[music | Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Albert Goes West]

Eddie Izzard. Was Fucking Hilarious.

The venue was not

[music | Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man]

Tonight is China Forbes @ The Paradise, Boston.

Natalie is the big Pink Martini fan here, I like them well enough, but she's the Lounge Music superfreak. We knew this wouldn't be loungey, but it was a very good show. She's a good song writer, and their performance was great. It was kind of an odd show because a huge part of the audience was friends and family (I guess she grew up in Cambridge), and so there was lots of in-joke back and forth.

The Grandmother stuff was the best. Her grandmother is 90 and apparently couldn't hear a thing, so Forbes was just hoping that everything "looks good anyway".

Opening was Lael Alderman, who is also the rhythm guitarist/everything-elsist for China Forbes' band. The audience was super light anyway, and not many people were there for his set, but he was good in a solo-male-singer/songwriter-Jack-Johnson sort of way. If you like Dashboard Confessional, you'll like Lael Alderman. I hope we were able to give him enough love from the 6 people in the audience at that point!

The main set was really entertaining, she pretty much played everything off of '78, and a couple of covers (R.E.M - Superman, Bryan Adams). The Bryan Adams song was good because of the story. This was her encore, and since no one in the audience seemed to go to many shows, they don't understand how encores work. When she said "It's been great playing here, hopefully we get back to Boston soon yadda yadda bye", everyone left. Every. One. So she said she had wanted to skip the encore but that the band made her do another song. So she told a story of Bryan Adams going back out on stage 30 minutes after a show in some stadium and playing to the few dozen stragglers who were still around.

Some of the people came back in after they started playing again. Many didn't :-)

A much higher percentage of my photos came out this time. Previously, I mentioned the blurry/grainy tradeoff I was willing to make, and I made it. I don't care, at least they're visible this time. No new camera however, the one I was trying to buy doesn't come out until June. Forcing ISO 400 and then playing with shutter speed seems to have done the trick largely. Maybe I'll put it at 200 next time for a while and see what happens.

Here they are:

[music | People Under The Stairs - More Than You Know]

What a surprisingly good show, I'm not surprised that it was a good show, but it was just amazingly good. Dragons of Zynth opened, who I'd never heard of, but I really liked them, and they will get my CD money. The first few songs reminded me of Smashing Pumpkins is a big way sound-wise, and their souled-up cover of Janie Jones really made my day, after learning I'd missed Mick Jones's band this past weekend.

Saul Williams was everything we wanted to see. Fantastic show and if you don't go see him you're a moron. Especially considering they were $15 tickets. Like many people, I came to him through Nine Inch Nails, with the tour a couple years back, and then Niggy Tardust, the album so nice, we bought it twice. The thing that motivated the audience most was his poetry. I wouldn't consider myself a huge fan of so called "urban poetry" as much, I think I associate the genre too much with Harold Perrineau. It's probably because I'm neither Urban nor a poet. I hang around in the city a lot, but I hardly think that makes me qualified to call myself Urban. In any case, his imagery was powerful and moving. His band was really tight, despite some on-stage tech problems, which happen all the time to everyone. The audience couldn't tell anyway. Well, I guess one guy yelled that he couldn't hear Williams' voice, but evidently that guy wasn't leaning on the stage, cause he sounded perfectly clear to me.

Natalie said that, even with all the shows we go to, this is right up there among her favorites, and I agree, energetic as hell, great lyrics, great sound, .

Williams' daughter came out for a couple of songs, she joined him on her spring break and was dancing like crazy and singing her head off. If all other career choices are unappealing to her, she could make for one of the great hype-men someday.

I'm glad Boston gave him such a great crowd, hopefully he'll come back around soon, as amazing as Niggy Tardust is, the live show was even better.

I swear that before Sunday's show I'll have a way faster camera. I'm getting really tired of having very non-grainy, usually blurry pictures. I want to swing that pendulum.

I only got a couple of decent photos, here they are:

This is the saddest thing I saw all day. I really can't think of a more appropriate way for things to play out though. Dying to protect his tiny piece of rock, protecting it from someone who really loved him, but wanted to take his rock away.

I remember very little about that book because I never really read it when I was a little kid. I was way too damaged, and I probably still am. But that story sums up a lot about warring over politics.