listenings and thinkings

To compound the basic jealousy you undoubtedly all feel toward me for having a free-ride year in New York, I would like to continue sharing various aspects of my rather enjoyable social life.

Last Thursday I went to see the Smashing Pumpkins at the United Palace Theatre, on 175th and Broadway. There was a lot of anticipation about this comeback tour, but not all the fans left happy. I was one who left elated. They played a few of their more popular numbers - today, bullet with butterfly wings, tonight tonight - balanced with several of their newer ones, but the crowd shouted for alot of songs they never got. Instead, Billy Corgan fully indulged his guitar rock-god dreams by busting 10 min jam sessions and incredible, sonically complex mixtures of delay and feedback effects. It was phenomenal. After about an hour, they brought out a miniature drum kit, an acoustic guitar, and a rhodes keyboard. I'll get my gripe out of the way - Americans find it impossible to sit still, not talk, and appreciate the music. The delicate acoustic session was permanently disturbed by a continual hum of background chit-chat. I wanted to kill someone. But the beauty of the music and harmony was enough to soothe my troubled soul, and I closed my eyes to soak it up. After 30 mins, they switched back to the normal set-up and proceeded to outdo themselves with an even heavier session of hard metal, topped with an awesome cover of Pink Floyd's "set the controls" For the encore, they came out and the band lined up in front of the microphones, only the pianist playing. They sang 'they only come out at night' and then one guy repeated the melody with a kazoo...surreal, and funny for that reason. Billy then began talking to the crowd and basically mocked them. There had been some booing during the solos, and in his final coup de grace, he imitated them like this: "Oh Billy, why? Why won't you play the songs I lost my virginity to?" Needless to say many laughed, and many felt chastised and booed some more. Well, this is New York after all, the city of cynics. For me, it was the best rock concert I've ever been to.

I also went to an art gallery exhibition/social justice event, which featured amazing photographs by a woman who had been touring Uganda and taking photos of people in a certain village that was having a well dug. After perusing the photos, sipping white wine, and pretending like a knew good photo art when I saw it, we all gathered round to listen to a brief talk by a guy called Sean who related his adventures in the Congo where he discovered a prison of child soldiers, met the Colonel of the resistance army, and forged press documents to sneak into the prison and release some boys. His story can be found here at Falling Whistles, which is also the name of a charity he started to raise awareness about the situation in Congo, which is currently the worst humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world and most people don't know about it.

While I was there I met a guy who was a magnificent embodiment of an American stereotype. He was a high school football star in Montana, but he broke his ankle. He was then spotted in the mall by a model scout, moved to New York, worked as a bare-chested Abercrombie & Fitch store rep, and now he does all sorts of modelling - product launches, runway, and best of all club-going. Yes, that's right folks, there are clubs in New York that hire models to go to their clubs to boost it's reputation for having young and beautiful people. So his job, if you can call it that, involves getting paid to go to the best clubs, get drinks on the house, and stand there with his fellow models looking good. The only down side, he tells me, is that the conversation amongst them isn't that exhilirating. A small price to pay, I say.