what a band is

This is what a band is. The Golden Band from Tigerland shot from the sidelines by an exploiter of privilege.

Saturday:
LSU vs. North Texas at Tiger Stadium.



Here is the whole wretched display of access/excess: three tailgates + the most and least intimate spots in Tiger Stadium from which to watch a football game. Maya and I scored sideline pre-game passes and then seats in the absolute top row of the upper west deck. There were Andean condors swooping up to eat spilled popcorn up there.

Sunday:
Hatfield & the North, Hatfield & the North
Slapp Happy, Casablanca Moon
Bongwater, Too Much Sleep
Nurse With Wound, To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl

In my passionate twenties, I would've tried to convince you too that Nurse With Wound was the greatest music-generating entity, and would've made that distinction rather than referring to them as a "band" or "project".  Somewhere around then I discovered Funkadelic, partly through a magazine recommendation from one of the guys in Nurse With Wound, and I quit worrying what a band is or isn't until Bonnie "Prince" Billy came around and the process renewed itself. I'd actually like to hear a Bonnie "Prince" Billy/Nurse With Wound collaboration. I think it would neatly tie up some cognitive quandaries and leave me to enjoy life to its fullest.



This is Tiger Stadium to its fullest. Maybe not fullest, but I was shocked this many people came to a throwaway game right after a hurricane. Normally we just tailgate. Up there in the high numbers my vertigo kicked in (I can't even handle Ferris wheels with any appreciable dignity) and even she was freaked out a little so we only stayed through the first quarter. It feels like you are about to be flung forward into the vastness of spectatorship any second up there.



Ours were the two yellow seats under the top 619 sign. Bottom left on the diagram.

Monday:
David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
Animal Collective, Centipede Hz
Matthew Dear, Beams
Deerhoof, Breakup Song

(x-posted from Goodreads)

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm comfortable with the fact that I enjoy things written about David Foster Wallace than I do David Foster Wallace's writing. I look at his work the way I look at barbed wire fences - there might be really exciting or really insightful things behind those fences, and once upon a time I was spry enough to clamber over intellectual obstacles like that but now I just don't have the patience.

Mr. Lipsky does a fantastic job nursing Mr. Wallace's tenderness and scaling his towers in this book length interview, and if all that sounds sexual, it isn't, but it is a very intimate and complex picture of two men talking and thinking a lot about mostly one of the two. Even when Mr. Lipsky and the reader alike were growing weary of Mr. Wallace's precious fretting about titrating his burgeoning fame - the interview took place during the book tour for Infinite Jest - we felt spurred by then mutual determination to make the wordiest guy on the planet just say what he wanted to say already. Both interviewer and interviewee come out of this thing as richer and more vibrant.

The band as they entered the stadium as viewed from the terrace of the third tailgate. I think I just described a Masonic ritual.