Finally made it to another Dahlia show, at Doug Fir last night. I'm not enough of a dork to bring a digital camera to a concert, so this is the closest I've got to photos. Sadly, I am enough of a dork to bring a Blackberry to a concert. Feel free to mock me, if you like. As usual, I got there wayyy early, and sat around typing up a blog post, because I thought it would be awfully l33t to blog from the Doug Fir. Also, I was one of the first people there, so I was feeling a little neurotic. I actually huddled in a far corner of the lounge, furiously thumb-typing away and sipping at a vodka tonic. In that would-be post, I complained about my punctuality neurosis, I complained about geezers hogging the swimming pool that morning, I complained at length about having to wrestle with the company teleconferencing system most of the day and not being able to find anyone who understood how the damn thing worked, not even the corporate phone administrator or the building receptionist. I went off on a deadly serious tangent about gentrification in the neighborhood around the Doug Fir, and reminisced about how the whole area was a no-go zone just a few short years ago, although the developers' future plans for the area also made me really nervous, etc. The idea behind the post was to explain why I needed so badly to lighten the fuck up and click everything else off and just dance for a while, but at that point I was still part of the problem, not the solution. I was actually getting more withdrawn and neurotic as I kept typing. The result was quite a sour, bitter piece, and luckily I wasn't getting any cell reception down in the lounge so I couldn't post it. So I did a "Save as draft", and figured I'd include it in a post today, but today I deleted it by accident. It's probably just as well. There's really no need here for a rant about my uber-punctual German Calvinist ancestors, or little old ladies in water wings. I was even about to start whining about the Dahlia dynamic duo, er, trio blowing off my friend request on MySpace, like that sort of thing actually matters or something. Sheesh. The lost post was fairly long, and I've probably missed a few of its not-very-salient points. I might be able to recover it by grabbing a memory image off the BB using some of the RIM developer tools, and grepping the resulting binary file for the word "dahlia". That would pretty much be for pure geek value, though. This post exists in lieu of that post, and I like this one a lot better.
So I shut the BB off when it started whining about a low battery, and soon I noticed a few coworkers arriving, purely by random chance, so we hung out and gabbed about B-movies and restaurants and such for a while during the opening act, Stalking Jane. I'd never heard them before and I think I'm a fan now; I didn't have enough drinks in me to get up and dance just yet, but I enjoyed the set anyway. Then when Dahlia took the stage, it was time to just check out, lose track of the world, and get lost in the music.
If you hadn't noticed already, this isn't really a review. I wasn't taking notes at that point. There's an eternal tension between truly being in the moment, and capturing the moment for posterity. You can dance, or you can blog, but you can't do both at the same time. 99.9% of the time, 24/6.999, I'm squarely on the 'blog' side of things, sitting above, or at least outside, the fray, commenting on the action in an amused and detached way. If I could have any one superpower, I'd choose to be invisible, and wander around observing people and making snarky and disagreeable observations about them for posterity. Did I mention I was a sociology major for a while? I could have done this for a living, basically. I'd probably have tenure by now, if I'd stuck with it. It presses my buttons. Well, 99.9% of the time. During the other 0.1%, you just have to turn everything else off and just shake that thang. So to speak. So I danced, and now I'm blogging about it -- the 0.1% having expired for the time being.
So what I can tell you about the show is: Great music, great crowd, I love the new material, can't wait for the album to hit the streets, blah, blah, etc., etc.. Basically what I'm saying is that you had to be there.
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