Friday, November 07, 2008

I Should Be...

I should be working out, I should be cleaning, I should be doing some errands. But. I'm blogging. I have a lunch date with a friend and my father later.

This photo shows me reflected on a giant gadget (an iPhone?) in the Apple Store window. I'm thinking the little things around represent games and such you can download to your phone. I've thought of getting a new phone but not very hard. I'm not sure I want a phone that can do more than phone.

We saw k.d. lang last night. I'd never seen her in person. Things I love about k.d. lang:

  1. She is impossibly, completely, irrepressibly herself and damn the consequences.
  2. She can take a brilliant song by someone else (Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" last night) and make a chill run through your body that you suddenly realize is going all along the row, all through the audience and at the end they rise to their feet and it's not to beg an encore but it's just that one piece and an appreciation of it that has yanked the audience up.
  3. In spite of the above, in spite of the fact that she could cover songs and perhaps be the most popular singer on earth (think Roy Orbison's "Crying" here, too) she does material that is all her own (written by her or for her) and bangs on it over the years and takes her faithful with her. (See number 1.)

I enjoyed it. Before that we went to the Austin Club and ate and drank too much. I like the Austin Club. The bartender. Summer, knows our names, our reciprocal number (we aren't really members at all but are in a reciprocity club from another club) and my drink. FFP saw her preparing my drink and realized she was using a different whiskey than I prefer. He said she stopped, thought, poured it out and got out the Woodford Reserve! It's great when people do their job well, isn't it? It's not like we go there all the time. (No, really. We drink all the time. Just not there.) Then she was laughing at herself for not remembering!

Yeah, I'm going to do some of those things I should be doing. Soon. But not until FFP and I finish listening to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" sung by a bunch of different artists. And not until I finish reading a play by my new friend in New York that she sent us.

1 comment:

Annie in Austin said...

John Aielli of KUT has repeatedly played just about every version of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' in existence but even Jeff Buckley's or Rufus Wainwright's versions might not stand up to K.D. Lang in person! Sounds like a wonderful evening.

Annie at the Transplantable Rose