Dagger Drawn
Now Playing: Alice Coltrane--"Blue Nile"
Saturday evening I had a beer (Sea Dog IPA from Maine--I've decided that I should really use glasses for the stronger stuff as it tastes better), ate dinner, and watched the thrilling finale of the Michigan-Penn State game. I do enjoy watching college football; I've never been able to keep up with all the stats and minutiae that consume the actual sports fan, but the games are generally fun to watch, especially if one lives in a college town, and particularly if the whole thing is decided in the very last second of the last quarter, as it was in the Big House that day. I actually took my head in my hands, so ensnared was I in the collective hysteria beamed through TV sets across the Midwest (and, one would imagine, beyond).

It was all a kind of preparation for the Matt Jones EP release show that evening at the Arbourvitae loft, site of Arbourfest a month and a half ago. The plan was to go afterward to the Electric Six at the Blind Pig, but I had a suspicion that I wouldn't be up for both. The show sounded great--Alex Robins was briefly returning from San Francisco to play, and Chris Bathgate would open as well, along with this guy Jansen Swy who I'd never heard before. I wafted down North University, strangely and unexpectedly at peace--it was a brilliant evening, with a gorgeous twilight and a faint chill in the air. Brandon and Katie turned up in the Diag Party Shoppe as I bought a bottle of water, and I followed them up the stairs to Arbourvitae. The place looked completely different from Arbourfest, considerably smaller, even shrunken, but it was a more intimate crowd in any case--at first, I was put in mind of an Al-Anon meeting (not that I've ever had to go to any of those), as we were all in a semi-circle and a little charming awkwardness hung above. Annie, Misty, Josh, Andrea, and Tim from a couple of the Madison House shows appeared, obviously among others. Itr was great to see Alex again, and weird yet wonderful to hear his music live barely ten hours after I'd heard it on CD. The real discovery here was Jansen, who played a quirky mix of piano tunes, some of them very funny indeed. Chris and Matt were their usual stalwart selves, Chris on piano and Matt complemented by violin, drums, and bass. I'm very, very pleased that they're making music; Matt's "Bearded Faces" is a decided favorite of mine. The whole night stank of a welcoming hominess that I suspect had a lot to do with the loft's physical difference from Arbourfest. Afterwards, I walked home through the growing cold and watched a little TV before turning in. "Independent Lens'" on PBS had a show on Parliament Funkadelic, and I lasted through that for a while before going to bed. All in all, a very fine weekend.