Oh, so Barbra Streisand's found the other triangle, eh?


First off, an update on our parakeets: Turns out Goldklang is a girl. We thought they were two gay boys, but Goldklang's nostrils have turned flaky and brown, which means she's not only female, but a female who's In the Mood, and Gormley was all up in that the other night. I don't know how I thought bird eggs got fertilized, but I was naively unprepared to see actual birdie humping. (Possibly because I never rented the unrated director's cut of Winged Migration that caused such a fuss.) According to our parakeet book, it will take nine or 10 days before eggs appear, and I guess we're going to have to simply dispose of them if they do, since we don't have the space or resources to raise baby birds right now. That makes me sad, especially since Goldklang has been pulling apart her rope toy, strand by strand, to make a nest in anticipation of the big event. I really hope Gormley has been shooting blanks and I just realized that this entry is starting to take a dangerously odd turn so let's move on now.

Monday, Bev and I took a ride down to Boston to see The Cure play at Boston University's Agganis Arena. You're going to hear about it and like it.

Just south of Portland, Bev and I stopped for sandwiches at Ainsley's, a nice little filling station and snack shop. As we rode back toward the highway, we spotted a woodchuck resting in the middle of the road, pivoting in a circle on one of her front paws. I stopped the car and blocked traffic while Bev fetched a board that was lying in the grass. She tried to slide the board beneath the chuck (who we quickly named Scampers even though Bev keeps referring to her as "Shuffles"), but Scampers decided it was more comfy to recline against the board, as though Bev had arrived simply to provide her a makeshift chaise lounge. Bev and I switched roles at that point, and I used the board to prod Scampers gently under the chin. After a few seconds of this, she got annoyed and scuttled off the road, so if her leg was indeed hurt, it didn't seem to be bad enough to impede her movement. Bev thinks she may have just been stunned by a car straddling her and grazing her paw or something. I hope she's okay. And I don't know what we would've done had that board not been there (I learned not to get too close to road-bound animals after Hammond the turtle took a swipe at my leg), so the lesson is: littering is good.

We passed a Hannaford produce truck that had a picture of a perfect, ripe strawberry on the side. Bev grumbled something about it not being representative of the quality of Hannaford produce, and I commented that at least it wasn't a Shaw's truck. (Shaw's is a competing grocery chain that has the crappiest produce I've ever seen this side of Wal-Mart.) We spent the next 10 minutes or so thinking up pictures that would accurately depict Shaw's veggies. Suggestions included:
-A withered, underweight yellow squash with a brown gouge taken out of it.
-An onion leaking translucent yellow liquid, with a thermometer jammed into it and a cartoon hot water bottle on top of it.
-Desiccated portabellas the gray color of pavement, with veiny fault lines running the diameter of their caps.

Around 2:00, we checked into the Ogunquit Resort Motel, just a few miles north of the Maine border, and about 90 minutes north of Boston. We planned to stop there for the night on the way back from the concert, and it made a convenient place to dump our stuff. (My stuff was a messenger bag with a change of clothes wadded into it. Bev's stuff--for our 30-hour trip--was a backpack, a canvas Harry Potter tote bag, and a plastic Hannaford bag, all full. She's not doing much to overturn sexist stereotypes, I must say.) Bev fixed the TV, we took a quick nap, got lunch from Yum Mee, the Asian restaurant next to the hotel, and struck out for Boston.

Didn't take very long to actually get to the city, but it also didn't take very long to get hopelessly lost once we were inside it. For one thing, between the two of us, Bev and I had managed to obtain three different, conflicting sets of directions to Agganis Arena. For another thing, although Boston seems to me like it would be a very pleasant place to live if you don't own a vehicle, an overhead view of the city's streets must resemble a contour drawing of a sweater crammed through a meat grinder. Exits appear, with no warning, around blind corners. Roads disappear down trapdoors, only to pop up again in some other part of town. Some goofball actually riding on a Segway makes you cackle so hard that you miss your turn. And all the while, the damn Citgo sign flashes its hypnotic Masonic iconography down at you like some dystopian mind-control device.

Needless to say, the 45 minutes we'd allotted for travel troubles turned out to be far too conservative. Bev and I got to our seats literally one minute before opening act 65daysofstatic left the stage. (Yes, we arrived toward the end of the 64th day, har har.) From what little I heard, they sounded like a fairly good post-rock band, like Explosions in the Sky with a whiff of electronics. I wish I'd heard more of them.

People-watching then filled the time as The Cure's roadies set up. Aside from being, curiously, almost uniformly white (and not in the goth makeup way you might be thinking, but the Republican National Convention way), there was an interesting mix of people in the venue. You had the characters you'll run into at every concert, of course: Crying Girl Stumbling Around Aimlessly, Drunk Girl Passed Out on Miserable Boyfriend's Lap in the Lobby, and Thirtysomething Dicksmoke Who's Trying to Stave Off the Waning of His Youth-Culture Relevance by Shouting and Dancing in an Intentionally Obnoxious Fashion Within an Eight-Foot Radius of Where I'm Standing. But Monday night, you also had Woman in Slinky Evening Gown Who's Having Trouble Walking Down the Arena Stairs, Pockmarked Old Wiseacre Who Appeared to Have Been the Father of Both Marky Ramone and Lemmy From Motorhead, and Unspeakably Awesome 10-Year-Old Boy Wearing Gallons of Eyeliner. Apart from the Ween show Jon and I went to a few years back, The Cure boasted probably the most diverse crowd I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, I can't give you much of a concert review because Bev is the big Cure fan in this household. I do like The Cure, I own nearly all of their albums thanks to the generosity of Scott Floman, and I flat-out love Disintegration and their singles compilation, but for whatever reason, I've never really become a real fan so much as an interested observer. Maybe it's because Robert Smith doesn't really write melodies, instead whimpering along with the music in a way that's effective but nearly note-free (as opposed to my golden-throated favorites Rodney Anonymous, Jeff Magnum, and Wayne Coyne). Or maybe, as with Neil Young and Frank Zappa, I simply felt so daunted by the breadth of their pre-existing discography by the time I discovered them that I've been content to self-consciously pick and choose which albums I revisit. Thus, I recognized lots of the songs at the show but didn't know the titles, which puts a crimp in my efforts to tell you about it all. For instance, until I just now Googled the lyrics, I thought "The Walk" was entitled "Japanese Baby." 

So here's the setlist, copied from www.cure-concerts.de (though I added quotation marks and capital letters because I'm that way): "Plainsong," "Prayers for Rain," "Alt.end," "A Night Like This," "The End of the World," "Lovesong," "Sleep When I'm Dead," "Pictures of You," "Lullaby," "The Perfect Boy," "From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea," "Hot Hot Hot," "The Only One," "The Blood," "Wrong Number," "The Walk," "Signal to Noise," "Push," "Inbetween Days," "Just Like Heaven," "Primary," "Us or Them," "Never Enough," "One Hundred Years," "Disintegration." Encore one: "The Lovecats," "Freakshow," "Close to Me," "Why Can't I be You?" Encore two: "Play for Today," "A Forest." Encore three: "Boys Don't Cry," "Jumping Someone Else's Train," "Grinding Halt," "10:15 Saturday Night," "Killing an Arab."

Robert Smith looked kind of doughy, like a cross between Chucky and a freshly exhumed Tiny Tim, but was playful and in good voice throughout the evening. The show's focus was on the rockier elements of the band's discography, culminating in vicious, pissed-off renditions of "Us or Them" and the gorgeously dissonant "One Hundred Years," both of which flooded the arena with all manner of cathartic guitar noise. It was interesting to hear the bass taking "Lovesong"'s instantly recognizable keyboard hook, but I do sort of wish there'd been a fifth band member onstage taking the keys, if only to add some sort of atmospherics to songs like "Never Enough" and "Prayers for Rain." It's hardly a complaint worth complaining, though. I was prepared to credit them with a win after they opened with the disconsolate "Plainsong" against a backdrop of glittering lights and CGI stars.

Bev and I left after "Lovecats" out of exhaustion and to get out of the parking garage without becoming ensnarled in a web of impaired pedestrians and bleating car horns, but looking at the setlist, I'm kind of bummed to see that we missed a full 10 songs as a result. (I figured we'd miss three or four, including "Boys Don't Cry" and "Friday I'm in Love," neither of which we care for.) I'm really bummed to see that we missed "Killing an Arab," which I enjoy but whose title I restrained myself from shouting between songs because I thought it would be slightly gauche to do so. Still, Bev and I caught two and a half hours' worth of fine performances, and "One Hundred Years" was the song I was most hoping they'd play, so I was pleased.

We crashed at the hotel and drove back home the following morning. On Route 1, I got stuck behind an off-brand model of car called an Esteem, which I followed very closely because its driver was not driving fast enough for my liking and I am kind of an impatient jackass behind the wheel. This went on for miles, and at one point, we came upon a plodding line-painting truck with a sign on its back reading, "WET YELLOW PAINT PLEASE KEEP OFF," as well as a big electronic directional arrow. Now, Bev maintains the arrow was pointing to the right, as in "Go around me on my right side," but I could have sworn I saw the arrow pointing to both the left and the right, Wizard of Oz scarecrow-style. I grudgingly admit that a double-headed arrow wouldn't make much sense unless the intended message was, "This truck is a solid mass; do not attempt to pass through it as you would a fine mist or ghost." At any rate, I obliviously kept on the Esteem's tail as she passed the truck on the left, allowing us both to smear the freshly-painted yellow lines all over the road and our tires as the truck driver blew an angry, disbelieving horn blast at us.

Cora was reluctantly collected from Bev's parents' place (she gets lots of treats there) and we drove home. Another band off my concert checklist. It's kind of depressing how short that checklist has become as I push 30. The Handsome Family has a star next to it, but they're the only one I think I'd drive down to Boston for at this point. Because I'm old and I also live in a crappy state where no one wants to come. When I worked in Ann Arbor, I could walk from Math Reviews' offices to Luna's last ever Michigan show, by the way. Sharon and I drove, of course, but the point remains...

CURRENT MUSIC: Your Bloated Corpse Has Washed Ashore by Puerto Muerto.
CURRENT MOOD: Bleak.
CURRENT LEAST FAVORITE PHRASE I'VE EVER HAD TO TRANSCRIBE AT MY JOB: "Mexicans are great, don't get me wrong..."