Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays. I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here. The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back. Tons of fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music. I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare. I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast. We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids. Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! \nhttps:\/\/origamiusa.org\/holidaytree\/2024<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before. It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan. I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there. Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar. They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp. The show was most excellent. The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material. Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts. Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro\/bridge to Frame by Frame. On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything. His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants. Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness. Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players. I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design. Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man. Small world, go figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next up: D&D<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays. I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here. The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back. Tons of fun. We … Continue reading “Be of Good Cheer”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-origami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6375"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6380,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6375\/revisions\/6380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}