Phthursday Musings: Dash Trash Bash Crash Rash Stash Brash Smash

I should start by announcing the arrival home of O’Leary:

Now I am told that he might also be named Rocket, but I’m still a little confused about what is and isn’t official.

O’Leary, interestingly… not a flax fiend. He is very into tofu though. And he loves to dash on his wheel. O’Leary really hit the jackpot here!

Last Saturday at a local forest preserve an event was held called Trash Bash. Different governmental entities and non-profits all brought trucks and you could get rid of light bulbs and grocery bags and electronics and paper you wanted shredded and clothes… all things that ordinarily you’d have to take to completely different places.

I was SO EXCITED about this. I got rid of grocery bags and electronics and paper I wanted shredded and clothes. The whole thing allowed us to be more aggressive about throwing crap out of the house and so I broke down a lot of old boxes and found other papers to get rid of and cleared things out of the garage and it was all so orderly and at some point I really do think I got manic about it all.

I can acknowedge my excitement here… and also how truly insane it is that as a society we even need to have events like this. We generate so much physical garbage and don’t have sane recycling systems. I try, but I know I’m not the norm. Most people of course would just throw everything I mentioned away in the household garbage, except maybe the clothes, and geez, some people would just throw the clothes away too.

But I was excited and even manic and when crap goes then it becomes easier to see the next line of crap and now even the garage kind of looks neat and… there’s still so much sitting around.

I’m a deep sentimentalist. I attach terrific import to some tiny and nonsensical things. It’s a side effect, perhaps, of having a more detailed memory than most people seem to have. Throwing an item out is akin to throwing that memory out, and the historian in me balks at throwing out memories. But, also, probably by extension, gets very excited about throwing out the things which don’t matter at all.

The digital age we’re in is one where there’s so much physical ephemera but so much more virtual ephemera… it’s a wonder we can even function without constantly visiting some kind of personal Trash Bash. And, maybe, this is a way of understanding why so many people have such difficulty functioning well. The body public can’t process all this waste. It builds up and it weighs us down.

This is META-SPIEL though. Sometimes there’s some nuggets of mental nutrition to keep you going, speckled around all of the sweet delicious silliness, easy to digest, easy to excrete, pH balanced for today’s happy brains.

Last week I had the great pleasure of seeing the magnificent Dirty Three. I don’t do it often but on this night I made sure to get there early enough to get near the front, and enjoyed an up close presentation of one of the world’s greatest musical performances, featuring one of the world’s true maniacs.

I’ve written often of the Dirty Three, and I’ll get back to them in an upcming META-FIFTY entry one of these days, so I won’t dwell too much here, but imagine:

Off to the left is a tall stoic guitarist wearing sunglasses, whose work is always present but almost never calls special attention to itself. In the middle is one of the world’s greatest drummers, equally adept at playing slow or fast, quiet or loud. And off to the left, except when wandering about, is a man with a violin, a man who you can immediately tell is a particular crazy, the kind Aesop could never have imagined.

Mick Turner’s guitar is like the rocky cliff, and Jim White’s drums like the water falling over it. Without the rocky cliff the water couldn’t possibly fall like it does, but fall it does, and the closer you get, the louder and more immersive the crash. And in the midst of all this is Warren Ellis, jumping around the plunge pool, whooping and hollering like a majestic hyena. Somehow when he is standing still, he is at his whoopingest and holleringest.

I’ve seen them four times now and the experience is more wonderful each time. This may have been a top ten all time show for me. It seems the entire show may well have been recorded:

Their most recent album Love Changes Everything is from 2024 and there’s an official video from it:

What I find every time I get sucked in is that I very well could get very sucked in, so much so as to hardly listen to anything else. They are the most immersive band I regularly listen to, like a musical representation of great mountains terminating at great oceans in stark cascades that a mere flatlander like myself can only begin to inhale. Of course they come from the other side of the world, a mysterious place called… “Melbourne”.

A week later in a different part of the big city, I was fortunate to see the Wedding Present for the first time, accompanied by my bestie Ouri. Wedding Present formed in Leeds in the mid-80s and were at their most prominent in the early 90s, though like a number of other bands, I think they sound a very particular kind of too British to have ever made it huge in the U.S.

They played the entirety of their 1992 album Seamonsters which was an early “quiet loud quiet” album… like if you took jangly pop love songs and microwaved them. I wasn’t expecting quite that level of force from what I had remembered as a pop band, but ahh, that’s where timing is everything. We had the song “Montreal” from 1996’s Saturnalia on rotation at WESN back in the day and it’s a super pleasant wistful pop song.

I hear people talk about popular music or popular culture in general being out of ideas and I do get it! But seemingly every day I hear something new, and sometimes that something new is something 30 years old, and something 30 days old, and so much of it is truly amazing stuff, and so much of it is right there waiting for us to discover. I don’t mean to be rash and gloss over how so much of this is caught up in so many real problems - how the plethora of media options today are often expensive and/or driven through horrible corporate entities - I think it’s important to acknowledge all of that and to be responsible about where our money and energy are spent. But look, I can share with you the 35 year old video for “Dalliance”, the first song off of Seamonsters:

I’d be remiss here not to mention the connection between Dirty Three and Wedding Present. During the Dirty Three show, Warren Ellis led the crowd on an incantation to attempt to raise Steve Albini from the dead, Albini having been behind the boards of Ocean Songs, which might be their greatest album. And years earlier, it was Albini behind the boards for Seamonsters. How these connections keep coming up is truly extraordinary.

Speaking of extraordinary connections, this video made the rounds this past week:

Jeff Tweedy covering Songs: Ohia is not one I had on my list. But it makes sense. All of these people who have been important to me over the past 25+ years seem to keep coalescing in unexpected ways. Days later a very different Jeff Tweedy clip made the rounds:

I last saw Wilco a few years back and thought, hey, this is really nice, but, I’m not sure I need to go out of my way to see them again. But I’ve since seen his solo / family band a second time, and it seems like Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of Finom are simply regulars in his side band now, and… I tell you, I wish I could go out even more than I do, because there’s such a stash of great stuff happening out there, even in the midst of the madness of the planet.

I mentioned a mysterious place. Now I must offer a most unmysterious flag. Your Phthursday Flag is that of Melbourne, Australia:

Now this thing is a low quality rendering, because… no person bothers to make a high quality proper version, because this thing is wretched. It seems the proper Australia term for this might be poxy. Bloody poxy.

There has got to be a better way to symbolize how important the wool trade is than with a fleece, right? Like just having a dancing sheep instead?

The whale is there to symbolize whaling not whales per se, apparently, even though whaling has been banned there for almost 50 years.

Not to be too brash about it but: Melbourne is a city of over 5,400,000 people. It is twice as large as Chicago. If x denotes the size of a city and y denotes how hideous its flag is, Melbourne might have the worst xy vexillological score of all.

A final thought on this week’s news that a federal court has found Ticketmaster guilty of illegal monopolization even though the Justice Department backed out of the case:

Ticketmaster isn’t the worst corporation in the world. But they might very well be the most infuriating. Everybody hates them, and everybody has known for decades that what they do is illegal, but nobody would do anything about it until Joe Biden put people in power like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter who were actually interested in the law being followed. Imagine that: the law being followed!

With so much chaos going on this one might have gone under the radar but we should all celebrate not only the result (so far) but how it got here - it took the states banding together to see this through, and showing that America can still function a bit even if the federal government largely refuses to. Let’s keep it up and smash these corporate assholes!

To celebrate, here’s 156 minutes of Pearl Jam live at Soldier Field in 1995, a show where the tickets were not handled by Ticketmaster, and I know because I was there: