March 2007 Archives
First, some thoughts from a couple Saturdays ago...
1. Why can't Saturday Night Live assemble a real musically-balanced soundstage? I realize there have been cutbacks, but they really can't handle mixing a real band for the television audience. Vocals seem to be buried and thin ever since the Ashlee Simpson incident ... if that's the way to prove that people are singing for themselves, then bring back the tapes, please.
2. During the Arcade Fire set that got me riled up originally, I was curious about the message on Win's guitar (before he shattered it at the end of "Intervention") -- "sak vide pa kanpe." Turns out it's a Haitian proverb, literally translated as "an empty sack cannot stand up." I know there are more nuances (as with any idiomatic expression), but the phrase does fit into all sorts of ideas about cores and peripheries, Potemkin villages, rotting from the inside out, appearance and reality ... perhaps not all that profound, but still a reasonable indictment of contemporary society ...
OK, now onto the main course -- yet another playlist from my infrequent visits to WPRB. This show, from February 22, 2007, was frustrating as I'd wanted to play lots of MP3s and yet my computer and the control board just weren't communicating well. I got a few across as intended, a few others in oddly phase-shifted versions, and then there were the tracks that got so mangled that I just had to bail out.
