December 6, 2004

• Weekend Update.  First off, watch this video.  Try and do so with good speakers.  You might hate it or love it, so make sure you can access the volume knob.  It is not my kind of music at all, but I'm finding myself forgiving it because the visuals are just SO DAMN GOOD.  I haven't seen anything quite this bizzarely creative in the mainstream in a while.

  
  

  Anyway.  Friday was a nice night at home.  I made barley and roasted vegetable soup, a great recepie that I'd tried a while back, and was hooked.  It's been chilly here, so soup's on! This recepie is spectacular.  Adhering to a few suggestions in the comments section, 1) put the garlic in for half to three-fourths the time of the veggie roasting process, 2) red wine instead of broth for the roasted veggie scrapings, 3) you WILL need more than 8 cups of broth, but equal parts water to broth over the recommended 8 would be fine, 4) the recepie does take a while, much longer than you think, but you can do the barley while the veggies are roasting.  Mr. Fresh came over for some hot stuff, and he said it was delicious, so you be the judge.  I'm pretty sure he was talking about the soup. 

  
  

  Saturday, La Peter and a gaggle of his friends went to Carmel, just south of Monterey.  I'd never been there before, and it was really beautiful.  It had a certain unreal feel to it, almost like a storybook feel.  Except for the fact that it's definitely an upmarket place, not the least of which includes the visitors (there were a couple of high-end Italian sports cars around, parked on the streets no less, so that should tell you something).  Galleries and shopping, galleries and shopping, and not for the poor of pocket either, although we went to a very, very reasonably priced Italian restaurant and had a great lunch.  La Peter and I, though, agreed that though the place has plenty of class, what it needs is some crass to balance it out.  But no, Clint Eastwood isn't the mayor anymore, apparently.

  
  

  Saturday night, we spend a great time -- not too late -- at The Midnight Sun, a video bar that shows comedy clips in between goddawful music videos.  Well, sometimes not so awful (see above for an exception, at least visually).  And they'll also show sitcoms and popular shows too sometimes during the weekd -- the Simpsons, Six Feet Under, Will & Grace, Sex & The City, and several others.  It was a nice social evening and contrast to the night before, but enjoyable.

  
  

  Sunday was mostly spent in quiet.  Mr. Fresh and I had a strangely early morning and went to Herbivore, one of the reasons I'm blessed to live in San Francisco.  It's a vegan place with a huge menu and inexpensive, delicious food.  I'm not vegan (lacto ovo vegetarian) and Mr. Fresh doesn't do dairy (everything else, meat or otherwise, is just fine), so it's kind of an ideal place in that respect.  They do a curry crepe for breakfast -- yum! It's bascially a crepe filled with a mash of artichoke hearts and onions (I think that's it) and a side of really good home fries.  Pass the hot sauce!

  
  

  The rest of the day, I pretty much spent relaxing, playing X-Box, but that night, B.P. and went to see a performance at the Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium of The Musical Box's production of the legendary old Peter Gabriel-era Genesis' show and album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.  Lamb is probably the culmination of the art rock movement for Gensis, as Peter left thereafter and took with him the bizzare and wonderful theatricality that made their unusual, complex music even more interesting.  Anyway, the Musical Box sought to recreate this concert, which is a challenge in its own right, because I don't think there's been a released visual compilation of the show.

  
  

  The show exceeded all of my expectaions, which I admit weren't foolishly high.  I'd heard about them some time back and even some clips of their recreations.  But after last night, I have to say that even though it's the only game in town in which you will ever hope to see some of the oddest and most fantastic 70's art rock performances, they do it up really, really well. 

  
  

  When a band does a cover, they can either make it theirs (like No Doubt's version of "It's My Life") or they can go for complete faithfulness.  Nudge the latter in the right direction, and you get into the creepy terrain of Tribute Bands.  I think The Musical Box can only honestly be described as a tribute band.  However, not only are they being jaw-droppingly faithful to the original music, theatrical dialogue, costumes, and props, but they are doing so with some of the most complex music and nuanced performances in modern rock history.  In this, I feel that, creepiness aside, that they're doing me a personal favor, as I was about 5 when Lamb debuted.  All I had were stories bordering on legend about the sheer bizzareness of the Slippermen costume, the illustrated narratives, the Watcher garb, the odd Gabriel mannerism.  The Musical Box managed to capture what I can only believe was probably the essence of the original shows, and possibly more than the essence.  In short, they were fantastic.

  
  

  The audience itself was an interesting cross-section:  almost 70% male audience, I'd say.  The woman next to me mentioned this in some wonder.  Indeed, I have to say, it was an extremely homogenous group that was a veritable study in male pattern baldness and "letting yourself go" or at least the "having reached the point of no return from a certain outcropping of guy-paunch"-ness.  B.P. thought it was pretty accurate a representation of "the only people left in the world who are still interested in 70's art and prog rock."  Alas, probably true, as certainly the musicians have mostly moved onward.

  
  

  But they were certainly appreciative, and demonstratively so.  I felt strangely out of my element, I think, but when those first appreggios began on the keyboard, it was a simple matter to immerse myself completely in the music and story, as jolting and weird as they were.

  • 11:27 pm
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