With the Wayward Son still wayward, The Pitch's Chris Packham filed this dispatch.
Today, I stared into Tim Finn's blog, Back to Rockville, and Back to Rockville stared back. Finn spares no totally unnecessary detail in documenting Garth Brooks' seventh show at the Sprint Center Arena, while Regina Spektor merits nothing but a link to Wikipedia -- nice journalisming over there, Back to Rockville. Anyway, the latest Garth Brooks performance elicits this jaw-dropping sentence from Tim Finn, the champagne of Lester Bangses:
"The show was both similar to and different from the six shows that preceded it."
That is Joycean in its layered complexity of total meaninglessness. I'm not saying Garth Brooks isn't worth reviewing. He may even be worth reviewing twice. Ultimately, my question is, why would you go watch the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Cowboy for the seventh consecutive night when the awesome Regina Spektor was in town? For the answer, turn your monitor upside down:
˙ɹǝʇuǝɔ ʇuıɹds ǝɥʇ ʎɹɹɐɯ-ʎɐƃ oʇ sʇuɐʍ ɹɐʇs ʎʇıɔ sɐsuɐʞ ǝɥʇ ǝsnɐɔǝq :ɹǝʍsuɐ
Encyclopedia Brown-o-Vision brought to you by my new business associate, the text-flip Web tool. We'll be seeing more of his excellent work in the future.
Clearly, Tim Finn is a man to be emulated. After several weeks of ghostly wispiness, my Tim Finn goatee really came in nicely over the weekend. It's just like that awesome army recruitment commercial where the kid comes home from basic training, and his proud dad says, "Yuh got off that train, shook muh hand and looked me square in the eye." Well, on Sunday, my Tim Finn goatee got off that train, shook my hand, and looked my chin square in its eye.
When you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I took the hammer of my music critic goatee to the nail of Regina Spektor's sold-out Sunday concert at the Uptown Theater. Spektor is the locus of a whole lot of idol-worship and long-distance affection. Here is my impression of the crowd at the Uptown: "Oooh, Regina Spektor, I luuu-uuuv you, I want to have a civil union ceremony with a simple exchange of vows and a joint checking account." I'm totally not kidding. Unlike the Sprint Center Arena, the Uptown is actually a venue where an unamplified fan in the upper deck can shout "WE LOVE YOU, REGINA" loudly enough for the performer to hear and respond.
Spektor -- whose continents-spanning biography can be read at Wikipedia!!! -- is a New York-based singer-songwriter who plays the piano, sings like a really pretty volcano, and is apparently the Socratic ideal of awesomeness to which all other awesome things aspire. Well, it was a good show, anyway. And she's definitely a charmer.
Her lyrics are smart and often very funny -- take, for instance, "Bobbing for Apples." In among various culinary and romantic images, she repeats the refrain, "Some one next door is fucking to one of my songs," which was very funny at the time by virtue of comedic principles such as timing and also delivery. I don't have time to go into all that. The point I'm trying to make is that she was charming and charismatic and completely owned the audience.
Spektor punctuates her impressive vocal acrobatics with often-hilarious grunts and guttural sounds; the effect is kind of like hanging out with a really pretty girl who knows how to belch. Over the course of a 90-minute set, she sang a Capella and accompanied herself on piano and guitar. As a measure of the love her audience had for her, just about everybody at the Uptown was shooting pictures for the entire performance, except for me, because I have it on good authority that I am a giant dumbass who never remembers his camera. I thought about pulling a free photo off Wikipedia, but instead, I produced this artist's conception of Regina Spektor at the Uptown Theater:
Final score: TEN POINTS FOR GRYFFINDOR. Uh -- six bags of popcorn! Rated E for Everyone. I will totally review her next seven consecutive Kansas City concerts.
UPDATE: Bill Brownlee wrote this review of the Spektor show, demonstrating a higher degree of critical thinking than, for instance, a Wikipedia article.
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