Saw Our Lady Peace last night at the Backstage. They were pretty good and the crowd was small enough that I could watch all the lead guitarist's weird facial expressions as he jammed out. It was a Stevie Ray Vaughan thing, like watching someone having an orgasm during every guitar solo. Afterwards there was offline music and I partied until the wee hours, kind of unintentionally because I missed my connection back to the S-Bahn at 2:00. I ended up just riding around in a tram for a while trying to get back to the Backstage. A drunk was riding around too and it was a pretty sobering sight (ha ha). No seriously. This guy had no face, he was just this hunched over leather jacket with an incongruous floral cap obscuring all but his gray beard. I watched as he slowly brought out a flask from inside his jacket--he almost couldn't manage even this--and took a swig.
Finished my book of two Huxley essays while I was waiting. The first, the famous "Doors of Perception," was really great, perhaps because it was rooted in actual experience rather than intellectual synthesis. The second essay, "Heaven and Hell," was the latter to read. I couldn't believe that a writer like Huxley could churn out such a piece of crap. And that it would continue to be published. After about ten pages discussing the power of gems and shiny objects to transport one to the "mind's antipodes" (the mind's antipodes! the mind's antipodes! a phrase that quickly became ridiculous through repetition, as "the bowels of the earth" was to Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth) I wanted to toss it in the wastebasket. But I stuck it out to its unenlightening end.
Posted by Alan at November 10, 2002 06:05 PM