"And if I learned her language she could tell me all her dreams." - The Dambuilders

Another absolutely gorgeous Sunday. Just back from Portsmouth, NH where we spent our weekend at the biannual Firm shindig. Which involved a lot of drinking and standing around and taking taxis from the hotel where all the paralegals were stationed to the hotel where the main base of operations was located. It was nice on the whole, I met and fraternized with folks who I pass in halls everyday but never knew. It rained like hell Saturday, but that did not deter Lopez and I from getting out onto the main drag in Portsmouth and taking lunch at the Friendly Toast (this link curiously name-drops Carman's Country Kitchen in South Philly, which was close by my old pad on Ellsworth and, perhaps more notably, claimed to put the "cunt" back in "country." But I digress...). Afterwards I shuffled across Congress Street to while away the hours in what I have decided is my current favorite record store, Bullmoose Music. I bought about a half dozen records from their ample used stacks, all of which are great. Particularly The Dambuilder's Encendedor, which I had a tape of back in college but never the CD. The tape is long gone, and I am very pleased to have the disc because it is even stronger than I had remembered (It looks like some third-party at Amazon will sell it to you for $.13 -- this is likely the best deal you'll get this year on hot rock, so I suggest you take it). The band synthesized Jawbox and the Pixies and other sounds into an indie rock delight that boasted a lot of violin, which sounds zany, but it works. I saw the Dambuilders a few times around the time this record came out, once in Bethlehem, PA and once in NYC at CMJ, and they were really hot then. They got snapped up by Atlantic/TAG or something like that and released another full-length or two that I don't remember anything about. I'll have to look into it.

Also got a bunch of other good records. Hooray for me. On a related note, I plan to launch Tuesday a webcasting venture through a partnership woth Logie's Teapothill.org. Go to http://radio.teapothill.org on Tuesday nights at 10PM, where you will be able to access a Shoutcast stream of music I will be spinning for one hour. We tried the experiment out Thursday night and it works pretty well. My show complements other extant Radio Teapot Hill programming, including jazz from Topher and punk and indie from Rob. Check in now and again to see what is spinning.

Need to settle back in here. I feel like we have been away for months. Fortunately this week's trip to St. Louis appears to have been postponed, which means I can go see Carbon Leaf on Thursday and Mobius Band on Saturday. The big Wilco show is coming up too. Rockity rock rock.

That is all.