This baby is late! The due date was July 29 and we are now into August and patiently awaiting the arrival. We are anxious to meet our new friend, but also focused on enjoying our final days as a couple without the enormous responsibility that will come with this child. One benefit to holding out: when I looked at the Celebrate Brooklyn schedule earlier this summer, I noticed many shows I might not get to see…
Philip Glass and his ensemble performed his score to the original Dracula, which I have been waiting to see again for years. I saw him perform it at the Orpheum Theater in Boston in 2000 and instantly claimed it was the best performance I had ever seen. He brought it to Celebrate Brooklyn a few years ago but a few minutes in, violent lightning was striking directly overhead. This time the weather was perfect and we watched on a packed lawn with a wonderfully focused and appreciative audience. If our small fry delays just a few more days, we will get to enjoy a live score to Beasts of the Southern Wild!
Dan Deacon is one of my favorite performers, playing spastic electronic music and manipulating the crowd into various dance games similar to what I use with my early childhood classes. By being a gregarious goofball, he has always pushed his shows with novel experiences and this one included the best stunt I’ve seen: creating a smartphone app for the audience to download then asking everyone to hold their phones up while he played. Across the crowd, hundreds of phones audibly performed with him and the screens lit up in unison, flashing different colors and incorporating a strobe effect with the camera flash, producing a spectacular and unique light show. I have never seen anything like it and was once again incredibly impressed with his creativity and technological wizardry. Jamie Lidell would be good enough as a straight up soul singer but he also uses technology to enhance his performance, recording vocal loops to add persussion or chordal harmonies to his drums and keys trio. It is a big, groovy sound and at the end, they were joined onstage by a Brooklyn girls dance crew that brought a great visual energy to the show; a very fun double bill of Deacon/Lidell.
While they didn’t play the Bandshell, I was also able to enjoy a live Phish show. From San Fransisco, on a projection screen in my living room. I discovered them in 9th grade and was instantly obsessed. For the next 10 years, until they took their break, I spent enormous time and money going to shows and trading tapes. It was the early days of the internet, when dial-up access got you onto a BBS where you could post a list of bootlegs and find others to trade with. I accumulated days worth of Phish tapes and I spent weeks worth of time going to see them live. They were always doing something new and had a charm to keep me wondering what they would do next. I have a greatly reduced obsession with them now, but I was still a bit disappointed to miss them on their East Coast summer tour, so I streamed one. And for all the great and weird Phish concert memories I have at countless different venues, watching at home is a great way to experience a show; the sound is great and the view is better. It’s not the same as being there, but it’s definitely not a bad alternative. Trading tapes has its quaint appeal, but streaming any show instantly is the best and most efficient music delivery system I could ever dream of. While their music sounds almost exactly like it did 20 years ago, they have grown with technology and provide a constantly improving experience for their fans.