Bucharest Notes - Awful, but less awful than expected
Posted over at Killing Batteries.
Things that I will and will not miss while in Romania (the goodbye for now post)
I apologize to my seven regular readers for what I assume has been incapacitating distress over my silence lo these past nine days. I have been hard at work, coordinating/preparing/stressing out over my one month trip to Romania and Moldova to research and write the definitive guidebook works on these rapidly changing countries that I both love and hate so much. I think I can get all this stuff done in about two weeks. Unfortunately, I leave Wednesday.
In further TIWILMinneapolis blog neglect news, since I’ll have precious little time or material for this blog while I’m away, I’m afraid that I’ll mostly be reduced to cross-posting my Killing Batteries stuff here, which I hope you’ll find entertaining or at least sufficiently distracting. You’ll be happy to know that I suffer unremitting nervous breakdowns and exhaustion while on the road for Lonely Planet which, oddly, makes for decidedly hilarious blogging material.
There’s been plenty of Minneapolis-centric personal events/discoveries to write about recently, but little time or energy to make each item a standalone post, so since the remainder of my life is consumed with lists right now, I’ll simply offer you this bullet pointed breakdown of conversations/rants/raves:
• Et tu T-Mobile, et tu? It’s bad enough that you drop my calls every time I enter a building, dare to use my phone in a suburb of Oakland or spin around too fast, but now you’ve gone and reduced coverage around my building? Maybe its my imagination, but for the first three weeks, all calls made from inside my condo were fine and clear. The past few days, calls are dropping and call recipients are reporting that only about one syllable out of three gets through and I sound like I’m calling from inside the Chunnel. This is downtown Minneapolis, for Buddha’s sake. If you can’t provide decent coverage here, you’ve got problems.
• Awww yeah!! I’m dying to see the Mill City Farmer’s Market! Everybody’s talking about it and City Pages just name it Best Farmer’s Market in the Twin Cities! The anticipation is killing me! I’m gonna get onions, tomatoes, bananas, apples, garlic… What? It doesn’t open until May 10th? Three days after I leave the country for a month? Razzle, frazzle, grazzle, ^%$#%^%#@!!!
• I try to avoid being the 1,397,376th person to comment on a tired topic, but this cruel weather lately is just too much. I’m growing weary of this constant vengeful God business. If I believed in God. Which I don’t. So there.
• Ate lunch at Wilde Roast Café yesterday. Wonderful, wonderful sammiches. Free Wi-Fi, fireplace, puffy chairs. Good thing the kitchen people cook better than they read - the words “tuna melt” on my order were somehow interpreted as “chicken curry”. The correct sammich was quickly produced though. I’ll be going back frequently, however with Bralessa right across the road, I predict a lot of time standing around on the corner trying to decide which place to eat.
• After months of pretending that it was a dumb fad, I sacrificed an hour this week and got myself onto Twitter. I briefly had this fantasy of logging tweets from the road in Romania (e.g. “In Transylvania now – price for garlic flower necklaces are up.”), only to discover that my Blackberry is too dumb to load the Twitter web page. Et tu Blackberry? Et tu? Going to test two workarounds in the next few days, time permitting. Tweets will be mostly geared to the Killing Batteries crowd, since there’s literally tens times as many Battery Killers as there are Minneapolis Lovers at the moment. Again, I hope you’ll still find my off-topic missives worthwhile.
Finally, I don’t believe I have ever been happier with a dwelling in my entire life as I have been with my bitchin’ new condo. I leave you with a snap of the view from my living room. A friend and I sat and stared out the window at traffic, people, HCMC helicopters and flickering lights for like two hours on Tuesday night. Better than TV.
This is why I love Brasa
As usual, I’m one of the last people to hear about awesome new places like Brasa Premium Rotisserie. Though to be honest, if I hadn’t been railroaded in for an impulse lunch on Sunday and instead had the opportunity to peruse the menu first, I may not have ever made it through the door.
The meat - dear Lord - so much meat. It wasn’t love at first sight.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll eat meat like a starving buzzard in most situations, (sorry Alexis!), but allow me to encapsulate the intimidating menu for you:
Starters:
Beef
Pork
Chicken
Sandwiches:
Beef
Pork
Chicken
Entrees:
Plate of Beef
Plate of Pork
Plate of Chicken
Sides:
Beef Salad
Pork Fries
Chicken Puree
Dessert:
Beef Cake
Pork Turnover
Chicken Pudding
Beverages:
Beef Tea
Pork with Limon™
Fresh Squeezed Chicken Juice
In short, meaty. But guess what? It was effing awesome anyway!
I had a beef sandwich that must have been marinated for about 12 years, because it was falling apart and so sinfully delicious that I started trying to picture it naked. My companion had the chicken sandwich, but I didn’t get to try it because mine was too good to put down and besides she threatened to leave if I didn’t stop touching myself in public. (God, I miss Italy.)
As it so happened, due to fatigue and inadequate blood-caffeine levels, I briefly felt compelled to go off my self-imposed Coke prohibition. When I ordered a Coke, I was flatly informed that they didn’t carry Coke or “any corn syrup-based beverage!”
Meow!
“OK…. So what do you have?”
“Mexican Coke.”
“Does Mexican Coke have caffeine?” I asked digging my fingernails a quarter inch into the underside of the table.
“I’ll check.”
[Five agonizing minutes later]
“It has caffeine!”
So I got one. And it was incredible! So sharp and tasty! Why don’t they serve Mexican Coke everywhere? It tastes like the Coke we had back in the 70s, like Buddha intended! Whoever started putting corn syrup in Coke needs to be lobotomize immediately. I bet the guys in the kitchen at Brasa could do it. They can do anything with dead meat.
Finally, they have an ambitiously-priced $5.50 piece of chocolate coconut cake served with raspberry and chocolate sauces and a pile of whipped cream for good measure. Now, I struggle with purchasing desserts that are this expensive in a no-nonsense place like Brasa, but I’ll grudgingly admit that the cake was rich and wonderful and experimenting with different sauces every bite was a nice little thrill. Also, as my companion handily demonstrated, the sauces can be a standalone dessert in and of themselves if you spend 10 minutes scraping every last speck from the plate. This from the woman that wouldn’t let me touch myself in public. Hypocrite.
Oh and the décor. Well, either the building that Brasa occupies used to be a car repair shop (in which case, kudos on removing the oil stench) or someone went through an awful lot of trouble to build garage doors into the front of the building. When the weather is nice (like it heart-breakingly was on Sunday), they yank open the garage doors and it’s like dining outside, except without crap from trees and bushes falling into your food!
I hear tell that when the weather is not so nice however, like all winter for example, not only are the garage doors prudently shut tight, but there’s nowhere for the hoards of people piling into Brasa on the weekends to stand and wait for a table. Also, table assignment is allegedly done at whim, meaning line jumping is possible and indeed, enthusiastic in some cases.
These minor flaws aside, it’s a great place that I’ll be biking to often this summer. And well, the name is OK I guess, but I bet they’d get way more business if they cut to the chase and called themselves ‘Bralessa’.
[UPDATE: Bralessa was just named “Best Takeout” by City Pages.]
Brasa
600 East Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis
612-379-3030
www.brasa.us
Where the *&#$ did I pack my Kryptonite lock?
You know what I love? Good timing. My appreciation for good timing is more acute than for most people because I am so infrequently its benefactor.
Have I mentioned that I’m cursed? Yeah, it sucks. So far, I’ve been able to keep the boils and flatulence at bay, but when it comes to things like timing, be it elevators, Light Rail or career-making book deals, I’m always about 30 seconds too late. Every time. It’s uncanny.
The upshot is that my eternal curse doesn’t afflict anyone more than two inches away from me, which is why, as we’re mere moments from biking season, it has come to pass that Minneapolis received a $900,000 grant from the Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Project to promote biking and walking. Look out Portland! We’re going to annihilate you the next time they take one of those cycling commuter surveys! Put that in your tweeter and smoke it, you dirty hippies!
On a related note, if I could only figure out which of these still-packed boxes sitting around my bitchin’ new condo contained my Kryptonite lock, I wouldn’t even be sitting here right now. Now I’m gonna have to walk all the way to Surdyk’s like a sucker.
Speaking of timing, gas is now $3.357 a gallon??? Jesus bootie slapping Christ. That’s gotta hurt. How are these people expected to buy wine and cider when it costs them $73 to fill up their completely unnecessary SUVs that they have no business driving, even if they could successfully navigate or park them - which they can’t if the lofty views from my bitchin’ new condo are any evidence.
I’m so overcome with empathy right now. ‘Empathy’ means ‘disgust’, right? Where is my dictionary? Probably under my Kryptonite.
I don’t mean to sound like a self-righteous asshole about these gas prices, but for those of you who’ve developed lives that are entirely dependent on excessively large cars that you only use for commuting and blocking traffic in my neighborhood, I’d just like to say BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
Oh, since I’m in a hating mood over here, there’s this red Hummer I see downtown all the time. Every time I see it, it’s ignoring other traffic or lazily parked in one and a half parking spots, last time, taking up part of a handicapped spot. I saw it again a few days ago - the passenger side window had been smashed in. Now, I don’t normally endorse vengeance-fueled property damage, but seeing this particularly deserving example of returned bad karma was by far the highlight of an otherwise dismal week.
Do your part, flip off a Hummer.
This is why I love the MONDO Jugglefest
You don’t even wanna know how badly I wanna just sit here and write 2,000 words about the unspeakable awesomeness of my new condo. It’s just so… awesome (I still haven’t figured out where I packed my thesaurus). I’ve been here for a mere five days and I can’t get enough of it. I’m so happy that I’m seriously considering sending a body double in my place to Romania and Moldova for seven weeks of guidebook research this summer, so I can just sit here and soak in the awesomeosity. Sadly, there isn’t another travel writer on Earth with a body like mine, so I guess I have to go.
So, since I’m not writing about my effing awesome condo (Did I mention it’s connected to the Skyway? And I have a clear view all the way to the downtown St Paul skyline?), I’ve decided to write about something else that’s obscure, yet dear to my heart, the annual MONDO Jugglefest, happening this Friday, Saturday and Sunday (April 11th, 12th and 13th).
For those of you too busy to read my lengthy bio, you may not know that I’ve been a juggler since age 12. There was a brief moment in time during my teens when my skill and breathtakingly rapid development had people dropping my name as the next Juggling All Star. But then I kissed a girl and all my practice time was suddenly filled with other activities. I regret nothing.
So, while I’m not even remotely as good as the average, non-girl-kissing teenaged juggler these days, I’m still very connected to this rarified art (one step above mime, one step below dinner-table magician), which is why I am so excited to get to the MONDO Jugglefest this weekend, held at Concordia College’s Gangelhoff Center, just off Hamlin Avenue in St Paul.
What do people do at a juggefest, you ask? Well, juggle like maniacs, for starters. There’s workshops, demonstrations, vendors and games happening on all three days. Not to mention the indescribable, jaw-dropping scene of watching a sea of people spread out all over a field house deftly throwing and catching (and dropping and bending overing and picking upping) hundreds of objects all at once.
And it’s not just juggling. Unicycling and yo-yoing are equally well represented. On Saturday night we hold our public show, the MONDO Spectacular, at the Central High Theater, where dizzying displays of top-shelf juggling, unicycling, yo-yoing and more are packaged and presented for hardcore enthusiasts and curious bystanders alike.
If you don’t juggle (or unicycle or yo-yo), this is without a doubt the best place to learn. Formal and informal coaching persists throughout the festival. I can teach anyone between the ages of six and 75 to juggle in less than 30 minutes. That’s right, in thirty minutes you can be just a little bit more like me and who doesn’t want that?
Festival Hours are:
Friday: 5:00pm - Midnight
Saturday, 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m.
(Note: the Gym will be closed during the Spectacular, from 5 p.m. until the end of the show around 10 p.m.)
Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Gym passes, good for all three days, are $7 at the door. All attendees will be required to sign a waiver before admittance to the festival.
And for the ladies, juggling is perennially a lonely guy affair. Typically, the guy to girl ratio at a juggling festival is like 25 to one. If you’ve ever wanted to be in a safe, fun environment, where you can develop your dexterity and have your pick of literally hundreds of guys vying for your attention, this is the place. See you in the gym!
This is why I love freakish cold every once in a while
Sure, Saipan may seem all innocuous and fun until you’re walking along, dinking with your camera and almost stagger into a picture window-sized cobweb, custom built by an arachnid so big that it can suck out all your body’s juices in 20 seconds flat, leaving you looking like one of those shrunken, pruney voodoo dolls they find in witchdoctors’ waiting rooms in the jungles of Haiti.
You know why we here in Minnesota don’t have this manner of man-eating spiders and Rodents of Unusual Size? Because of our freeze-your-face-off winters, that’s why. What would you rather have? A few weeks a year where you have to take inventory of your fingers and toes when you return from shoveling or have to fend off Skull Island-caliber bugs and lizards every time you take out the recycling?
Even the jungle’s itty bitty spiders are programmed to inflict maximum human discomfort and embarrassment with their uncanny penchant for biting people in warm, hairy, unmentionable places. Believe me. And it itches like a mofo, too.
I know I cowered in my apartment for two straight months and complained lavishly of cabin fever this past winter, but I’ve acquired a newfound love for the occasional spell of kill-everything cold. From now on, every time the temperature dips below zero, I’ll just imagine all the bugs and rodents dying off that would chomp on my doodle given half a chance.
Anyway, it’s good to be back in good ol’ Minnesota where there’s no question that I’m at the top of the food chain.
I’m wicked tan, by the way. I’m also so exhausted and jetlagged that I almost fainted while walking to Subway this morning. Or maybe it was the wine I was force-fed all the way from Guam to LAX. Whatever. I’m gonna go throw up.
Buying a condo: Almost as expensive and furnishing a condo
Hello from Saipan! In case you were wondering, it’s pretty hot on this part of the planet. It also happens to be the hot season, so it’s extra hot. And humid. It’s the humidity that really gets you, ya know. That and the heat. Which is on the hot side, incidentally.
So, in summary it’s hot.
As I flit hither and thither, solemnly viewing WWII sites and noting the deals that can be had at the Prada duty free outlet, my mind is still very much back in Minneapolis. This is because I am closing on my bitchin’ new condo two days after I return from Micronesia and I spent the week prior to my departure racing around the city buying stuff to make it livable. This was not cheap. Let me set the scene:
Let’s pretend that you’ve just been dropped off on Earth after four and a half years on an alien planet. Just for fun, we’ll call this imaginary planet “Romania”. Now interstellar travel between Romania and Earth isn’t easy at the best of times. When you make the journey, you can only bring so much with you. Mostly just clothes and, if you’re feeling up to it, the Vlad Tepes Dracula coffee mug/ashtray set that some naïve, but good intentioned native gave you on a birthday.
So now you’re back on Earth. Firstly, welcome back! It’s pretty much the same as when you left except we let the economy go in the crapper while you were busy trying to sort out the metric system, but c’est la vie!
When you left four and a half years ago, you figured that you’d be gone a long time and since your parents frown on you storing your stuff in their garage, you pretty much sold everything you owned. You saved some random clothes that are no longer in style, a few books and DVDs and that’s pretty much it. Since you can’t sleep on old clothes or watch TV on a book, despite what grandma claims, you’ve got considerable shopping to do.
Having never had to start from zero like this before, you never could have imagined exactly how protracted and expensive this was gonna be. Even when you moved out at 18, you had your bedroom furniture and the apartment’s existing garage sale living room and dinning room sets that barely survived the last student residents.
So, it goes without saying that you need furniture: Bed, couch, dinning room table, chairs, desk, entertainment center, wardrobe (the bitchin’ condo has precious little storage space), coffee table, bedside table, couch-side table…
Then you need all the basics for the kitchen and bathroom: plates, knives, forks, glasses, pots, pans, cutting knives, spatulas, cutting board, pasta strainer, spice rack, towels, soap, mats, toilet paper, magnifying mirror for those hard-to-shave areas…
Then you need cleaning stuff: broom, vacuum, mop, bucket, garbage cans, garbage bags, toilet brush, microbial organic growth neutralizing spray-on compound…
And let’s not forget the all important home office and entertainment components: printer/scanner, PC speakers, optical mouse, shredder, absurdly large plasma TV, amp, speakers, DVD player, stripper pole…
What I’m getting at is that furnishing a condo from scratch – even one that is of modest bitchin’ size, as mine is - starts to add up. Staggeringly so. I spent about $6,000 in less than a week and that was even after getting a BeautyRest bed at 70% off and the geeks ringing up my stash at the electronics store forgetting to scan most of my home office stuff. And I still have to grit through the whole double-barreled shotgun blast to the ass-side where I keep my wallet with next week’s down payment and closing costs.
The smoking crater that used to be my savings account aside, my credit rating must be 1,000%, or whatever an idyllic credit rating is these days. Only a few months ago, I was reportedly flagged as having “no credit” – you are thusly punished for having the audacity to live abroad long-term – but after this series of purchases, I bet I could buy a private jet and an island off Dubai with only a phone call.
Anyone wanting to go in on an island off Dubai with me, email my corporate secretary. No freaks.
[Photo credit: cockanippledoo]
This is why I love the Minnesota RollerGirls
T, A, bloodlust - what’s not to love?
I was fully expecting my first attendance at a Minnesota RollerGirls bout to be awesome, but Buddha help me, the experience was so beyond awesome that my limited edition of the “Directory of Mega-Evocative Adjectives” has failed to do justice to the experience.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure, exposed cleavage and ass cheeks aside, this is a genuine sport. Nothing is staged. The girls aren’t cast-offs from Texas body building leagues or retired strippers from Nevada. The RollerGirls are just a bunch regular women that like skating, competition and inflicting debilitating pain.
This is not a joke, many of these girls are flat-out mean – born and bred. Most had a criminal record by the 3rd grade. But it’s heartening to see that they’re not so consumed with unchecked rage that it inhibits creativity and wit when it comes time to select their menacing player pseudonyms, so as to invoke fear and loathing in their competitors and preventing creepy fans from stalking them. Names like “Punish Mint Patty”, “Kim Jong Kill”, “Frau Scientits” and “Ji Spot” are brilliance that primetime sitcom writers can only dream about – and you know none of those pasties ever sterilized a home room teacher with a staple remover.
From the moment of the first whistle, when the elbows started flying and the first shove caused a girl to fly into a happy geek’s lap, I was in awe. The flat, slippery corners at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium mean that speed is limited and spinouts guaranteed - ring-side spectators often come away with skate-shaped shin dimples. Flagrant penalties were frequent and celebrated. Not like those drama queens in soccer or basketball when the accused gets a pathetically incredulous “who me?” look after committing a foul. When a RollerGirl trips and face-plants a competitor, they skate to the penalty box with joyous satisfaction, gesturing at the crowd as if to say “Look at me! I dislocated that girl’s ankle! I own this track, mufucckkaaaaahhhss!!”
At half-time the Dance Band played to the euphoric audience that rushed the track to dance. I was too sober to get into it, due to the Roy Wilkins bar’s inability to serve more than one patron every seven minutes. I had to console myself with a $2.75 Snickers and the knowledge that their wine probably wasn’t fit for cleaning automotive components anyway.
The second half was inconceivably more violent than the first. There were times when the penalty box had three or four girls cooling their wheels at once. Checks and shoves were brazen, falls were bone-crushing and bruised knees and asses multiplied. One girl’s shirt was nearly torn clean off. The end of one particularly brutal bout was punctuated with a bench-clearing brawl, which was inconveniently held on the back side of the track so we couldn’t see who was doing what to whose kidneys. It was just outstanding.
As sweet and wholesome as an evening with the RollerGirls can be, the action unfortunately attracts a certain unpalatable element in the audience. Just behind us sat a couple of early-40s, Abercrombie & Finch-wearing douchebags that had just seemingly completed their annual recertification at the Chris Farley School of Gentlemanly Conduct and Sobriety. Nostalgic for their days at the frat house, these f*ckwits were in top form making asses of themselves from the moment the bout started. Our eye-rolling at their foot pounding and incoherent screaming turned to horror after Buffy the Vampire Skater was sent to the penalty box (directly in front of us) and they started hollering “Come over here and suck my dick Buffy!!” Either Buffy didn’t hear them or she showed Academy Award winning poise by not turning around and skating over their testicles. Mercifully, the douchebags got wholly distracted by the beer table during the first break and weren’t seen or heard from again until just before the night ended when they remembered why they’d come to the Roy in the first place.
I’d like to go again this weekend, but alas I’ll be half way around the planet scuttling around Micronesia, enjoying beaches, pristine waters, world-class diving and pseudo-Vegas dinner shows with Japanese budget tourists for travel journalism posterity.
So, if you think about it, I’m really the travel writing version of a RollerGirl. I’m dedicated, I’m cruel, I have a funny name and I totally sacrifice the bod.
Mufucckkaaaaahhhss!
This is why I love First Avenue
It’s been a while since I posted a Minneapolis love sonnet and since I’ve actually left my building almost daily this past week, I’ve got some good material that has nothing to do with dangerously low temperatures or the spread of a non-hand-washing influenza pestilence of such magnitude that even the bible didn’t have the guts to foretell it.
Like my fawning post about the Current, I’m not exactly uncovering a well-kept secret here. First Avenue not only boasts biblical longevity, but it also has the street cred to back it up, proudly displayed, coincidentally, right on the street in case you had any doubt. Walking around the club’s façade is to see a veritable roll call of every great band in modern history, who inevitably played at the Ave before they hit it big - and many times after.
First Ave is no longer just a great club, it’s historical. I expect that the Smithsonian will arrive some day soon, construct a tent over the whole building and start charging admission. I imagine that tours will go something like “These are the beer bottles that Black Flag peed in back in the day when there was no bathroom backstage. And here’s the chair that Prince busted his head on when he slipped on his mascara brush. Five stitches.”
Whatever your opinions on live music clubs and current tastes, no one in their right mind can disparage nearly 40 years of saga-like live music, starting with Joe Cocker on opening night in 1970 and enduring through last week when I stepped foot in the joint for the first time in six years to see Bob Mould.
A lot has changed while I was away from the Ave. First and most heartening, the Minneapolis smoking ban has made a night out at local bars/clubs a lovely and civilized experience, rather than a toxic fume bath that took days of showering, clothes laundering and 12 hours in a pure oxygen chamber to recover from. First Ave was especially affected by the ban, as it had the air circulation of a 19th-century colonial bank vault. So, to simply walk in the door and not have my eyeballs burst into flames and my blood-oxygen levels drop 50 points was inexpressibly pleasurable.
Also, they serve Strongbow now, which is the difference between four stars and five stars as far as I’m concerned. In an effort to modernize, they’ve hung flat panel TVs all over the place, which I’m not sure was absolutely necessary, but at least it wasn’t offensive. The same can’t be said for their “sight line seating” reservation scheme though, where one can reserve a three-seat table by the upstairs railing for $45 (in addition to the price of the tickets to the event). I understand the urge to maximize potential revenue streams, but is this bourgeois element really necessary?
A final notable difference is that they apparently took a portion of their tiny indoor parking/dock space and turned it into the VIP Room, for strict DJ music and smaller special events. I didn’t get to check out the VIP Room myself, but a few smokers standing outside as I passed seemed quite pleased with venue.
Embarrassingly, this was only my first time seeing the iconic Bob Mould. The man can still rock his balls off. No messing around or idle chit-chat between songs either. That’s not how the Mould rolls. Apart from introducing the band during a late pause and the token mention of how bloody cold it was outside, the man’s segue ways averaged about 1.5 seconds. All about the music, which was hard, loud and testosteronily charged, evidenced by the male/female ratio of the crowd; about 2,000 guys and five women, including the two that I brought with me. I’m told the term is “sausagefest”.
On a side note, it was quite nice to have my grand return to the Ave coincide with a Bob Mould show, because the median age of the audience was like 42, which made me feel all youthful and spry. Those people were old, man. If I’d brought my father to the show, I don’t even think he would’ve been the oldest in the room. It was a far cry from typical First Ave shows where only about 5% of the people in there have actually shaved.
So, now that we’ve established that First Ave is one of the greatest live music venues since the dawn of humans, I just have one, humble query. A trifling matter really, but nevertheless, I was just a little curious about WHY IS THE MUSIC SO F*CKING LOUD???????
Dear Lord all mighty in heaven, what are you people thinking? I had a profound hearing loss for over 48 hours after that goddamn show! Is that really necessary? Huh? Really? What the f*ck?
Don’t get me wrong, the music should be loud enough to drown out the conversation of the drunks in the back, but Jesus Harold Christ, I felt like I was being attacked by an anti-riot aural cannon. When did you guys replace audio quality with stupefying wattage? Do you really think your patrons are too dumb to tell the difference?
By the fourth song I was literally too dazed to pay attention to the show. My eyes were involuntarily rolling into the back of my head and I had to lean on my lovely companion’s wheelchair to keep my knees from buckling under me. The distortion was so bad that you could only discern about 25% of the lyrics that poor Bob had agonized over.
Now I’ll admit that I’m somewhat to blame, because I forgot my earplugs, but equally earplugs shouldn’t be necessary if you don’t crank the volume to ‘13′ and focus a little more on sound quality. The wretched audiophiles in the audience were nearly in tears, both emotionally from the butchering done to the music and also due to the physical agony we withstood from that god-awful sound.
It wasn’t always like this. I happily went to shows at First Ave for about 10 years before I started to become uncomfortable with the volume and Wednesday’s show broke every audio distress assault I’ve ever withstood.
Get it together people. Fire whatever self-trained, tone-deaf jackass that’s running sound for you now and get someone in there that actually knows something about the fundamentals of acoustics, not to mention the upper tolerance limits of the human ear.