The Gentleman Cowboy

For my birthday this year my dear sister and brother gave me a couple tickets to the annual Lyle Lovett concert at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery in Woodinville. Kim of course was my date, and she wore those handsome cowboy boots of hers that she won from running that darn half-marathon last fall.

These shows used to be "neighborhood" events for us, literally a 5 minute drive over from Novelty Hill. Now from Bainbridge it's a bit of a hike, and we turned the evening into a full on date night complete with dinner at Il Tropea in Redmond.

We ended up coming a bit late because when we read the ticket we thought that we weren't that interested in seeing John Hiatt, the "opening act". Ha! Turns out that this concert was a different format than usual. Apparently there is an old tradition in the Nashville country scene where musicians will share a stage a do a kind of musical dialogue -- one guy does a song and the other may or may not sing back up of play along. Then the other does his song in response, again with some help. Like a friendly duel.

So they did start on time and we missed the first duel or two. Whoops!

There were three things that I liked about this format very much:

1) I find myself in concerts trying to figure out what the band's mood is -- or what their attitude toward their body of work is -- by reading into the set list. I'm sure it's just me over-reading, but I do a bunch of mental noodling during a show, esp. in the downtime when the band plays something I don't know or like. But with this format I liked "solving" the problem of why the second person chose the song they did as a response. Some of the pairings were easy -- two songs about Memphis, or two songs that are standards, etc. Since I didn't know much about John Hiatt, it was an interesting entry point into his work, through Lyle.

2) Usually Lyle has a Very Large Band. For this show it was just him and an acoustic guitar. When I listen to music I'm pretty focused on the lyrics, esp. Lyle's lyrics, so it was great to have his voice dominate his songs. It felt much more Lyle. I was also struck by how not-technical he is, even compared to Hiatt. It's like his music is a sort of rough clean place to lay out his lyrics. I guess I've never seen him that alone and unvarnished for that length of time. I loved it.

3) Because there were just these two guys sitting on chairs up there doing a back and forth musical thing, the whole scene lent itself to quite a bit of banter. It was like overhearing some guys jamming a bit on a porch in Texas. And they almost talked as much as they sang -- no kidding. And there was quite a bit of interaction with the audience too. Lyle came across as a very sweet, country gentleman cowboy. Very polite, very dry and deeply funny.

I think the audience was evenly split between the people that came to see Lyle and the people who came to see John. I kinda got how these two guys might have met up, but there was enough of a demographic difference between their fans -- and they have pretty different world-views -- that I would have liked more back story on how they got thrown together on stage. I came away with the impression of John Hiatt as a hillbilly version of Neil Diamond. So like Lenny Kravitz last week, who was not exactly my cup of tea, he made the "main act" seem that much cooler.

But Lyle is such a dear dude I'd be happy to go see him every year, even if he brought KISS and Peewee Herman and Victoria Jackson.

U2 360 Seattle

OK, gotta put up a few pictures of the U2 show from Saturday night..

Jeremiah and I conspired to get tickets about 18 months ago and we lived through the Bono ouchie cancellation last summer and all the social calendar peregrinations that eventually resulted in our selling some of the tickets and reconfiguring our loyal viewing crew. Most importantly, Bradley was able to come up from Portland and treat Ewan to his first U2 concert as a birthday present. Above you can see the Bainbridge travelling party walking from the ferry to the venue -- Bryan and Erin had come up for the show and spent a bit of time visiting the island paradise before the show.

We went in the North gate of Qwest -- not sure any other gates were open -- and the crowd was pretty chunky. I think this is the largest number of people I've seen in that venue. Normally for sold-out soccer and football games there isn't more than 65k people, but with the floor configured as a mosh-pit I think they got another 10k people in the door.

Our seats were decent -- not spectacular. Although, as you can see below Ewan, we lucked out because our row was right up against the tunnel where the production crew and talent came and went..

Here's another view of our seats. You can see Jeremiah with his father-in-law. Notice everyone came equipped with earplugs. Since I'm working on enhancing my tendency to deafness for domestic purposes I of course did not partake of the plugs.

We were seated by 7:30ish and by 8 or so Lenny Kravitz hit the stage. You can see him up there on the video screen. From our seats we couldn't see him much unless he was prancing around the 360-degree catwalk. But the lack of visibility at this point was mostly OK -- I only recognized one of Lenny's songs (American Woman) which is ostensibly about Mr. Kravitz's difficulty in communicating the end of a relationship to a woman, but the whole things comes across like an over-generalized faux-dilemna -- the women are throwing themselves at me! Help, I'm just too slithery and cool!!

One thing I learned from Andrea Griminelli delivered as road-wisdom in some sweaty Malaysian backstage VIP room on a random spur of the perpetual LP world tour was this: A successful opening act will not last long if it even attempts to outshine the headliner. I would say by this criteria Lenny exceeded his role.

From my seat you see His Mirrorshaded Wiggleness on his way back to the dressing room. My favorite image of Lenny Kravitz that evening didn't come until a bit later when U2 were on the stage and he was standing watching from the tunnel -- pretty much where this picture is taken -- all "disguised" in a black feather boa and hoodie, and these two fat people in the stands about about 6 feet above him were making wild gestures pointing at him and trying to get their friends (I guess?) to notice that LENNY KRAVITZ IS STANDING RIGHT HERE!!! OMG!! Of course he couldn't see them, and they kept it up for a few minutes. I would have taken a picture but by then the light was too bad. But their slurpee-fueled gesticu-dancing was hilarious and somewhat tempered The Kravitz macheezmo kool.

In the intermission between the ex-Kravtiz-ganza and Bono's band Bradley nipped off to buy some water and t-shirts. Apparently he was forced to make a somewhat harrowing decision while he was away -- one or the other: commemorative shirts or college educations for his children. This was Ewan's shirt. Ach! College is over-rated.

Before the show started I sat looking over the edge of the tunnel rail re-living my few years in show production. Good Lord. It was cool to see all the overlapping crews and coordinators and production people and recording people and various layers of management. I found the U2 version of myself down there, and watched him running around thinking "hey, that could be me..".  He was actually a pretty old dude (had white hair!). Sigh.

You can tell the show's getting ready to go when the smoke machines start up. And the guitar techs are doing some last minute tuning.

Bradley and Ewan took over my seat to get the best position for pictures and general brush with greatness.

When the lads came out of the tunnel there was a 70,000 person roar. It almost drowned out the "marching to the stage song", which was of course was Ground Control To Major Tom, in keeping with the space-y theme of the show.

And then we were off! The real thing. Or, as it turned out, Even Better Than The Real Thing. Set list here. 

It was a perfect night weather-wise. Early summer evening, not a cloud in the sky. The city in the background.

This is only my second U2 show -- the first was a pair of concerts I attended somewhat reluctantly in Tempe Arizona over Christmas break in '87 -- $6 tickets and a handful of people crashing a single Motel 6 room. It turned out that those shows got turned into Rattle and Hum. If you look closely in the movie during the helicopter pans you can see a sulky dude in the nosebleed section actually reading a book. That was me. This time, however, my attendance was quite voluntary.

In fact, between Jeremiah's steady love of U2 quotes and references and Bradley's love of It Might Get Loud, which features The Edge pretty prominently, I was very much looking forward to seeing Mr. Evans in person. I've come to imagine that if I had been a rock star and had even an ounce of cool I'd have gone a similar direction as The Edge, including a goofy name -- not really going the traditionally musically talented direction  but making the most of some technical futzing. (Check out Bill Bailey's version of the same observation).

But any appreciation of U2 means that I've had to come to terms with Bono. In processing some of my exposure to celebrity types I think I understand something of the hunger for attention and the mechanics of entertaining "at scale". Bono even said last night when he was introducing the band members (fifth graf here..) that all he needs are 70,000 people (and 200 trucks and a spaceship) to make him happy. I totally believe that. He's now inhabiting a persona that for me feels like part part David Bowie, part Scottish Inkeeper, and part Ellen G White. Kind of a nutty hyperbolic messianic ball of screaming attention debt. And where his music bridges personal with corporate (as in a lot of people) politics, I think he's a genius lyricist. Where he's the be-sunglassed leiderhosen me-dancer, umm, not so much.

Of course there are stunts to get the crowd involved. The political appeals and Amnesty International and One, etc. I'm not against any of that stuff but I'm not really into organized religion of any stripe so I tend to take a pass there. The International Space Station stunt, though was cute.

But there's no better crowd integration stunt than actually writing awesome songs that everyone wants to sing along with. They played enough from Zooropa and Ach Tung Baby that I got hoarse shouting along with my mangled memory of the words..

The highlights for me, besides seeing Dave bunny hop around the stage was the acoustic version of Zooropa. And I did like the REM + Ach Tung Baby mix of It's The End Of The World As We Know It and Until The End Of The World..  Would have been even cooler to mix in the Nick Cave song instead -- where Until The End Of The World was a couple tracks down on  from the best ever Cave song I'll Love You Until The End Of The World on the soundtrack of the whack apocalyptic Wenders movie (surprisingly!) called Until The End Of The World.

And then before we knew it we had zipped through the encores and Bono was saying goodbye to Seattle.

We would eventually amble back to the ferry terminal and get on a 12:45a ferry after eating too much McDonald's (i.e. any McDonalds is "too much") and vowing never to eat there again. But my last impression of the show was watching the four guys troop down the tunnel. They walked in tighter formation than I would have expected, certainly with more togetherness than Lenny's band. And it almost looks like after all these years they're really still 'mates'. I guess to do this 110 times in the last couple dozen months and to be working hard together for 35 years they would have to like each other a little bit, eh? Four guys hanging out that long together is a pretty cool thing no matter what you think of their music and commercial ambitions.

NBA 2011 Playoffs Love Index -- Conference Finals

Another late love list. I was three for four on my predictions from last time -- Memphis didn't make it past Oklahoma City -- rats. Overall, though, I'm pretty happy that the old guard teams like Boston, Los Angeles, and  San Antonio are already home. And that I have two clear teams that I like vs. two clear teams that I don't like. Awesome!

Here's how I think things should stack up:

1) Dallas Mavericks -- These guys took over the top spot, mainly because of Jason Kidd. I like him as much as I like Derrick Rose, and he doesn't have many more shots at a championship. He's an utter rock, he's the moral captain of that team and he deserves a ring. Also, a key narrative arc for the whole finals has been "the Bench", and Dallas has probably the most consistently productive bench in the playoffs. If you look at the game-two road-steals this round already, it was the bench (and D, the other arc) that won those games. In a battle of the benches, JJ and Jet and Peja are all solids. It will be interesting to see if Dallas can figure out OKC, though. I heard Dirk say that Portland and LA were "big" teams and they felt like Dallas ball movement and 3-pt shooting shredded teams built like that. The young Thunder team is making the defensive switches more quickly and coming out to challenge shooters so Dallas has a new animal to figure out.

2) Chicago Bulls -- Hmm.. I still love this team muchly, but I think they may be a little more mentally fragile than the Mavs, if you can imagine that. The loss of Asik in game 2 was the loss of the game for the Bulls, which surprised me that a shot on the Big Turk's chin had that kind of emotional weight, but there it is. A guy I'm starting to like a lot is Gibson. In fact, I think the barometer for this series will be the matchup between Taj Gibson vs. deus-ex-Haslem, both energy 4s. Yeah, still love the Rose, Noah, Boozer, Deng.  Thibs is starting to look real to me.. I think they can pull this off.

3) Oklahoma City Thunder -- I flipped the order on my "villain" teams as well. I think the thing that did it was that despite my native Seattle disgust of the Thunder-poops in general, I really like coach Scotty Brooks. I admired him as a player, and I think he's doing a heck of a coaching job. I also like Mo Cheeks his coaching sidekick. The way those guys handled Westbrook so far in this series is classic, at least on the floor. Durant is fine, and I kinda like Hammurabi Harden. The jury's still out on Westbrook though.. not looking good. But the over-riding problem with this team is every time I look at their logo I see Howard Schultz's SEG.

4) Miami Heat -- The way I picked the Heat as my new low was to ask myself -- OK, between the Thunder and the Heat, which team would do the most damage to the NBA in the long run. One team represents Commish Stern manhandling local government and ownership by presiding over what would most charitably be seen as a bad-faith team market transfer. The other team, however, represents an organization flouting the letter and the spirit of the league's anti-tampering laws (and again, a Commish who seems complicit..). As much as I hate the first, the second is worse for the game I think. Barely. Wade and Lebron seem like "nice guys" I guess and I do actually like Udonis muchly. But not enough to overcome the Riley and Spoelstra smarm and the precious take-my-BFF-talents to Miami crew. Blech.

So the dream matchup is Dallas vs. Chicago for the final -- battle of the power benches! I'm predicting -- big surprise, that this is what we'll get. As in, actual team basketball. I would be happy if either team won.

The nightmare scenario is an OKC vs. Miami final. I might not watch something like that. The clash of the soul-less front-office zombies. The other two options would be OK too I gues: Dallas vs Miami -- unfinished business from '04 baby! or Chicago vs. OKC -- battle of the Young Guns. Just as long as the right teams win!

Home Sweet Home

We just got back from a quick trip to Santa Monica, and I guess this time I was struck by how much that place is getting very familiar. This is our fourth family trip there and I think Kim's seventh trip since January, so it's feeling like another home.

The girls know the drill -- most mornings they take their breakfast in bed (Daddy earning his nap!) and then we all head out to the pool for some sunshine and fast wi-fi. The girls like these little cabana-ettes and they can play in those things for hours. I think they make-believe that they're by a pool at hotel in California. Something like that.

On Saturday we go to church, if by church you mean, the Santa Monica pier. Definitely a religious experience. Here's Maze sitting beside me on the big wheel thingy. Right behind her in the yellow car is Noah Wyle. No kidding. He was standing in line right in front of us and I would have never recognized him except Kim said something to me. His kids are pretty cute, and damn, he does look a lot like a young Steve Jobs.

On the same Ferris Wheel ride Lu and her Mama practice not-blinking. A few minutes later Kim went with Maze on the obligatory ride on Rickety Death (my name for that blasted roller coaster) where she got to practice not-barfing. Maze has this liturgical insistence on the sacrament of roller-coaster, so this time I begged Kim to go instead of me for a change. If you want to see one of the videos I took of a previous ride with Maze, check this out. (Warning: I say "baby" a lot).  I don't know what it is with Maze, but she's really into insane thrill rides. I tried to take a video of Kim and Maze this time but you can't see anything as they swoosh by -- mainly because Kim was "hiding" in her seat. Hmmm.. I think I have my old job back next time.

Sunday, while Maze and Kim had a shopping date, Lulu and Deano and I went to the awesome Science museum on the USC campus. We played around in the "creative area" for a while.

Here's what we look like in infrared.

And after looking at all the exhibits we went to see the IMAX movie Born To Be Wild. No it's not a Steve Martin routine, but the baby elephants and the baby orangutans were pretty funny. And the movie was narrated by Morgan Freeman, who if I'm not mistaken, was actually born a poor black child. Close enough.

And then just like that the weekend was over. We got to the airport and for some reason the Alaska terminal (31-35) was jammed full. So in desperation I rifled my wallet and found this card that got us in one of the business lounges, a part of the airport where Kim and I spent quite a bit of time when we worked in the circus. Home sweet home. Ha!

The Noble Elk

We flew into LA late last night for our monthly pilgrimage to Santa Monica and driving around near midnight in the muggy smear of lights all I could think about was: Phil is no longer the King of Los Angeles. 

Then this morning I read a very fine homage to the Zen Master by Mr. Simmons which had the net effect of inspiring me to actually go and read some of Phil's books (I think I saw Seth B reading one over Easter..). The article had two things in it that I found especially excellent:

1) BS gave the best explanation for Phil's smile at the end of that Dallas sweep in Game 4 last Sunday. Some guys are criers, some guys -- especially Van Gundy guys -- let their grief show through like a bald spot, and some guys get stony. Phil just smiled after that undressing by Dallas. Turns out he was prepared -- preparation is his trademark. I should have picked up on the "tell" myself -- the kids all flown in the see this game in Dallas. Of course Phil knew this was it. He knew his team had quit and his career was done. He could smile because he knew, he was right. 

2) The other thing that popped in the BS article was just the amount of unsaid loathing Phil has for Kobe. Am I just reading into this? I don't know. Yeah, there was the book a few years ago, but then there was detente. I will do a post sometime about Kobe, a player who has tortured me for years as a possible inspiration for hard work but who is so completely un-coachable -- or un-reachable! -- and self-limited. And I think that's where Phil's emotion for Kobe comes from -- because Phil is all about "reaching" people and Kobe was one mountain that he was never able to climb.

Three things I've read recently have helped me understand The Kobe Problem better -- an article by Saint Henry of Portland that debunks Kobe's claim to be a great clutch player (hint: not even close!), then a prose poem by Sherman Alexie about what happens now that Kobe is no longer an elite player, and finally, this Simmons piece about Phil and how much Phil misses Michael. Hmmm..

If we're lucky, Phil has another couple books in him. And if we're really lucky, someone will talk him into coaching the Knicks. Yeah, I'm dreaming.

Ma!

Here's a picture of Ma from a few months ago in her natural environment -- she's got the cowboy, the garden, and that incredible view.  

What you don't see here is all the art and food and books in a home -- not necessarily the house! -- where I grew up.  I love you mom -- Happy Mother's Day!

Mother's Day

We're having a very quiet Mother's Day so far -- the theory is that Kim gets to do pretty much whatever she wants, which includes sleeping in, taking and receiving Mother's Day wishes from around the world, and getting her coffee and chocolate croissant in bed.  I think she's got a couple lady-dates set up as well -- a walk and then a movie in the evening, with maybe a little afternoon gardening..

Yes, a laid-back day is definitely well-deserved for the commander of the Goerlitz household, the mother of my girls and defender of our domestic bliss. Happy Mother's Day bay-bay!