maniacal rage

We saw Colin Meloy at Town Hall last night. Since I've had a huge boner for The Decemberists the last few months (I named Picaresque my favorite album of 2005), I was excited to hear Meloy sing solo. Shawn mentioned he was expecting Meloy to be either very strange or completely normal (based on the lyrics of some of The Decemberists' songs), and it turns out he's the latter. The show felt very personal and very low key (Meloy kept saying he hoped it felt like we were all around "a campfire") and it was extremely enjoyable.

Aside from the quality content, the sound was excellent. Probably the best I've ever heard in a live performance. I'm not sure why it was so good, but the guitars and vocals sounded clean and vibrant. Adding to that was the fact that Meloy is one of those rare musicians who is capable of sounding near-record quality live. His opening acts were an interesting pair of women, the first (Amy Annelle) was messy and strange and sort of classic in that "musicians say weird things that do not make sense" kind of way, the second (Laura Veirs) was near-perfect and all business. She was almost too good, too clean, but her music was great.

If you like The Decemberists or, well, frankly, good music of any kind, check out this show.

Update: Shawn talks about the show. I agree—my next show will be The Decemberists.

One of the reasons I wasn't posting a lot of entries on the site before this new RoR version was that the CMS I built wasn't working. Adding a new post required using phpMyAdmin and manually creating tag associations as well as creating a Markdown version of the content as well. It was a pain. I used to have a fully-functional CMS, but it broke when we moved to PHP5 at Segpub and I never bothered to fix it. So for the last year or so, I've been entering posts via the database itself, basically. And it was cumbersome.

Another issue was always having to think of titles. I hate thinking of titles. I don't want to do it anymore. The new site doesn't have them (technically, it does, you just never see them because they're for my reference only—this entry is called "Pooping Out Bananas") and I love it. No pressure. This goes hand-in-hand with the whole one-entry-on-the-index thing I started with the last design, which nearly immediately killed the site. Having only one entry on your index page at any given time is ballsy—it requires that you actually have good content that can last for several days, something that's, well, nearly impossible in this medium. I would find myself looking at an post 20 minutes after I published it and already being pissed off at the stale feeling it gave me. It's one thing for a long piece of fiction, but when it's just some nonsense about nonsense then, well, it's annoying.

And then there's the lack of comments. I must say, I fucking love it. I don't have to worry about saying something so fantastic that you'll feel obligated to respond, and I don't have to worry when you don't. Clearly, you're here—I still get plenty of hits a day—and if you want to say something you can send me an email (there's a link in the info section) and I'll respond.

This new format feels freeing and suddenly I'm writing without worry or responsibility. Stripping away everything but the most basic of content has given me an internet boner for this site which, effectively, is the same thing as a real-world boner except that it's really shiny and keeps beeping. See, no responsibility at all.