid--for an hour of rant and roll whose nine tracks range up to 14 minutes, it's more like sloshing or spewing.... Stickles bellows, "None of us shall be saved, every man will be a slave," "After ten thousand years it's still us against them," "The enemy is everywhere." You could complain that these cris de coeur are a loser feeling sorry for himself, and I could admit he's overstating. But at least he's stating. He may be a loser and he may not. Either way, he's not about to quit.
I'll go further than Christgau and simply call it the best album of 2010 (definitely the best of the ones I've heard). As he notes, its premise seems preposterous on its face (a concept album? filtering personal heartbreak through the Civil War? that includes a 14-minute song?). The lyrics are as dark and bitter as you'll find anywhere ("I will not deny my humanity. / I will be rolling in it like a pig in feces. / 'Cause there's no other integrity / In awaiting the demise of our species"—from the absolutely perfect "Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Dimensions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem)"). The music is hard and aggressive, but includes such improbable elements as military drum-rolls, keening violin (played by Klein), and wailing bagpipes. By some kind alchemy, however, Titus Andronicus succeeds in fusing these ingredients into songs that are angry, desperate, beautiful, and joyous.
It's the joy that is most unlikely and unexpected. Lots of bands make records that are angry and misanthropic, and I am all for that. But I can't recall the last time I heard misanthropy made into such anthemic crowd-pleasers. As Perfect Sound Forever's Jason Gross tweeted from their final show in New York, "Titus Adronicus [sic] live- something liberating about singing 'you will always be a loser' with them & entire crowd." It's as if, by voicing their (and our) darkest despairs and ugliest hatreds, they exorcise them, and we the audience can share in and celebrate that exorcism.
I keep falling back on magical terms (alchemy, exorcism) to describe how I think this album works. I think all great art is, in a sense, magical. Art does the impossible: taking mundane ingredients (sounds, words, paint, etc.) and combining them into something wholly new and unanticipated. We can analyze artistic objects—make interpretations, trace influences, examine technique—but I don't think any of that quIte suffices to explain what happens when something that has never existed before suddenly is.
To put it bluntly, art is a fucking miracle.
Random Addenda
Oddest moment of the show: during a brief break between songs, parts of the audience started up a "Let's go Phillies" chant (we're a little excited about our baseball team here), to which Stickles responded with an impromptu rendition of "Meet the Mets" (a song that has, notably, been covered by another great New Jersey band, Yo La Tengo). There was a brief standoff, with Stickles and the chanters trying to drown each other out, until he declared, "enough with baseball. This is punk rock, which has nothing at all to do with sports." Situation defused.
After the show, I talked briefly to Titus Andronicus guitarist/violinist/vocalist Amy Klein, who graciously agreed to my request to take a photo of her with her violin. Both of my kids are taking violin lessons, and I really wanted to show them (especially my daughter) that violinists can be rock stars.
Klein tweets and blogs as "Amy Andronicus" and has a lot of interesting things to say about being a woman in the androcentric world of indie/punk rock (among other things). Her Rock and Roll Is Dead post, in particular, seems to have generated a lot of discussion.
You may recall that I wasn't entirely happy 
