Dancing about architecture

2009 in music

Since I keep track of the music I buy anyway (for various reasons), here’s a list of what I bought in 2009. Most is from eMusic, but some are still old-fashioned CDs.

Make of it what you will.

• ABC: Traffic
• Aimee Mann: The Forgotten Arm
• Ani DiFranco: Fellow Workers, Educated Guess, Little Plastic Castle, Not a Pretty Girl, So Much Shouting So Much Laughter
• Beirut: The Flying Club Cup, The Gulag Orkestar
• Big Blue Ball: Big Blue Ball
• Billy Joel: Piano Man
• Bon Iver: For Emma Forever Ago, Blood Bank
• Cranes: Cranes
• Eric Prydz: Proper Education
• Gary Numan: Dance, The Pleasure Principle (Expanded Edition)
• Girlyman: Little Star
• Happy Rhodes: Rhodes II
• Heaven 17: Live At Last, Naked As Advertised
• Hem: Eveningland
• Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins: Rabbit Fur Coat
• Jethro Tull: J-Tull Dot Com, Jethro Tull Christmas Album
• Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros: Global A Go-Go, Streetcore
• John Foxx: Metamatic, The Garden, The Golden Section
• John Mellencamp: Life Death Love and Freedom
• KMFDM: Symbols, Blitz
• Katatonia: Night is the New Day
• Kenji Williams Terra-Illusion EP
• Lisa Loeb: Gypsies Tramps and Thieves, Hello Lisa
• Meat Loaf: Bat out of Hell, Dead Ringer
• Miljoonasade: Lelukaupan häät
• Múm: Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Yesterday Was Dramatic Today Is Ok, Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know
• Neko Case: Blacklisted, Furnace Room Lullaby, Middle Cyclone
• Nitin Sawhney: London Undersound
• O.M.D.: OMD Live - Architecture And Morality
• Paradise Lost: In Requiem, The Anatomy of Melancholy, One Second, Draconian Times, Shades of God, Icon
• Patty Griffin: Children Running Through
• Placebo: Battle for the Sun
• R.E.M: Accelerate
• Rapoon: Church Road, Dark Rivers, Melancholic Songs of the Desert, Darker By Light, Cidar, Time Frost, Rapoon vs Kinder Atom
• Rökkurró: Það kólnar í kvöld…
• SPC-ECO: 3-D
• Seabear: The Ghost that Carried Us Away
• Sia: Some People Have Real Problems
• Sin Fang Bous: Clangour
• Sufjan Stevens: The Avalanche
• The Clash: London Calling, Combat Rock
• The Gaslight Anthem: The ‘59 Sound
• The Prodigy: Fat of the Land, Invaders Must Die
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show Original Soundtrack
• The Waterboys: Universal Hall
• The White Stripes: Elephant
• Thom Yorke: FeelingPulledApartByHorses, The Eraser
• Underworld: A Hundred Days Off
• compilations: Dark Was the Night, Songs For Tibet

[…]

...and back

Back in drizzly Finland. Actually, back almost a week ago.

Trip went well, and even though it was a very “active vacation” it left me feeling relaxed and I feel I’ve been away for a long time (even though it’s only been a month). We visited Iceland, then flew over to California & Burning Man. Janka provides some trip recap in her blog, so I won’t repeat (much) of that here. I took a ton of photos – nearly 2000 – but then again more than half of those were 3-picture HDR composites, and then after the obvious failures are weeded out… well, the number of “reasonable” shots left is a lot smaller. Still, took lots of pics. The batch from Iceland is now available (slideshow), I’ll add the rest later once I get them processed.

Since I don’t have pics available yet I also won’t talk about the U.S. or Burning Man here, leaving that for later.

So, Iceland. I found the country quite amazing. Sure, it was expensive, and sure, it’s small and insular – but somehow, that insularity wasn’t as annoying as it can sometimes be in Finland. Maybe it’s just the fact that I was only on a short visit and didn’t see the reality of things, or maybe it’s also other things: I found the Icelandic elitist megalomania quite refreshing (compared to the Finnish traditional cultural inferiority complex), and the fiercely independent ethos of the people was also very appealing. Sure, Finland is supposed to also have some degree of that, but I think that died out at some point in history and was replaced by a general “it’s not my fault, I’m a victim of society!” outlook. Having said that, there do seem to be a lot of common points between Finland and Iceland: tiny, insular societies that speak an incomprehensible language, endless long dark winter months, a love of (lots of) alcohol, lots of beautiful unpolluted nature.

…but as always, it’s the differences that charm you. I’m a sucker for harsh landscapes, and the Icelandic volcanic wasteland was just too cool for words at times; especially so during our hike of the Laugavegur 55km mountain trail. Some of the scenery up there was just breathtaking. Culturally, I mentioned the elitism… I guess it’s because according to the Icelanders, the Vikings did pretty much everything first, better and with more style than anyone else – and naturally enough, Icelanders are direct descendants of said Vikings. Somehow, all the rape and pillage involved gets a lot less press over there… In any case, while the place felt very insular, it didn’t feel annoyingly so; in fact, it felt quite charming to me. Oh, I’m sure the “everyone knows everyone else” thing gets old fast if you live there, but that’s just how it goes.

The music scene in Iceland is amazing, and the same applies to the arts scene in general… for some reason, it seems that arts are very much respected there culturally and pretty much half the population dabbles into some artistic pursuit. You could explain it away with “well, they have to do something during those long winter months”… but then again, why do Finns use those same months to plan suicide (or axe murder) and drown their depression with Koskenkorva?

Yes, I kid. Finns get artistic too, and I’m sure Iceland has its share of suicides, alcohol and depression. But still, you have to admire the amazing artistic scene in Iceland, especially when you compare to the population count (about the size of your average larger metropolis). To me, the music was (and is) especially impressive.

About that music… I have to mention the record store 12 Tónar. At the time we visited I wasn’t aware that it’s also a record label, and “home” of many known Icelandic musicians. We just saw an advertisement about “lots of Icelandic music!” while strolling around and decided to drop in. Glad we did. Since I didn’t know much about current local bands, I walked up to the guy behind the counter and asked for some recommendations, saying I was familiar with Björk & Sigur Rós and had a fairly eclectic taste in music. Now, that sort of approach generally tends to work in many non-chain stores, but here I got especially nice treatment. The guy gathered a pile of 8-9 CDs and said “start with those”, then sat me down at one of the many eclectic CD-players scattered around. He also brought me a cup of (free) espresso. That’s what I call service. In general, the place was what a good record store should be like (but all too seldom is): knowledgeable & friendly staff, comfy surroundings, and freedom to listen to a lot of stuf in peace. I ended up buying two records: “Það kólnar í kvöld…” by Rökkurró (excellent alt-folk-pop sung in Icelandic) and “Clangour” by Sin Fang Bous (weird but fun music, sung in English). Janka picked up an album of Viking poetry set to an ambient music soundtrack.

So… yes, I liked Iceland a lot. The food was great (though expensive), the atmosphere was nice, and the scenery awesome. I also really liked the language, it’s actually the first Scandinavian language I have any larger interest in learning – which is inconvenient, since it’s also arguably the most generally useless of said languages. Whatever, it’s quite pretty (in a weird fashion), and while it reads a small bit like Swedish etc, the pronounciation is almost totally alien.

I probably want to visit again, sometime down the road. Armed with a large travel budget, since the place was very expensive – and I say this as someone from Helsinki, one of the more expensive cities in the world.

After 1.5 weeks in Iceland, we hopped aboard a plane again and headed off towards the land of the free(ish) and home of the paranoid. More about that later. […]

Secret meeting in the basement of my brain

I’m put together beautifully
Big wet bottle in my fist, big wet rose in my teeth
I’m perfect piece of ass
Like every Californian
So tall I take over the street, with highbeams shining on my back
A wingspan unbelievable
I’m a festival, I’m a parade

And all the wine is all for me
And all the wine is all for me
And all the wine is all for me

– The National, “All the Wine”

So, there we were at Ankkarock, dead on our feet but with the sun shining and tons of people milling around. I wasn’t sure how I was feeling, but it was generally pretty good. Janka was having more than a bit of trouble keeping awake, but soldiered on. Me, I was starting to get more and more on top of things. You know that feeling you get, when you push past the first 10 or so times that your body tells you “you really need to sleep now”? There’s a weird sort of plateau, where you know that you’re dead tired and running on fumes… but you actually feel pretty good, and sort of just float along in a daze. I was getting there.

Anyway, the music. Eppu Normaali was…. Eppu Normaali. Absolutely no surprises there, but I wasn’t expecting any. Nostalgic Finnish poprock, with lyrics everyone knows by heart. High on the nostalgia factor, but otherwise… well, what can I say. It’s Eput. They are a Finnish pop/rock institution.

Next up was PMMP, and I was (very) positively surprised. In fact, they proved to be easily the second-best of the four bands I saw there. Now, it’s a band that a lot of people I know have been telling me is good for years, but I never got around to listening to their stuff much. I’ve heard some of their songs, and they are in the “pretty much ok” department. Also saw them for a short while at Provinssirock some years back, but didn’t stay to watch too long. Well, this time I did, and I have to say that they have (perhaps surprisingly) blossomed into a real, “serious” poprock band. Their stage presence was excellent, they had energy and humor, and the songs worked great in an outdoor festival environment like that. Still not sure how well they work on CD, but that live show did very much change my opinion about them. Perhaps because of their “bubblegum-pop girl band” beginnings, I have been a bit dismissive of them in the past. They’ve evolved, apparently. Good for them. They rocked.

At that point, Janka decided to head for home; she was just totally dead from lack of sleep (and still probably suffering from the food poisoning in addition), so staying to watch some more bands didn’t make much sense. I stayed on, since the band I actually came to see (National) was playing later in the evening.

I went an grabbed a long drink; dared to drink one even though I was dead tired and still needed to drive home, experience has shown me that I can handle one (specifically, one) in that state and that it’s actuall a good idea. It was, once again, it took the worst edge off the tired feeling and left me in a nice, mellow mood. The sunshine helped, too.

The next show was Volbeat. Some people had gushed a lot about their stage show, and I can understand why; these guys were pretty good and they have a huge number of Finnish fans (many of whom were there to cheer them on). Musically, it was heavy rock with some “Elvis” elements; I liked the fact that they had added some 60s/rockabilly/country elements to the mix, which is apparently one of their trademarks (they actually did one Johnny Cash cover). It works quite well – but on the other hand, the music is mostly fairly bog-standard heavy rock and gets a bit same-ish and slightly boring after a while. It’s not a band that I would probably specifically pay to see again, but I wouldn’t at all mind seeing them again at a festival or such sometime. It lacked a strong “hook” to really get me interested, but it was fun and energetic heavy rock’n’roll with some nice nonstandard elements thrown in. Definitely better than most of the “heavy” bands around nowadays, which at time seem cloned from one another.

Lastly (for me) was the band I had actually come to see, The National. They have risen to become one of my favorite bands nowadays. Some of the things in their music are things that typically attract me in music: complex, multilayered obscure lyrics, strange tempo changes, strong melodies, and a strong sense of dark, wry sarcastic humor. Some other bits go in the “if I could describe it, it wouldn’t be art” department. For some reason, their music resonates in ways that few bands manage to pull of (for me). Don’t get me wrong; I have a pretty wide taste in music and The National are far from being “the thing that I listen to, period”. But they are one of the bands frequently found on my playlist nowadays, together with Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers and other bands in that sort of “headspace”.

So anyway, I’ve never seen these guys live (sadly missed their previous first visit to Finland a year ago) and had pretty huge expectations from this gig. Now, generally that’s a bad thing, especially for “just a festival gig”; it’s setting yourself up for disappointment. But I couldn’t help it, I was looking forward to this a lot, and the sun was shining and I had a pleasant sleep deprivation plus one long drink buzz going on.

They were awesome, actually better than I had expected. The guys in the band seemed happily bemused by the happy and loud audience reception, and people were singing along to most of the songs, and in general the feeling was just fantastic. Things started off with Matt Berninger shuffling on stage, wearing a scruffy suit with a bottle of white wine stashed in the pocket, and then launching into the first song, “Start a War”. When people around you sing along (loudly) to obscure lyrics like “and so and now I’m sorry I missed you, I had a secret meeting in the basement of my brain”, you know you’re in good company. Great setlist… they only missed one of my personal favorites (“Friend of Mine”) and had nice variations on many of the songs. There was an “extra” guy on stage playing keyboards and violin… and any band that features a violin or fiddle on stage gets an extra point from me. They closed down with “Mr. November”, which had Matt climbing down to hug some fans while singing the “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders” end refrain. It was great, everyone was grinning and having fun.

Awesome high note to end a heavy-duty con weekend on. Someone has already uploaded the first song from the gig on YouTube, so here you go:

[…]

No sleep 'til Monday

Well, another Ropecon is now over (except for the after-party). While once again it was an exercise in seeing how far you can push yourself in the sleep deprivation department, it also went very well and was a lot of fun.

I had already done some “con stuff” on Wednesday and Thursday, with some pub time with LSJ (Guest of Honor), Juki, Janne and the others, but things really started off for me on Friday with the big VTES tournament. I was at work until 4pm or so, and after that drove over to Dipoli and set up the registration desk. Things proceeded smoothly even though there were a lot of players (we got a grand total of 85 this year), and I managed to get the tournament running by 18:15 – not bad. LSJ was also playing in this one, something he doesn’t get to do all that much. He did threaten to ask nasty rules questions from the judge (which would be me), but in reality he behaved. Perhaps it was the threats of violence…

Anyway, the tournament was a success. Nobody skipped out suddenly and everyone who signed up was actually there more or less on time – the few latecomers kept me well informed via the phone. There were some rules questions as always, but only one which I wasn’t 100% sure about right off… and this time, I could actually go find LSJ and ask him for confirmation. Awesome. Even though the playing space was cramped for this number of players and the lack of fresh air and ridiculous air humidity became real factors, everyone dealt with it and seemed to have a good time. So a huge thanks to the players for this one: once again, you made this possible and a fun thing to run.

The preliminary rounds finished a bit before 1am, after which I dealt out the EC qualifier t-shirts to the 21 players who got a qualification. After that, the finalists took a short break and then gathered up to play the final round (which got going around 1:25am). The final round had 2 Swedish players and 3 Finns. Pauli (one of the Finns) was ousted quite soon by Michael (a Swede), which left four Dominate-heavy decks on the table. After a long tense stretch of a game, the win finally went to Adam Esbjörnsson (from Sweden) with about 5 minutes left on the game clock. Congrats! Adam was playing a very nasty-looking deck based around Gabrielle di Righetti, the new Tremere Justicar. I’ll write up a full tournament report over the next couple of weeks, hopefully with full finalist deck lists and some pictures.

So, at around 3.20am, things were wrapped up, and I could… go downstairs to do an Info desk shift until 7am! Whee! To be fair, I had requested night shifts, so I can only blame myself. The night shift went fine, though it was a bit boring. Come on Troubleshooters, your job is to keep Info (and yourselves) awake, keeping peace and order is secondary to that! There was cakes and whipped cream, though, so can’t complain too much.

When 7am rolled around I hopped in the car and drove home. In own bed and asleep before 8am… so got to sleep curled up next to wife for a hour or so until she had to get up and do her own Info desk shift. The cats were quite confused about human timetables at this point. I slept until noon(ish), then headed back to the con. Hung around, saw some lectures, did the normal con routine until something like 9pm, when Janka & I decided to do the smart thing and go home and sleep for at least some hours before the next night shift (which we both shared). Unfortunately she had gotten a slight case of food poisoning (probably from a packet of bacon she had as breakfast), and we actually only got a few hours of real sleep, if that. At 2:30am or so, we headed back to the con after a quick wake-you-up shower. Janka wasn’t feeling too good, but decided to see how it would go.

Once we got there, night shift was fun and not at all boring, since we decided to do something about it: Janka hooked up one of the laptops to the projector (usually used for projecting con schedules) and some kind person lent us their portable speaker set – we forgot ours at home. After this, it was Info Deck Night Radio&Video, courtesy of YouTube. We played everything we could think off, as long as it was reasonably short, funny, and if possible slightly insane. Janka wrote about the playlist in her blog.

… so, we managed to keep ourselves (and any victims nearby) awake and semi-coherent. Morning rolled in, and we didn’t have much else to do yet so we stayed for a few more hours at the Info desk to help out. After that I headed off to make sure that the “VTES Brunch” with LSJ and some of the tournament finalists and high scorers was ok (it was, Katri & others had organized an awesome breakfast buffet at a roof-terrace sauna). Grabbed some breakfast there while talking VTES with the guys, then headed off to organize a few small things and find Janka.

The rest of the con for us consisted of sitting in Keltsu (the pub) and talking with Guy, Kristel and others, winding down. At around 3pm, instead of doing what our bodies were claiming to be the sane thing (go home asap and fall into a coma), we headed off to Korso for Ankkarock, to see Eppu Normaali, PMMP, Volbeat and The National. Sanity is overrated, anyway.

More about the rock festival visit in another post (it merits one).

[…]

Transience

The world is all around us
The days are flying past
And fear is so contagious
But I’m not afraid to laugh

I could go at anytime
There’s nothing safe about this life
I could go at anytime

– Neil Finn, “Anytime”

When I opened my browser today I got the same main headline from all the news sources: Michael Jackson Dead. I should not be surprised, the man has looked like a walking zombie for all too many years. Still, I sort of am; he wasn’t all that old, and it was… sudden.

I’m no Michael Jackson fan, but neither am I a hater. I remember when Thriller came out, way back when. I was (more or less) in the Finnish equivalent of high school, and I remember how cool the album was. I also remember the videos, which were extraordinary at the time. Haven’t followed his career musically much after that… but I haven’t been able to avoid reading about his troubled life now and then. He was just such a strange, sad figure; like Britney Spears, an object lesson of what too much money and fame coupled with limited mental stability can do to you. In the end, he looked more like a movie monster than a pop star, due to way too much (failed) plastic surgery and who knows what medication. About the other accusations… I don’t know. The thing with accusations of sexual molestation is that it doesn’t really matter whether the court finds you guilty or not, you’re branded guilty in the public eye anyway. Most of the “Michael Jackson jokes” going around have to do with child molestation. Is that deserved? Hell if I know. I guess I’ll just go with “speak no evil of the dead”. I always found the later Jackson to be a… sad figure.

Sudden death is jarring. I’ve lost one very dear person due to that, and it’s a shock I hope (perhaps in vain) to never repeat. You hope to die of extreme old age (with your mental faculties still more or less intact), surrounded by people you love, having outlived all your enemies (if any). That might happen, if you’re lucky. Or you might get run over by a car the next day, with no warning. Baji-naji.

Worrying about that is useless and counterproductive. Living a reasonably healthy life is smart, getting enough exercise is crucial… but other than those obvious points, you don’t have all that much control. Avoiding fun things just because they are a bit dangerous makes no sense to me, because doing that misses the point. At some point you will die, and there is no life after that (sorry, religious people, but that’s how it almost certainly works out). What matters is how you lived, what you did for other people, how the world remembers you.

Life is damn short and damn long at the same time. The world is wide. […]

Tori Amos: Abnormally Attracted To Sin

You got you a fast horse darlin’
But all you do is complain it ain’t a Maserati.
You had a soul that you left back in Memphis
but your mama ain’t New York she is pure
Tennessee

Tori Amos, “Fast Horse”

Tori’s new album, Abnormally Attracted To Sin isn’t an easy one for me to rate. Let me explain…

The last Tori album which I consider excellent is 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk. Even though that album splits opinions, I absolutely love it – the whole U.S. roadtrip concept behind it works for me, and the songs are fantastic (though difficult to puzzle out sometimes, as is normal for Tori). After that… well, it’s been a bit spotty. I don’t much care for The Beekeeper; the album has a couple of really good tracks (Parasol, Power of Orange Knickers, Toast), but on the whole it’s a bit “meh”. It’s bland.

Here I must add that I usually listen to and think of Tori’s albums as, well, “albums”, instead of groups of songs. They work (or don’t) as wholes, with each song lending something to the mix. For me, Tori has always been an “album” artist instead of “single”, if that makes any sense. Each album has a “feel”, a personality.

Anyway, American Doll Posse was a step up from Beekeeper and it contains perhaps my favorite “modern” Tori track, Bouncing Off Clouds. Unfortunately the album is a bit too schizophrenic for me to really love. That’s by design, I guess, since it’s a concept album based on various very different women (“dolls”), with wildly different personalities. There are great songs here and the album doesn’t suffer from the blandness of Beekeeper… but it’s just a bit too disjointed to totally work. It’s also overlong, a common problem with all three of Tori’s latest albums; all would have benefited from some tighter editing, leaving some songs for “b-sides” and bonus disk material.

So now we have the new album. It’s been getting pretty mixed reviews, and to be totally honest, the first time I listened to it I was quite disappointed. Nothing really stood out, even the single track Welcome To England didn’t really grab me. It was hard to get an impression, the album just slid on by. Regardless, there was something there, and the album did feel like a “whole” more than the previous two albums and had “feel” I liked. Don’t ask me exactly why, this is an emotional response, not an analytical one. I found myself listening to the album again. And again. And again. And each time, I found myself liking it more, finding more layers in it. The songs started opening up, and I started to really like some of them (Fast Horse is a current favorite).

…so. Here I am, wondering what to say about the album. Right now, I find myself liking it quite a lot. It’s not up to Scarlet’s Walk level, but I would claim that it’s the best of her three latest albums (much as it surprises me to say that, given my first impression). It’s a subtle album, and one that demands repeat listens, it just doesn’t open up all that fast. There are some weak tracks, but the thing works as a whole… and as I said, that’s important to me.

I’m not sure I’d recommend this to people who aren’t Tori fans (just as I wouldn’t recommend Beekeeper or American Doll Posse). But to people who do like Tori’s music: don’t give up on this one too soon. There are gems hidden here. […]

Summer scheduling

Looks like I need to start scheduling my summer right about now, a lot of things need decisions round this time. For example, I just heard that The National are coming to Ankkarock… and of course Ropecon is on the same weekend. Gah. I really want to see The National, they were one of the best “new finds” of last year for me. Good news is that they are performing on Sunday. I’ll probably be able to combo the con Sunday with a rock festival. Somehow. It might involve beer.

In addition, a friend’s paintball weekend thingy lands on top of Provinssirock. Probably choosing the paintball there… sure, it would be nice to see Placebo (again) and Nick Cave, but now that (another) friend no longer lives nearby that would be a pretty expensive trip – I think I’ll opt for the cheaper “run in the woods and get shot” option. Oh, and of course there’s a KMFDM club gig on that same weekend. Already have tickets for that, but not yet sure how I’ll combo everything.

Oh, and we’re planning of maybe visiting Iceland in August, and continuing from there to Burning Man (once again!). Still in the planning stages, but that one will eat up both our vacation time and a chunk of cash. Why Iceland? Because we can. And because it should be less horribly expensive now, due to their financial crash. Sucks for them, good for us.

Having fun takes work, I tell you. […]

Weekend

Nice weekend. Leonard Cohen was fantastic, managing to be even better than expected. Somehow he made the huge Hartwall Arena seem intimate, which is quite a feat. The backing band was also superb. Janka writes some more on the subject.

Sunday was mostly spent at the salle, we did six hours of Bolognese sidesword. Fun, and a weird mix of easy and quite difficult; some moves felt quite natural, while some were a total bitch to get even remotely right. Normal thing when learning a new weapon, or course. The seminar was also Ilkka’s Assistant Instructor exam, so we did some things (as told to by Guy) to make his life more difficult. He did splendidly and gave us an excellent day of learning the fundamentals of a new(ish) weapon… and easily passed the exam too. Over the years Ilkka has become a good martial arts teacher, it’s been interesting watching him develop both as a swordsman and as a teacher. I do like the sidesword, it’s a fun weapon which combines techniques from various other sword styles I’m familiar with; I’d like to learn more.

Only negative for the day was the fact that my back was killing me, I had picked up a nasty pain in my lower back from somewhere and had to eat some tabs to keep it in check. Those mostly helped, though some parts of the day were painful, literally. Good thing is that the pain is a lot less now, on Monday. Exercise helps (except when it doesn’t, of course). […]

Tuulta Päin, plus Cohen

On Wednesday we went to see Tuulta Päin, a play by Gérald Sibleyras (originally titled “Le Vent des peupliers”… “The Wind in the Poplar Trees”?). It was a comedy of sorts, set in the 1960s at a home for aging war veterans. There were only three actors, playing the parts of aforesaid veterans. The plot consisted of them sitting on chairs in the back yard of the home, planning their escape to Indochina, talking about girls and women, and trying to look after each other despite lots of needling. Oh, and there’s a stone dog. He’s important.

It was funnier that I had expected, though I’m not sure if “comedy” is the right word for it… “humorous drama” might be more precise. In any case, it was well-written, well-acted and very much worth seeing. Haven’t been to the theater in a long while.

Tonight we’re off to see Leonard Cohen at the Hartwall Arena. I’m not an absolutely rabid fan, but do like many of his songs (the best of which are quite brilliant)… and Janka like his music a lot, so I grabbed tickets the moment they became available. We’ll see. Haven’t seen him live before, but by all accounts he is still in great touring shape and tends to play long gigs (2.5 - 3 hours). Not bad for a 75yr(?) old. […]