Planet Rodin

From her statement to the press today:

If I have learned one thing: LIFE is about choices!

And one chooses how to react to circumstances. You can choose to engage in things that tear down, or build up. I choose to work very hard on a path for fruitfulness and productivity. I choose NOT to tear down and waste precious time; but to build UP this state and our country, and her industrious, generous, patriotic, free people!

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy. It would be apathetic to just hunker down and "go with the flow".

Nah, only dead fish "go with the flow".

No. Productive, fulfilled people determine where to put their efforts, choosing to wisely utilize precious time... to BUILD UP.

And there is such a need to BUILD up and FIGHT for our state and our country. I choose to FIGHT for it! And I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and LIFE... I'll work for and campaign for those PROUD to be American, and those who are INSPIRED by our ideals and won't deride them.

I WILL support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the RIGHT reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska - or Outside Alaska.

But I won't do it from the Governor's desk.

I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people. So I choose, for my State and my family, more "freedom" to progress, all the way around... so that Alaska may progress... I will not seek re-election as Governor.

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it". I'm not putting Alaska through that - I promised efficiencies and effectiveness! ? That's not how I am wired. I am not wired to operate under the same old "politics as usual." I promised that four years ago - and I meant it.

The financial crisis is the one thing that could have turned Obama's election - which was about young people's energy, new ideas, the blurring of standard GOP/Dem party lines - into nothing more than a middle chapter in a litany of grownup problems. It's the one situation in which Obama is no longer the bold (comparatively) young reformer but just another guy trying to fill the Big Political Moment.

I wrote this back in the day:

What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

The phrase 'I'm enjoying myself' certainly sounds different from 'I'm having a good time' - listen closely and the latter is about circumstance, while the former has something to do with addressing oneself to it. What's great about 'enjoying oneself' is that the key to doing more of it lies in the very phrase: lasting pleasure and deep fulfillment seem to spring from acting at the limits of your abilities, in a state of total commitment-to-circumstance that rests far below conscious 'awareness.' To truly enjoy yourself you must become unself-conscious, taking pleasure in what you do without dwelling on your self-image, which after all pertains to nothing but your own perceived inadequacies, fantasies, personal myth-history, etc.

Your self-image isn't a positive part of you, as I see it; it opposes action. Why? Because the last thing you want to do is lose your image of your self, find that you've been living out of step with your actual relationship to the world.

So you try to remake the world as what you think it's supposed to be in relation to your fantasy self-image.

Which sometimes fucks everyone up, starting with you but by no means ending there. Maybe you discover electricity along the way, or paint a chapel, or marry the right person (or just someone else), or send your kids to a school where they happen to be happy/sad/lucky/coddled/alone. Most likely you find that the world in your head isn't the world, and you begin to tear things up.

Sounds hopeless. OK, so modify it a little. (I'm carried away anyway.) What keeps us sane is: differentials. Change. As long as we think we're changing the right way we can settle down, live at peace, enjoy ourselves. Which is to say we can love what we are only if we see it as the result of doing right. You have to trust the process that is your self before you can quiet down and notice the world.

'Having a good time' is just about time. 'Enjoying yourself' is about action - getting out of your own way and letting yourself adapt naturally to your circumstances, which is what all the other animals do since they don't have to abstract everything around them to keep from getting [fired/abandoned/ridiculed/sued/shot/etc.].

I believe in the pleasures of incoherence and of fluid form, and I'm able to love things more honestly when I can move with them. I don't always more skillfully or beautifully but I find a line eventually, and can curve with it as the time demands. It's bedtime, doctor's appointment in the morning, work to be done, I'm behind schedule maybe already, the phone needs charging, there are so many ideas to get rid of. How swell is that gonna be.

Now imagine (3,3) and (4,4) on the plane. Ya dig? OK: What's the next point?

Most people, I'm guessing, speculate that the 'next point' is (5,5). Linear progression. You don't even have to think of it as function input and output; you could just have a weird way of making two lists of integers that happen to proceed at equal pace from the same starting point. 'Sliding friction' is the force that resists you when you're sliding; 'static friction' is what fights against you starting. The latter is the greater force; as wacky Wernher von Braun said, 'Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.' The world has tendencies: in motion, stay in motion; at rest, stay at rest. Reality is opinionated. So are we.

We're made to extrapolate, which is how we invented God; we need order to make sense of infinity, which is why we invented God; we tend to value and enshrine straight-line thinking, which is why God looks like a bearded white man (and there's no such thing as a 'liberal media').

Proof by induction works like this: if you can show that a proposition is true for one baseline element, and that if it's true for one element then it must be true for the next one in line, then the proposition must be true for all elements. Inductive reasoning frees you to run - once you've settled on your baseline, your (literal) starting point, then all you need is a logic of association to allow you to make a universal statement. Which feels, let me tell you, absolutely wonderful. That wind-in-your-hair feeling of encompassing all of what you see in a single expression or conception. A formula.

But.

That joy (of understanding) doesn't come from a point. Think of singular aesthetic (i.e. learning) experiences that have 'changed your life,' or just your mind: I remember for instance my first rock show, being dumped for the first time, 'losing' my virginity, realizing I was falling in love with my future wife. You go back later on and fill in relationships to what you know, or to later examples of the same general phenomenon, but in each instant what prevails is confusion, loss of center, prior understandings (a/k/a 'priorities,' right?) falling away. The word for this feeling is freedom. The feeling changes you, but you can't possibly understand or articulate each moment within itself. The limited relationship between your reptilian, emotional, and analytical minds precludes such understanding.

And from that point, where do you go?

What would Hamlet say if he were here with us right now?

Over at Eleven Foot Pole, Greg writes about an unexpectedly empty room in Thunderspire Labyrinth, the 'Crypts,' described as follows in the written adventure (H2):

Crypts: The remains of about two dozen minotaur warriors lie here in burial niches along the walls. In the southern hallway stands a statue of a grim-looking skeletal minotaur with a greataxe—a minotaur version of the Grim Reaper. An iron door leading to the south is locked. It can be unlocked with a DC 20 Thievery check or broken open with a DC 25 Strength check.

Greg seems irritated not by the emptiness as such, but by inconsistency:

The skeletal reaper is a classic archetype, and here we have a new bull-headed twist on the idea. It's a great way to build on the undead from the last encounter and really tie the Horned Hold into the ongoing minotaur-themed history.

Unfortunately, yet again, it's not to be. The statue doesn't come to life; the dead don't rise from their graves. There is, in fact, no tactical encounter for this room whatsoever, making it the only part of the Hold not covered in this way. Players will be completely baffled as to why nothing in this room is animating and trying to kill them. It does, after all, run contrary to their entire previous experience.

[This is a very long Phish post. It's aimed at people who aren't necessarily fans, but it's still...a very long Phish post. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.]

The period known to fans as 'Phish 2.0' stretched from the first day of 2003 (the worrisome comeback show at Madison Square Garden) to mid-August 2004 (the catastrophic farewell festival in Vermont). In that time Phish played 63 shows over four relatively short tours and a trio of multi-night stands (Hampton '03, the 20th anniversary run, Vegas '04).

It was a weird, fascinating time for the band, as I've talked about elsewhere. In the mid-90's it was a big event for a Phish tune (other than the long composed suites) to stretch beyond 20 minutes; by summer 2003 one could reasonably expect one or two such monster jams per show. Yet something was a little off; the energy couldn't be sustained, or the music ran its course, and personal problems certainly obtruded; within 18 months of their shaky-but-thrilling reunion and very successful winter 2003 tour, Phish were broken up, this time (it seemed) for good.

They're back together now, more focused and energetic than any time in the last decade, and it makes sense to consider what went on during that wild interregnum, to get a better handle on what they're doing now.

In that spirit, I'd like to present a mix of 2003-04 Phish, with notes on what to listen for, even how to listen, where this music fits in the band's history, what it says about their unique improvisatory methods.

The ideal ordering principle for this mix turned out to be chronology, so here come 30 tracks, from two to sixty minutes in length, in thirteen segments. You can find audience recordings of all of the tracks at sites like phishows.com and phishthoughts.com, or (for a fee, in soundboard format) livephish.com. The [mp3] links below, where present, point to phishows.com.

2/16/03 Disease > Seven Below > Disease > Anything > Piper > Disease > Makisupa (mp3)

This is the most 'conventional' selection of the group in pre-2003 Phish terms; 'Down With Disease' segues into 'Seven Below' on the back of Fishman's drumming, which shifts from the generic driving 4/4 of DWD into the sly beat of the newer tune over the course of a full minute or so, which Trey immediately picks up on to initiate the new song. A very smooth, patient transition - the best Phish segues have this same organic evolutionary quality, and many of the best sets in Phish history (12/6/97 II, 12/31/95 II/III, 2/17/97 II, 11/30/94 II, 7/2/97 II, etc.) string together a series of such attentive transitions.

This set is unusually self-referential as well - Trey brings the band back into DWD not once but twice, in different keys each time, at the climaxes of 'Seven Below' and 'Piper' alike. That kind of bookending is the hallmark of an exceptional set, and when it occurs naturally (rather than as a plan, or interrupting a smooth musical flow with an out-of-place idea) it's always the highlight of the touring week.

Listen especially for the complex four-way groove that emerges seven minutes into 'Seven Below,' the key change that announces the first DWD reprise, and - above all - the unbelievably patient evolutionary groove that constitutes the second half of this maybe-best-of-tour 'Piper,' which climaxes twice: first with Trey's anthemic chording around 16:00, which he plays in ascending inversions each time he takes a solo break, and again, purely for the hell of it, with the DWD invocation in the final two minutes of the jam. This is classic Phish with new '2.0' sonics (Trey's uncompressed tone, Mike's pointed new bass sound, Page's arsenal of electronics, Fishman's fatter drumming and looser snare), easing the crowd and the band from one familiar variety of improvisation into a new era. The smooth modulation into 'Makisupa' is pure gravy, a stoned chillout before the set-closing 'Character Zero.' Hear how giggly Trey is on the 'spliff' keyword - he knows how well-wrought the whole set has been.

2/25/03 Theme > Jim

'Theme from the Bottom' has long been a soaring, well-wrought tune saddled with a problematic jam; Phish's usual approach has been to play a great noisy wall of sound and just wail into the final vocal reprise after eight or ten minutes. This long version is much more clearly articulated than usual, speeding up after the first few minutes and getting funkier-than-normal rhythmic treatment halfway through the track. That's mostly very good. On the one hand, this more spread-out sonic approach flattens some of the differentiation between 'the "Theme" jam' and every other 2003 jam; a certain mid/uptempo 4/4 rock jam was standard fare for Phish that year, moreso than in their more stylistically-varied idea-per-minute past (cf. the second link at the top of this post). Indeed, around 11:30 this 'Theme' jam drops into the sort of loping bluesy-funk jam you'd find in any of a dozen Phish tunes. On the other hand, it liberates this particular performance of the tune: within a half-minute Trey starts chording triumphantly to bring us back to the original 'Theme' chords, and the vocal-closing onset is less sudden than usual, maybe more affecting. A little vocal improvisation, the closing chords...and suddenly Trey and Fishman start up a new dark groove in a slightly faster tempo...

...which Page and Mike pick up (on piano and bass, respectively), and which washes out into 'Runaway Jim' after a moment. This is an exceptionally delicate 'Jim,' a collective choice perhaps meant (unconsciously?) to contrast with the chunky 'Theme' jam and ominous bridging groove. Fantastic rhythm work here under Trey's bold sustains - again, not an unprecedented jam, but Phish had set some decent precedents in the preceding 19 years, so that's alright.

Methodological note: because the 'Jim' jam doesn't peak before the closing guitar figures come around, Trey's semi-written melody signal can serve as a structure for the final improvisation; listen around 9:30 as the intensity rises by steps, the build sounding almost composed in part because the band now knows exactly where it's going and how much longer it has to get there. The gain in precision and clarity trades away a little complexity for the band - and the effect is worth it, this time, because the jam itself has been so pleasant. A less cohesive early improvisation would've made the stepwise closing seem unearned.

2/26/03 Stash (mp3)

After the 9:00 mark: 'Children, this is a little game we like to call "Hunt the Downbeat."' The next three minutes are just a divine, playful improvised pizzicato/staccato quartet, and at 12:00 comes a declaration of intent from Anastasio (in the form of that slower blues figure) that Gordon immediately picks up on (with a gnarly flatted-sixth bass call), which Fishman punctuates with some rolls on the high toms and away we goddamn go. Not the only great 'Stash' of Phish 2.0 (listen to the scorching NYE 2003 version for the heaviest 2.0 take) but still my favourite. The smoothness with which the band raises, lowers, and then climactically raises the music's intensity is a mark of their comfort and empathy on this winter 2003 tour - and while summer would bring billowing rock anthems galore, this sort of prickly, almost mathematical improv-assembly is really made for indoor shows.

Probably the most 'old school' jam in this collection. I was lucky to be present for what might arguably be the best start-to-finish Phish concert of February 2003, though the special Jones Beach show two nights later is the consensus tour heavyweight.

7/9/03 Gin

Here's the schema, folks: Theme > elaboration > clav/woodblock double-time funk groove > guitar-driven rock expansion > eerie/ambient movement > half-time gathering > theme > out. Rearrange or substitute those components and you have a road map to a number of the big post-hiatus Phish jams. Notice how Trey moves from accompanist to lead voice around 14:30, suggesting a i-IV chord framework after the modal funk groove. Page moves to the Hammond organ, and by 15:30 Trey is definitely leading the show again. The rock groove that forms after the funk breakdown is canonical summer '03 stuff, and after 16:00 is busy showing his extraordinary versatility, alternately serving as his own rhythm guitarist and throwing down blues/rock leads. One of his big steps forward after 1999 was to learn how to integrate those two roles in the band, making juicy chordal playing part of his lead-guitar vocabulary.

Just a strong, complex Phish jam, and a great start to summer.

7/17/03 Tweezer > Makisupa

Another representative jam, which through the first ten minutes is just a fun rocking 'Tweezer' - chunky midtempo barroom rock that reaches a peak of sexual energy and stays there. After thirteen minutes, though, it takes a turn into new-but-familiar country, with five full minutes of spacey textures from all four players and a subtle build around 17:00 that wouldn't be out of place at the end of a Pearl Jam album. I include this jam largely because of the organic way the boys come back from the brief ambient excursion, working their way right back to the 'Tweezer' rhythms on the back of Fishman's patient drums around 19:00 on their way to a lightning-quick reprise of the theme and silky-smooth segue into 'Makisupa Policeman,' with Trey playing no more than two bars of upstrokes before the rest of the band is into the reggae with him. This 'Makisupa' includes a stupid/funny 'Dust in the Wind' jam, which cools the crowd out nicely after the studious intensity of 'Tweezer.' A careful, layered version of the band's venerable big-jam vehicle, drawing on the key elements of their '2.0' jamming style without exhausting them.

7/25/03 Hood > Bowie (mp3)

This is it, folks: one of the very few must-hear versions of 'Harry Hood' after the beloved 12/30/95, certainly the biggest most far-reaching 'Hood' ever, and probably the 'gotcha!' freakout of the whole summer. The first nine minutes are standard-beautiful I-V-IV stuff, but then Trey starts playing those cascading textural lines, at 9:40 hits an unexpectedly aggressive chord, at 10:15 a surprise blues lick, and then we're off to the races. Minor-blues tonalities creep in after twelve minutes, and though Fishman recurs to the hazy 'Hood' rhythm every couple of measures, Trey is driving the jam in a rock direction, which Page and Mike are happy to roll with. After fourteen minutes or so the jam recalls the middle passage of the 2/26/03 'Stash,' complete with Fishman's hair-raising tom-tom work. Notice how busy the bass is in here - without the low-register bombs grounding the four-man chord there's a sense of the entire performance shifting at once, and Fishman is wise to lock down a rock beat on the kit, which Trey responds to with what I laughably think of as a Naughty by Nature reference somewhere around 16:40.

There's a little vocal texture around 19:00, when the jam has cooled out and the band is regrouping. This is typical of summer 2003 jams: big rock improv brackets restrained passages where the band gathers its strength and focus. Ten years prior these quiet passages would have been unbearably boring to the band, and they'd have (over)compensated by charging headlong into the first idea - or rather, distraction - that came to mind. In 1997 the quartet nailed down its weird brand of long-form funk improv and learned how to let time just...pass, which let them overcome the attention-deficit problem that made its early shows so schizophrenic (and necessitated the coat of defensive comedy-irony).

Anyhow, the jam simmers down to silence before building up ever so slowly to a reprise of the good ol' I-V-IV, led by Trey's hyperactive attempts to play, apparently, every note in existence in the space of eight bars. This 'Hood' is weirdly structured: the traditional build occurs not within the primary jam's chords but indirectly, over the course of the full half-hour, as the jam grows seemingly without bound and band and fans seem to lose sight of the tonal homebase. It's worth noting that the whole 29-minute jam is technically all in the same key - the number of variations the band comes up with is pretty darn impressive, considering.

Not much of a segue into 'Bowie,' but you don't have to be a jerk and complain about it. And it's good to have a 'Bowie' in there. This is a mildly weird version, heading in a couple of different tonal directions before winding up for the big minor-chord splash at the end. But the 'Hood' is the main event.

The whole show is worth hearing, largely on the strength of its obscene second set, complete with 'Kung' chant and a host of genuine → segues. (On further reflection, this might not even be the best 'Hood' of the summer - the 7/31 performance is similar but with a smoother consistency. No such thing as a wrong decision there!)

7/30/03 Twist > Bug (mp3)

'Twist' was a big jam vehicle after the 2000-02 hiatus; the all-time great version is still probably 6/14/00 II (the best set of that uneven year), but 2003-04 saw a host of blown-out 'Type II' versions (leaving behind the song's chord structure). That's not unusual for that time period, when Trey in particular seemed impatient to head out into the musical nether regions every time, often at the cost of sloppy composed playing. But this gnarly version is a pure rhythmic/textural playground - Fishman throws down a whoa-nelly bluegrass beat in the middle there, and if the band never quite figures out how to capitalize on it, everyone sticks with the groove (to their credit) for several minutes, trying new things, cooking up a thick musical stew atop Mike's effects-laden bass. Eventually they just climb the scale, crescendo 'til they're raving, and spread the resulting melted mess all over the crowd in the form of what wants to be a 'Seven Below' segue.

This jam is a precursor to the megalithic '46 Days' that arrived just four days later; its darkness and murk, the weird unsteady relationship between the chordal playing and the rhythm bed, and the eventual escape into an unexpectedly delicate outro all prefigure the masterpiece that was the real climax of summer, indeed of all 2003. It's instructive to hear these elements juuuuuuuuuuuust failing to cohere on this date (which also saw a monstrous half-hour 'Scents and Subtle Sounds'), then falling effortlessly into place after nine hours of exhaustive, exhausting experimentation at the end-of-summer IT festival. After an experiment like this, a cooldown is necessary; the go-to coda in 2003 was 'Bug,' which is perfectly placed here. Probably no one has ever specifically requested this odd little song, but complaints about its climactic, cathartic outro jam are equally unlikely.

Between this 'Twist' and the next few tracks you see the stretch marks start to show - and 2004, I think, saw the band turn away from some of these musical movements specifically. More on that later.

8/2/03 Rock and Roll > Seven Below > Scents > Spread > Bug (mp3)

I'm biased, as I was there for this extraordinary festival show, but this run of tunes gets my pick for best suite of 2003. Nine minutes in to the 'Rock and Roll' you get a huge eight-bar windup from the full band - echoes of the empathetic, aggressive old days - after which they bring the volume down but not the intensity, with Trey soloing in his lower register as if he's never seen the underside of middle-C before. Fishman teases the 'Seven Below' rhythm for fully five minutes before the full band swings around (via Trey's unexpected open-fourths magic chords and some colourful electronic washes from Page); the band makes merry doubletime/halftime sport of the new tune until Mike insists on the eerie opening to 'Scents and Subtle Sounds'; nine minutes into that tune we get into a spicy hybrid of 'Scents' and 'Seven,' eventually getting back around to the piano-rock vibe of 'Rock and Roll'; the segue into the second-ever airing of 'Spread It Round' is seamless, and that tune erupts into an electric-noise freakout offering a preview of the night's 'Tower Jam' (see below); and again, we get a 'Bug' to take us home.

The set stands comfortably between the distended long-form jams of summer '03 and the more clearly-intentioned narratives of earlier days, and wanders from the playful mock-martial beat of 'Spread It Round' to the electric sludge of...whatever 'Spread It Round' mutates into. The boys knew they'd done right by this third set of the festival: the night's encore was a chatty hangout scene capped by a barn-burning reading of 'Mango Song.'

Listen especially for the way the band layers the natural idioms of each new song atop the palimpsest of the set to that point - 'Spread It Round' collapses under the accumulated weight of the driving cock-rock of 'Rock and Roll,' 'Seven Below''s sprightly movement, the declamatory I-IV dance of 'Scents,' and the loopy songbook punctuation of 'Spread' itself. Bug is the perfect palate cleanser. This is perhaps the natural length for Phish jams - the 'classic' tracks often stretch beyond 20 minutes, but the 12-to-15-minute scale seems to bring out the best in most of their tunes. Any shorter and you're sticking to one strong declarative; longer, and the whole enterprise needs to be mobile and mutable (which is, of course, awfully difficult). I love the 30-minute blowouts, but brainy segues were a bigger part of the band's rep back in the day.

8/2/03 Tower Jam (mp3)

Late, late on the first night of the IT festival, Phish played an hourlong free-improv set from the top of an air traffic control tower at the Air Force base where the show was held. They were accompanied by spectacular lights, billowing smoke, and aerial dancers suspended on ropes halfway down the tower, in a multimedia wee-hours weird-out session. This track - the most unique post-hiatus Phish music - is the result.

The first thing to note is that, compared to even the eeriest material from the 7/30 'Twist' and 7/17 'Tweezer,' much of the Tower Jam is gnarly, confrontational sludge-rock offering little to latch on to thematically. The boys seemed to be directly representing some kind of UFO takeoff maneuver in sound, rather than evoking it through the filter of a traditional musical assembly (though admittedly this kind of free playing is itself part of a particular post-60's jazz tradition). It's instructive to listen to a give segment of the jam to determine which band member is deliberately throwing off any full-fledged rock groove that might start to emerge; the intent is very specific here, and the jam sounds quite like it's supposed to: open eerie sci-fi soundtrack, definitely not a 'song.' Not until around 48:00 does a pure melodic expression emerge in the form of the weekend's most soothing minute of music, a simple major-chord unfolding that briefly recalls the hourlong ambient explorations in Fukuoka on 6/14/00. Of course Fish and Trey smash that feeling of calm with a wash of guitar noise, feedback, and crashing cymbals. On the other side of a noisy explosion Page gives us some celestial-darkness sounds and we're done.

The same basic shape would also emerge in the next night's '46 Days,' our next track, but that jam rides more identifiable rhythmic and tonal ideas; its first half echoes the noise-space of the Tower Jam, but the boys let themselves get somewhere contemplative afterward, which wasn't allowed on the Tower.

One difference between the ambient jams of 1998 and the spacey improvisations of 2003 is the freedom with which the band moves in and out of rhythm in the later shows; the band's initial long-form ambient experiments seemed to pull at the fabric of their baseline improvisations, whereas the post-hiatus band simply spread the music out into a rhythmless wash and cohered again, treating time as something wholly elastic (hmm), fully integrating the big rock'n'roll vibe of their dance jams with wide-open textural playing. A number of people have pointed to likely chemical sources for this style; I won't comment other than to say that the music hadn't yet fallen apart in 2003, was stretched beyond the comfortable scale of Phish's best years (1997 to arguably 1999) into something less shapely but still exciting and undeniably beautiful. As I've said, many 2003 Phish jams include segments where the band seems to gather itself, letting the music extend and empty briefly without losing the groove so as to allow new dynamics to emerge. That willingness to explore (and leave behind!) local maxima and minima in the course of a given jam is one of the key strengths of later Phish, which the triumphant first tour of 2009 hasn't yet displayed.

All this said, the Tower Jam doesn't reward close headphones listening the way the other big jams on this mix do, but between the Tower and the next night's '46 Days' you can hear most of what made summer 2003 a giddy, slightly unnerving time for Phish fans (and, one suspects, the band as well).

8/3/03 46 Days (mp3)

I've written about this one elsewhere so I'll just say a couple of things here.

'46 Days' is pure drunken strutting cock-rock; this version illustrates the band's post-hiatus tendency to get beyond the basic mood of each song with great speed - maybe impatience? - and dive back into what seems like an ongoing conversation within the band. Trey solos for less than two minutes here before he's laid down a haze of guitar noise, and the next half-hour is unusually patient free improv, with clear chords emerging only sporadically before about the 25:00 mark. It's not quite right to call the music 'languorous,' though it's wonderful accompaniment to idly strolling through a city at night. Rather, it's focused but unhurried, attentive yet spacious, with each player contributing constantly to a subtly-changing bed of rhythm and tone without forcing the jam to say any one thing in particular.

In 1996 the band recorded a half-hour weird-noise experiment at Bearsville Studios, called 'The Blob,' in which each musician could add or take away a phrase in a slowly-evolving group improvisation/composition. (Part of this musical mass survives on the Billy Breathes album track 'Steep.') The point? Learning to let go, to speak freely and deliberately at once, to listen in new ways for the possibilities in an evolving composition. The languid segment of '46 Days' following the noisy washout around 22:00 evokes this spirit of generous co-creation, demonstrating just how far the band came as improvisors in seven years.

(Rock years and jazz years pass at quite different rates. In seven years Radiohead went from their by-the-numbers debut Pablo Honey to the best-of-decade Kid A; it's the difference between the Beatles' first album and Sgt Pepper's. By comparison, John Coltrane recorded every one of his Impulse! albums in seven years - that amount of time could include Kind of Blue on one end and Ascension on the other. And Miles Davis went from his first album with Wayne Shorter, through Silent Way and Jack Johnson and Bitches Brew, to On the Corner in seven goddamn years.

No real point to this exercise, I confess. And in any case Shakespeare tops them all - he went from Twelfth Night to Hamlet in a single year, and cranked out Othello, Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra between 1604 and 1607. We're all lazy slobs.)

2004 Headphones Jam

This is an in-studio jam from the Undermind sessions - what would be Phish's last recordings before their five-year separation, Trey's painkiller addiction and rehabilitation, and the 2009 reunion shows and return to steady work. The band was recording at Trey's barn in Vermont, they started jamming as the engineer set up his equipment, and Bob's your uncle.

Start here for a sense of the tune. Yeah, there are hints of 'Spooky' in there, but mostly it's Mike playing eccentric basslines and refusing to settle the groove into old-fashioned tonalities, Page being his usual tastefully charming self over on the keys, Fishman sounding loose as a goose on the drums, and Trey...this is the most casually observant, freewheeling Trey in the whole mix. Listen at the 28:00 mark to Trey's soundtrack-anthem melodies - the rock show doesn't usually leave space for that kind of statement, but Trey's dedicated to a particular sound here and it frees him up to play in a deceptively sloppy way. The last five minutes feel like a dance remix of the Tower Jam's closing, and point toward the lightning-quick dance-rock that would fill so many minutes of the 6/04 tour.

This band sounds subtly different from the group that produced the Tower Jam and IT '46 Days,' and not just in terms of electrical tones. There's an unself-conscious messiness to the Headphones Jam, a border between the adventurous summer '03 jams and the less varied (though still exciting) 6/04 and depressing 8/04 material. There are stretch marks on this band; the music never quite took its old shape again. Five years would have to pass before Phish could return to its roots as expert performers and extrapolators of complex songs, rather than slumming party-rock experts. There's some great stuff in 2004, but this is the last you'll hear of 2003's complexity and focus.

6/19/04 Ocean > Piper > Jibboo > Limb (mp3)

Another seventy minutes of gratifying segues and big open-air anthems. Summer music. I was at this show too, and came away thinking it was the perfect sendoff for the band: after a stormy 'Song I Heard the Ocean Sing' the second set seems to consist entirely of big joyous climaxes, from a thunderous 'Tweezer Reprise' jam in 'Piper' to a big I-IV-VIIb-IV rockout session to close 'Limb By Limb,' with a breezy trip through the feelgood 'Jibboo' for dance flavour. My next two shows were the August Great Woods dates, one of them fun but underwhelming and the other flat-out terrible, so maybe I should've stayed home after this scorcher. But the SPAC show also hints at the limitations of Phish's 2004 jamming model: after Fishman's midstick-cymbal drumming kicks off the 'Ocean' jam in appropriate watery style, Trey takes over with busy lead lines atop accompaniment that never quite coheres, and the second half of the track settles into a big, pleasant, wholly undistinguished midtempo 4/4 groove. It's cool to hear Page producing such a dense keyboard sound, and the end of the jam has some of the bombast of a good mid-90's 'Tweezer,' but it doesn't really go anywhere, and it's a long track. It feels long.

Well, Piper is 60% longer, so gird yourself for battle, but I say it gets a pass for its sheer cock-rock excess and the surprise left turn around thirteen minutes in. At 13:50 Fishman starts in with some half-time rimshots under busy bass and spare, eerie guitars; at 15:00 we're into another 'Tweezer' jam, which goes on for more than five minutes without quite taking off. And somewhere in the 22nd minute everyone latches onto the obvious impulse and starts playing 'Tweezer Reprise' in all but name - makes sense given that half the set has been variations on a 'Tweezer' groove. Ask yourself: is that what you want to hear? If you like techno the answer might well be 'yes,' but it's more complicated for those who assume songs are meant to sound like themselves rather than that one midtempo bar-band Phish tune. The 'Tweeprise' jam is exactly as thrilling as all the fans say, pretty much the definitive 'We'll never play this song again after summer' version of 'Piper,' and it goes on for something like seven minutes.

That's the challenge here: are you interested in hearing noisy elaborations on a pounding rock groove for the entire length of the song 'November Rain'? Bear in mind, this isn't some purely repetitious 'She's So Heavy' trance; every 8 or 16 bars you get a new solo idea, and that keeps up for a damn long time. It's impressive in a way. But until the half-hour mark the jam is basically one fun idea taken to illogical, ecstatic extremes. At 31:00 Fishman does a neat trick with his hi-hat and the dance party is on. Question: after pumping your fist in the air in honour of the rock gods for a half-hour, do you want a dance party? What kind of mood does that imply among band and fans? Who plays what feels like a continuous 70-minute crescendo?

The segue into 'Jibboo' takes five full minutes to materialize; you know it's coming the whole time (if you know the song) but the band is in no hurry. Its admirable, and would be moreso if everyone were sober and this were a scrupulously constructed party set instead of relaxed intuition. And yet isn't musical 'intuition' something you develop over the years? And didn't Phish take a long time to get so relaxed? So what the hell am I complaining about? And yet, and yet...

...and yet it's the best 'Limb By Limb' ever by some standards. Not as delicate as 6/16/00 or 8/16/97 or 11/2/98, though that's not the point - this is a knotty improvisation that circles excitedly before seemingly topping out with Big Rock Chords after seven and a half minutes. Trey seems to burst through clouds at the 8:00 mark and just starts wailing away, tossing in one more chord and trying a series of variations before settling, after 30 seconds, on a huge I-VI-VIIb-VI progression. Mike agrees to it a full 30 seconds later, freeing Trey to start soloing over the new progression, breaking away after a couple of minutes to fan his upper strings and play melodies instead of those obviously satisfying rock chords. Fishman plays a figure at 10:30 like he's ready to bring it home, but Trey has other ideas, and the drummer responds by demolishing his kit as the Hammond organ cries out and Trey hits his highest notes of the jam.

If it's not the best 'Limb' ever, it feels like it might as well be the last. The whole set feels that way - like they're playing the climax to every jam they've ever played, all at once.

But, again, is that risky musical business? You know how the crowd will react to soaring major chords: same as they have since you formed the band in 1983. Only now those chords aren't serving as a respite from maddening fugal counterpoint and onstage math-rock exercises, they're the whole set. Which is why some people think this is the most fun Phish ever provided onstage, some people find it soporific, and I go back and forth day to day. Listening advice: point your speakers out the window, get some friends together, and dance in the sun. That's what this music was made for, and its purity of purpose is its own recommendation. It's ecstatic art and I fervently hope you can find joy in it.

What's left is farewell.

8/15/04 Wading in the Velvet Sea (mp3)

In spite of it all, this is my favourite 'Wading in the Velvet Sea,' though it excels mainly in its desperation and hesitancy. It's hard to say it's good, exactly. It's heartbreaking.

This is from the final show, the Coventry festival at which the band finally collapsed and shattered and said what was to have been goodbye. The quartet that returned in 2009 was something else - Trey Anastasio is off drugs now, the band members now bring their families along on tour, and they've recommitted to practicing hard and restoring their mid-90's rep as jam-geek perfectionists. The band that covered Dark Side of the Moon on a couple days' notice is probably gone, replaced by middle-aged men less interested in proving their immortality than in playing honourably and honestly, earning respect one show at a time.

Coventry was a disaster. I wanted to go but couldn't, and don't regret it at all. I haven't listened to the whole show - can't bear it.

The spotlight comes up on Page at the keys, he leans in to sing, and he breaks down weeping. Trey tries to pick up the vocals, can barely squawk out his harmony line. It really is an unbearably sad song despite its silly title - 'Someone else will set your clocks / I took a moment from my day' - it's a lovely little image set to Phish's most out-and-out sentimental pop melody. The revised 1998 arrangement calls for extra vocal lines from the band between the two-chord guitar bridge and the solo; the boys gather their strength, sing strong, and nail the final words. It's an interesting tune in some ways - no chorus as such, just a lilting chant in two- and three-part harmony under the other composed parts.

Trey's solo is pure catharsis. He can hardly play at this point - between the drugs and the overpowering sadness of the occasion the band couldn't quite sync up for most of the June shows, and the music suffered in terms of precision. But Anastasio's awesome melodic imagination shines through, the wrenching sound of the guitar captures the meaning of that difficult weekend, and the full band rallies with him, taking the song to unbearable level of melancholy intensity. This performance leaves me drained.

Afterward, Trey gave a teary speech about Phish's history, and declared at the end, 'We need to blow off some fucking steam...because I just keep looking at the clock...' The band followed with a deadly half-hour 'Split Open and Melt' that seemed to banish all four men's demons; the final set of the weekend was a goof-off session complete with onstage improvised songwriting, tributes to the crew, and laughter all around.

I like to think that they never lost sight of the ordering principle that kept them together for more than twenty years (even during the hiatus it felt like they were together): four friends walking onstage together, trusting one another completely, sharing their joy at one another's company and creativity. That joy and trust shines through every note they ever played, no matter what else weighs on the music, no matter what form or style the art itself takes. That I can share in their fellowship through music and the experience of traveling to their concerts has been one of the joys of my own life, and I wish - in my limited way - to share it with you.

See you when the lights go down.

[Additional Fixing You magique. Forgive me.]

prior to the advent of the digital american online there wasn't all that much to do; you'd watch a tv show on your actual tv, for instance, and the absence of spoiler websites meant you didn't know what was going to happen until you saw the actual show, which is stupid - how do you know you want to see the show without knowing how it ends, what the online encyclopedia 2.0 says it means, what kind of numbers the tv-industry professional webblogger/marketers think this "skein" will garner? in the holy name of american christ what is a "skein"? also newspapers were hand-delivered to the doors of hardworking organization men and their nuclear families by pauper children, selfish malnourished little jerks who'd come around every couple of weeks begging for money. "please sir, i have nothing to eat!" "leave me alone, {charming ethnic slur}, my atlantic-salmon-and-liquid-gold smoothie is getting cold." you remember what it was like: it was like we were on top of the world where we belonged. there was little to do, nothing to say (except, sternly, to the paperboy), and you didn't have an audience of several dozen strangers from the web-based online community webblogs to share your well-formed important opinions with. so you kept them entirely to yourself; it's not like you can talk to your family about that shit.

(do you remember the time little beauregard chased the paperboy all the way back to his "home" under I-45? we thought we'd die laughing! apparently the paperboy, too, was afraid he would perish.)

[Another Fixing You excerpt. Still haven't figured out what to do with this stuff.]

here is a snap judgment for you, an example, along with the rest of this "carefully-crafted" prose assemblage, of the power of spontaneous decision-making (we've thought carefully about it to make sure this is correct, so who knows really, but...): think of a teddy bear. looks a lot like an actual bear, doesn't it? the resemblance is not a coincidence. both are adorable talking creatures with bellies full of delicious honey and severed human hands; both stick to their own deal, keep the woodland vibe mellow, and don't mess with everybody's shit; both crave knowledge above all things. and: each thinks of itself as a bear - but only one of them is correct. which one? well we're not scientists so we won't hazard a guess, but it's unnecessary in this case anyhow. each has it in itself to be...actually no, these aren't interchangeable personality-free little goddamn human infants we're talking about, these are living creatures with names and aspirations and clearly defined sex roles. each bear has it in HERSELF to live a full satisfying life, whether she's stuffed full of cotton fibers or made by the same divine hand that shaped the pyramids, montana, this charmingly retro-obsolete (but in a progressive way) old-media artifact you're reading.

each might find something like happiness, but either Bettina the Bear has her facts wrong, or Wu-Pen the Teddy Bear does. one of these ladies has a human/bear soul, one is just a homunculus. but in the grand scheme it doesn't matter which is which. in either's arms you might fall asleep dreaming about the candy planet, from either you might run screaming through the campsite all yelling and shit about "i'm being chased by an enormous killer animal/children's toy!" with either - maybe both - you might feel the kinship that all living creatures are afforded in moments of soul-extremity. you might also be eaten, whatever, the point is CLASSES DON'T MATTER, categories are largely nonsense. file that under "wisdom." sidebar: college classes don't matter either. no one ever got anywhere with a comparative literature degree from dartmouth anyhow. ever, like in history or anything.

feel that refreshing breeze wafting up your handcrafted designer pant leg? that's relief, the onset of something like wisdom, also climate change makes the air warm and/so it rises up the pant leg. we're someplace new now: stay focused.

Out the window, line across the sky like the start of a signature: a flying man!

I liked last night's show, and Deer Creek.

That said.

To deepen my understanding of the fun, quietly disconcerting summer tour at its halfway point, I've been listening these last couple of days to some long '2.0' tracks - the unbelievably cool '46 Days' from IT, the 'Headphones Jam' from the Undermind sessions, the latter two thirds of 6/19/04, the 2/03 and 7/03 jams everyone knows. Trying to figure out what's changed, what's missing, what's been added. Obviously the technical side of the music is stronger than it has been since 1998 at least, maybe earlier. But it's equally clear that the jamming is less adventurous. Less patient. And what's missing, I think, is the deadly electricity that starts flowing after the energy inside a given song-form (and implied improvisatory form) is behind the band.

Here's an example. The IT '46 Days' jumps off the diving board at 3:20 (on the SBD). The implied opening chords thin out to a one-(minor-)chord vamp within a minute or so; around 6:30 the band takes the volume down a little, Fishman starts one of those roiling uptempo drumbeats that characterized so much of Phish '03 (cf. Waves, Walls, Seven Below, Pebbles). By 7:30 Trey is building a grungy soundscape and playing the occasional dark figure in his low range, Page is on the Rhodes, and Mike is in his eerie subterranean place, playing those intricate 2.0 bass figures that are to my ears the most Dead-like thing about Phish's sound. By ten minutes Fishman has cooled out a little along with Trey, going half-speed, but thirty seconds later the band is building intensity and suggesting doubletime rhythms within the kind of ambient-grunge texture they do particularly well.

All of which is to say: eleven minutes into this climactic tune of the festival the band is playing roughly in their scalar homebase, with the same underlying tempo as at the outset, but they're in something of a holding pattern, and anything could happen. What happens is a great big ambient 'space jam.'

If a summer '09 tune reached this point, someone would push the jam somewhere - or you'd have a straight-up ambient interlude and the next tune would kick in.

Nearly a half-hour remains in the IT track, though.

I love the IT documentary (though Trey looks and sounds frighteningly unhealthy in it). There's a great sequence with Page talking about how certain musical moments and exchanges are possible only after you've dwelled with a jam for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes. Underscoring that interview, and then featured for a few minutes, is a long snippet from just after the twenty-minute mark of the '46 Days.' A curtain of noisy guitar/keyboard texture is fading away, and Fish has landed (somehow!) on a sprightly 6/8 beat, counted/accented as two triplets (as in a slightly-fast 'Jesus Left Chicago'). Page starts playing eerie washes on the Rhodes, while Mike and Trey latch onto Fish's new time signature, but feeling it differently - in 3, in 4. After a while Fishman starts subdividing his own phrases in 4, keeping up the tempo (the hi-hat hits are at the same speed) but with a new count (accents and snare hits every 4, then every 8, rather than in 3 or 6).

It is, in other words, a nearly-ten-minute exercise in tension-building following a nearly-ten-minute dark-ambient space-out - and the filmmakers (and maybe Phish themselves?) selected this passage to illustrate one of the central messages of the film and the festival, about patience and empathy and open communication. I think that's important.

So by the 29:00 mark Trey is playing more melodic lines in the midrange, Mike is making groovy suggestions, Page is building some syncopated halfway-funk shit on the piano, and Fish throws some goddamn disco into the drumbeat. From there you get something like a quick quiet 'Piper' groove, shit goes barroom by 35:00 and everyone's getting laid on the back of the 4am bus to Funkytown, and when Page hops back on the Hammond you know Trey's ready to strap on and head home - at 37:00 you have the coolest segue of the weekend, reminiscent of the rocket-liftoff key change leading into 'Mike's Song' on 7/22/97 and complete with suggested modulation from Trey...he takes it back...Page is with him...back...then BOOM, we're back in the home key. Around 39:00 we're out, and the rest of 2003 feels like epilogue.

Why does this shit matter? Because this goofy rock band performs a ten-minute build in intensity, almost without lifting the volume of the music one iota, and it could only have happened after the palate-cleansing, mind-emptying, face-melting blast that fills the song's second ten minutes. Yet those ten minutes would never have happened in early summer 2009.

Maybe it's sobriety.

Maybe it's the twenty-five-year itch.

It's not some new abstract 'focus,' folks - these guys had plenty of focus on that wild summer 2003 tour.

What they also had was the confidence to wait, to listen in quiet for rhythms that aren't only sound, to dig in and revise their jams as they went. Writing is revising, of course; that's the craft. There's a myth that improvised music is totally spontaneous, but that's not quite right. Listening is a craft too, waiting is a taxing physical challenge, and what remains for Phish - what could maybe start coming back in August? - is just that: listening, waiting. Letting the music play itself. Sometimes that means 'noodling' a little. Sometimes noodling (or math, or 'space,' or just cock-rock gone south) gets you thirty minutes into '46 Days' and you've found another universe.

That's the point. That's the thing I've loved most about this band. And if there's a criticism to be leveled at summer '09 so far, that's it as far as I'm concerned: not enough waiting, seeing the other side. Everything up to that point is pure happiness for me, but beyond it is transformation. How fucking good will that feel.

[This is an excerpt from a larger, admittedly kind of weird piece. If you must know, it's from the Fixing You manuscript, a couple hundred pages of stylish/aggressive nonsense-or-possibly-genius in this vein. Please enjoy. --wa.]

the main difficulty with traveling, other than being eaten by carnivorous fish or having an "everyone here is very tan and speaks in gibberish"-related panic attack in the middle of the world's largest shopping mall or something, is adjusting to the little things, the tiny cultural differences that make life living: don't touch the food, don't look directly at sweet bitches or someone will cut off your hand, the mosquitoes have AIDS, there is no internet access unless you go to the city, nearly three hundred miles downriver, past the golden temple. THERE IS NO GODDAMN INTERNET. not 2.0, 1.0, little-known intermediate web technologies like web 1.5. nothing! plus there are sensitivity issues to worry about: how do you approach tiny japanese without being crippled by guilt, knowing that they've already lived through the 21st and 22nd centuries once, are aggressively fixing up the 23rd century with nanobots and thermonuclear magic spells at the moment (contemporary japan is what the 23rd century will look like if we make cloning not only legal but *mandatory*), and now here you come with your stupid questions about "how do they make tempura" and "why did the police outfit me with this GPS-enabled dog collar when i got off the plane in tokyo," things like that. plus, cultural solidarity is one thing, open-mindedness is one thing, but why are all the muslims dressed like assholes? you see? you dropped out of georgetown's medieval studies program before getting the degree, which was the right move, everyone thinks so, but you never did take that acting class you'd been so excited about - so how are you going to convincingly act like you don't know how much better your country is than, uh, theirs? all of them really.

worthies, the world is just too difficult to understand. did you see the part about no internet web? it's not available in alaska, indeed most of the u.s. west of the mississippi river (minus san francisco, obviously), so what are the chances they've discovered the internet in bangalore, paris, the picturesque mountains of switzerland? answer: the chances are very very small, and you can't take that kind of risk. you're not a gambler, you're an exceptionally talented and stylishly-appointed urban elite. you can't bring mohammed to the mountain because he's been put in a secret government prison on the floating magical island of west frandisco. but someone has to be brought to the mountain; the gods demand it. it just doesn't have to be you. nor do you want the mountain brought here; it's trivia night at Foster's and you can't duck out of it, not when you have to defend your "80's sitcoms"-themed record-setting title last week. someone else can babysit the mountain.

well so the alternative is to make like a grownup and stay home. but how? no american is truly cultured unless he or she has traveled the world, and yet we've shown through careful logic that travel is impermissible if not simply impossible, never mind pricy - god even if you can lifehack your tickets into a first-class upgrade from coach you're still looking at ten, maybe thirty thousand american dollars to get a seat on a giant spacegoing quantum shark-jet, and who has that kind of money lying around? other than famous personal american productivity guru/authors who spend their nights covered in locally-grown honey and rolling around in four-foot-deep piles of authors'-advance cash, "lucre" really, who has that kind of money in today's enlightened western world?

so if you can't go abroad - and you can't - you have to find a way to make HERE more like THERE, without all the "charming" local "flavor" that the emaciated non-digitally-savvy citizens of THERE think is so special precious dear to their ancestors in the dreamtime or whatever but is, when you get down to it, basically las vegas with cheaper whores and lower production values. which, sure, *awesome* in a way, but remember: no internet.

ok, to recap:

* be brave

* stay home

* america

it's a little unusual for a lifehacking project to intentionally downgrade performance and style, but when it comes to worldliness and open-minded cultural exchange, the western hemisphere is willing to take one for the team.

as is traditional, we have a set of easy-to-follow lifehacking tips'n'tricks in clear, jargon-free language - ready to be implemented by the post-digital post-national hardcore american digital freshmaker/coolhacker/raconteur now reading this volume, i.e. probably you. possibly not you - have you come down from the lsd yet, hasn't it been twelve hours? how much goddamn lsd did you take? - but *probably* you.

* food: american food isn't terribly fashionable unless consumed ironically, post-nationally - e.g. designer mac and cheese with a bottle of very delicate absinthe you got on your celebratory trip to bhutan when your post-college startup shipped version 0.02beta4 of the social-network app you guys had worked up and you just had to, like *unwind* - so we have some major changes to make here. luckily, most foreign cuisines are easily duplicated using american ingredients. for instance: to make delicate taiwanese curried poultry, buy some general gao's chicken at the local chinese take-out place, head down to your local organic/macro food mart, get a little green curry paste, and mix it in using a limited-edition quantum-plastic japanese designer stirring spoon. for authentic taiwanese texture don't mix it in, just pour it right on top, then call one of your chinese friends to wave nuclear weapons at you menacingly while you eat your food huddled in the corner of your small but efficiently furnished and stylishly laid-out loft, furtively looking around all the while to make sure no local warlords have beheaded any of your neighbors tonight. taiwan has warlords, right? or to make indian rice, buy chinese rice and give it smallpox.

* dress: ever since the second world war foreigners have been required by law to dress like americans, only funny in some small way - e.g. french clothes are always a little too tight-fitting at the crotch; all swiss wear baggy fleece workout pants cinched below the knees, known as "lederhosen"; amazon men and women wear dish towels; all germans have lots of piercings but in a refreshingly non-aggressive way; there's nearly a million chinese, two million, and they only have about 300,000 outfits between them - all grey tracksuits with "china!" written in big letters on the back, we saw it at the olympics - so in china you only get to wear any clothes at all one day out of three, which is actually ok because four days out of five it's illegal and unwise to breathe chinese air. (confirmed! on the internet.) you have nothing to worry about clothing-wise; most of your designer shit is made in sweatshops anyhow, right? so just pretend YOU'RE the sweatshop worker - easy, go around acting all grateful you have a job at all, even if that's a weird feeling for a progressive urbanite - and make believe you STOLE your featureless grey china-blouse from the factory, you're so worried about getting caught, and friendly subversive Commandant Chang can't cover for you forever, they'll catch you, FOOLISH xiao ming, they're sure to catch you...

* money: no problem. american dollars are good everywhere. however, to maintain fictional coherence on a fake stay-at-home world-travel vacation, you can't find or use an ATM, and will eventually have to barter to eat. this is standard in most countries of the dark, exotic east ("exotique" in french). you'll do fine; your body still has that undergraduate firmness, you'll fetch upwards of ten dollars a day. (sidenote: really? if you're offering, contact our publisher. IF you're offering.)

* internet: WHAT DID WE TELL YOU. NO.

* local customs: you went to graduate school, right? "culture is a conversation." you can more or less make shit up as you go along; for instance, refuse to believe that streetlights are real, or always turn left. if anyone asks what you're doing, call it "subaltern chic" or "just like mama xiao pan used to make" and then steal their wallet, but in an adorable, culturally authentic ("authentique") way.

* attitude toward americans: as with most things, you already know what to do here, you just need to maintain a constant high level of very cromulent mindfulness about it. assume that everyone on the street is an actual cowboy (ladies too) who bathes in liquid gold, nanobubble baths made from forcibly-aborted fetuses, and middle/near eastern crude oil; do not hide your disdain at people's inability to follow your language; marry a tiny cow-eyed babychild to preserve its honor post-defilement; occasionally mourn the death of a beloved uncle or grand-niece, wailing and ululating as their little coffin is lifted out of the pickup truck and lowered slowly, so slowly, into the blood-soaked earth that is your ancestral home - where you someday will rest as well. then vow bloody vengeance against whomever the hell; according to our fashion/historical sources, jews will do nicely.

obviously this will yield nothing even remotely like travel, will expose you to none of what makes other countries worth seeing (if you believe that marketing hype). but ask yourself: do you *really* feel like leaving home right now, right in the middle of things, when your favorite web-cartoon is probably updating tonight, and all your friends are talking about really important things on electronic digital mail? you really want to give that up?

well we don't either. never, ever, ever.

Whatever do you think you're doing? she asked. I said, I'm flying! She frowned and said, I don't think sitting and flying are the same thing. I said, With an ass like mine you never can tell, baby. She came to see it my way; kissed me like I was whiskey on ice in summer; asked if she could fly with me. There was room on the couch so that was no problem.

There's nothing to be done. I guess it's time to talk about Phish's reunion tour.

I've seen three shows this summer, and heard all the 2009 shows so far.

They've been playing well lately, and their written performances (vs improv) are better right now than they've been since maybe 1996. The fluidity of '97 is (temporarily?) gone, replaced with a middle-aged familiarity and zest that they've never quite had before; the catastrophe of late summer '04 is gone too, and if the improvisations aren't as daring as they were in the late 90's, nor as patient and organic as in 2003, Phish are attacking their songlist with the verve of their 15-years-younger selves, particularly the mature new material. The new album should be interesting.

The real question: how's the jamming? God damn it, how are they improvising?

Please understand that this summer I see, or maybe just saw, my twentieth show, and I've heard hundreds of 'em. I'm not as easily impressed as I was when I first flipped for Phish in 1994, and I'm attentive to aspects of the music that less musically-inclined listeners might not care about. (I miss plenty of others - guitar technology, for instance. Who the hell cares what brand of guitar equipment a guy uses, you know? Learn to play the goddamn thing, then you get to jack off about logistics. And yet I wish I knew more.) The point being, you might go to these shows and have the time of your life. You might hear nothing amiss. You might be bored stiff, or changed forever. What follows is only my two cents.

Well. So how is it? What's up?

A couple of things.

Less stylistic variety than there used to be. Phish's first big step forward in the studio was the seemingly effortless virtuoso comedy of 1992's A Picture of Nectar. After the lumpy prog of Lawn Boy and the scattershot Junta, here was a tight set of fiery songs flawlessly executed, tightened over years of shows, kept to almost-reasonable lengths. The most amazing thing about the album was its vast reach: Nectar seemed to encompass every imaginable musical style and invent a couple more for spice, and if it didn't yet have the fully unified sound of Rift (still Phish's strongest batch of studio songs, though not their best album), the album showed Phish's omnivorous appetite. In 1998 the band could cover an entire Velvet Underground album on Halloween, Dark Side of the Moon two goddamn days later, and a mix of Marvin Gaye, Zeppelin, and the Beastie Boys along the way. And if they always sounded most like themselves, they always approached jams on their own terms - molding their approach to the sound, style, and language of each song and genre in turn.

But in 2003 the band's many different sounds congealed into one consistent, thrilling - and then a little boring - rock'n'roll tone and feel. They were itching to tear the songs apart, but often the results sounded like...well, like one big song. It wasn't a bad song, but it wasn't the insane polyglot musical language the band and fans had learned to speak and appreciate.

Right now Phish's improvisations have some of 2003-04's sonic consistency. From a purely sonic perspective things are clearer and more precise than they were during that weird interregnum; Anastasio's guitar sound is less dirty but also less likely to seep into a noisy mud. In terms of spontaneous creation, though, the band isn't creating a new language right now. There have been flashes of pathbreaking boldness at times, and guitarist Anastasio's playing has certainly deepened in the last five years, but if anything the band now sounds more like their partial progenitors, the Grateful Dead: less cohesive, more focused on individual voices, with everyone doing their thing behind the lead player. Mike and Page are playing better than ever on bass and keys respectively, but half the reason that's so obvious is that they're being featured as individuals at the cost of group creation.

What it all means is that a given song is far less likely to spark sudden innovation - either they're on or they're not, and Anastasio's less mercurial playing prompts the group to take fewer chances. So they stick to what they do best, which is Being Phish, and that sounds awfully familiar. As beautifully as each of the four guys is playing, the mystical 'fifth man' emerges all too rarely. So you hear a rock band, instead of The Greatest Fucking Rock Band Alive.

Looser climaxes. The band doesn't have the same psychic connection as it did up through the 2000-02 hiatus; their famous complete trust is (for now?) gone. Where a 1994 'Harry Hood' or 1997 'You Enjoy Myself' jam was all about setting out together and arriving together - 'loose/tight' in the sense that each player could improvise freely knowing that there was a shared expectation about structure and fluid exchange of improvisatory role within a basic envelope - today's jams are, paradoxically, both more rigid (less likely to wander far afield, less playful) and more flabby (far less likely to clap militarily together on the downbeat, far less coherent in the 'we are all one big chord' sense, etc.). The easiest way to see this phenomenon is in the climaxes of big jams. They get there, but not as cleanly and decisively as they used to. If you like the old stuff, the pre-hiatus stuff and particularly the self-contained declarative-statement jams of the mid-90's, today's big bangs might seem both more triumphant and, oddly, less earned.

Far less open-ended and exploratory improv. Last night's Deer Creek show featured, by consensus, some of the best jamming of Phish 2009. 'A Song I Heard the Ocean Sing' broke open a near-continuous second set, with no time to breathe in the first thirty minutes of intense rock. But listen (at phishows.com, or phishthoughts.com/nospoilers, or livephish.com) to that 'Type II' jam between 'Ocean' and 'Drowned': a sprightly jam in the song's relative major key, the tempo kicked up a little after a meterless ambient interlude, with the whole thing dying out into some tinkling piano and the onset of 'Drowned' on no more than ten seconds' notice. Lovely, generous music for a couple of minutes, but isn't the point of 'Type II' jamming that the music becomes something other than an extension of the song? Meanwhile 'Drowned' itself morphs into one of those uptempo clav-driven funk interludes you'd find in nearly every latter-day version of 'Weekapaug' or 'Down With Disease,' which entertains the crowd without going anywhere for a couple of minutes, and then devolves into 'Twist.' You can faintly make out a suggestion of the 'Twist' bassline from Mike five seconds before the segue, but other than that, this 'most exciting jamming of tour' is basically a mid-jam fade and Trey counting off the next tune.

I don't want to dismiss the whole enterprise, because the music is still pretty great. Indeed, that 'Twist' gets hot and stays that way, deliberately echoing the scorching 'Oye Como Va' jam from the Jones Beach 'Twist' earlier this month but with a doubletime funk feel; only fools and assholes can complain when the band floors a gassed-up 'Twist.' Yet people are talking about this set as if it's the best run of tunes this whole tour - and without exception the tunes stay within shouting distance of homebase. The only total departures are 'ambient jams' of the sort that bridged so many songs in summer and fall 2000, to devastating effect in Fukuoka but boring audiences to tears on other occasions. I like their new, busier approach to ambient jamming, but it doesn't feel terribly risky or innovative; the formless between-song breakdown is one of the first crutches a beginning improvisor learns, as leaving the rhythm and making noises without tonal center frees you to resolve to pretty much whatever you'd like, within mood constraints.

Then again, what kind of person demands that a rock quartet stay 'innovative' after a quarter-century of pathbreaking improvised music? What kind of jerk am I, anyhow?

Well, but what kind of band are they?

More one-guy-partying showoffery. These are great musicians, no question. And they make fantastic party music. But it's their collective creation, their communication, that holds fascination for their fans. A ten-minute 'Tube' that's basically a long clavinet/cowbell freakout does tend to run into the ol' diminishing-returns wall after a while, like a pounding noisy 'Free' consisting solely of Big Bass Sounds followed by Trey's screaming guitar outro. (He's demolishing every single version of 'Free,' by the way. But the band hasn't taken a risk with that song since 2004 at least. In the late 90's 'Free' could end up in some straaaange places; we could go there again, y'know. I'd go.)

The crowd eats this mildly onanistic business up, and you can't fault the guys for wanting to rock out and show off a little. But these spotlit showcases cease to be communication at all, after a while. I don't need 'em. (That's me. Whatever.)

Less dicking around. The boys are charging out of the gate at full speed on every single song - which is both exciting and costly. The best 'Taste' solo ever (12/30/97) begins with nearly 30 seconds of quiet; the best 'Ghost' and 'Tweezer' renditions percolate for a while before cohering, as do classic 'Wolfman's Brother' versions like 7/24/98 (with its sharpest-ever climactic turn). Wasn't that the lesson of 1997 - take your time, build the music slowly, and something good will float by?

But Trey Anastasio's been to jail, for god's sake, and he wants to squeeze every note out of each performance. So you get two fewer minutes of idle notions per song, no dead air as it were. Meaning no more delicate, fragile versions of 'Limb By Limb,' no autumn-breeze openings to 'Hood,' and 'Reba' won't open with just Mike and Fish setting the scene in near-silence. The floor is raised, which makes the ceiling seem lower. Which is of course an optical illusion, but do you really give a damn when, after all, it's your house we're talking about?

And yeah, last night's Deer Creek 'Tweezer' heads right out of the gate with no muted chording from Trey, boldly takes one step 'round the circle of fourths, and bubbles to a pleasant end - but you never quite get the sense that the band is building a single thing together, even though the individual playing is more complex than it's (maybe) ever been. Which is to say...

Good focus, less patience. Phish's great achievement in 1997 was to develop an approach to group improvisation that built on dance rhythms and electronic/hip-hop energy, slowly evolving complex musical structures and building to razor-sharp peaks while patiently combining each existing idea, each going rhythmic concern, with whatever new notions struck the band in the moment. They learned patience, a new kind of musical democracy, and it elevated their game far beyond even the anthemic heights of fall/winter 1995. Check out the colossal '2001' from the Great Went in August '97: twenty minutes of pure after-electric-Miles eccentric-white-nerd dance-porn. Right now the lads are playing joyously but less patiently, meaning tunes like '2001' take off more quickly, do what they need to do in less time, and never quite reach the dizzying heights of the band's best stuff.

I listen to Phish in part because I want danger. I miss that feeling: 'How are these musicians going to get back to that song? And if they don't, where in the world will they end up?'

Phish 2009 hasn't been at all dangerous. Entertaining, yes. Beautiful, rocking, profound, yeah. But there's a part of my mind that's going unused at these shows, and I look forward to turning a corner along with the band. Soon, soon.

Easy, comprehension-crippling mistake:

Musically referencing the monsoon with the opening “A Song I Heard The Ocean Sing,” this time we knew it was for real.

No!

We did not reference anything, god damn it! The band references the monsoon; we know it's for real. The two clauses should correspond and agree. 'Musically referencing the monsoon...the band let us know it was for real. And we did know. Know, we did. They rocked our balls and minds. Who did rock balls/minds? The band. The professional American rock band.'

See?

I never learned this shit in English class - never knew what a 'clause' was until college or grad school and still don't know what a 'mood' or 'participle' is - but it's not too hard to pick up if you read middling-tough prose with any attentiveness. Keep your ears open and the clarity of your writing will improve.

Why was Fox Theatre 'Slave to the Traffic Light' butchered this week?

To my ears it seems that Trey was playing as if to finish the jam, though the jam wasn't finished - he'd suggested the climactic upper-register lines that often signal the jam, but then (around 8:30?) pulled back from them a little, heading back down the 'doc, which might've confused the others. And Fishman did seem to be with him before Trey went into the closing chords, though Fishman was clearly surprised by Trey's exit too. It's possible there was some visual-communication issue instead, I wouldn't know.

One unfortunate(?) new thing about Phish is the relative muddiness of their biggest jam climaxes: Slave, Hood, YEM, Reba, and specifically in the Star Lake 'Disease' and 'Piper,' or the botched 'Mike's Song' at Jones Beach. Back in the day, the closing chords of Hood or Slave or Reba wouldn't come as a surprise - there was a clear pattern to each build, a road map that the band and audience knew in advance. It might only be general - in Hood, Trey would start playing those cascading high notes, or in Slave he'd top out at the fifth and you'd know it'd be over in 4 or 8 bars (same in Reba) - but band and crowd would arrive together.

Presumably for lack of rehearsal or loss of habit, those standard progressions have been set aside or dissipated, and now we've got jams ending suddenly, without warning, or without 'peaking' as cleanly as they used to. The Fox Slave is a perfect example: without some unspoken shared agreement about what the end of the jam looks/sounds like, the band is a lot closer to square one in terms of synching up. Riskier, sure, but less viscerally satisfying for the audience. Or anyhow for me.

(The big rock tunes - Chalkdust, Free, etc. - are great right now. Phish can do that kind of shit in their sleep.)

The Star Lake 'Hood' was the cleanest version of the tour, with the most powerful peak, which Trey signaled with his canonical closing lines. Trey starts the closing chords at 11:30 (on the soundboard), but listen carefully to the thirty seconds before that: at 11:00 he starts playing those fanned scale runs he's been doing, ten seconds later he hits the top-shelf octave that signals we've got some multiple of 8 bars left, and right on schedule he goes sliding into the final chords 20 seconds later. According to a plan that was never written, but emerged over time. Habit, you might say.

Meanwhile, in that night's 'Disease,' Trey lands on the 'Free' chords ten seconds before the end of the DWD (SBD) track, which presumably suggests the next track to him. (DWD > Free isn't a particularly rare segue - no news here.) But instead of moving straight into the colossal 'Free' rift, Trey gathers the band with those (help me on the guitar terminology someone) muted eighth-note downstrokes, to establish tempo and feel at the outset. Ten years ago that segue might've happened more organically, but the band's signaling apparatus is rusty, and the Star Lake transition hardly qualifies as a segue.

(Sidebar: did you know Coca-Cola removes rust from tools? It's terrifying actually. Don't drink Coke - drink your rum straight and your caffeine in coffee.)

The point of this exercise is only this: the boys are unused to the kind of communication that used to come naturally to them, and that communication was the whole reason we'd see the shows. 'The biggest idea,' Trey calls it. It'll come in time, though not as energetically as back in the day, and we'll get both riskier 'Type II' (open-form) improv and more cohesive, discrete climaxes in the 'Type I' (intra-progression) stuff. Easier for the audience to follow, more rewarding, more open-hearted - I think these old guys on their best days or weeks or months were pretty much untouchable improvisors and generous musical companions. They've got work to do; they're doing it. That much right with the world.