And All That Jazz...

Yesterday evening, I was a jazz virgin. Last night I popped that cherry by going to see my first ever live jazz gig with two of my good PhD friends. But I didn't start off paddling in the shallow end with some up tempo ragtime. No no. I jumped straight into the diving pool and tried to doggy paddle my way through experimental, progressive Scandinavian and Japanese jazz 'music'.

I should have known what was coming my way when I was given a pair of yellow earplugs at the door. Earplugs at a gig, could they be for cereal, we thought. They were super cereal as we found out...'Some people may be disturbed by the high frequencies of tonight's show' we were told...Big deal, thought I, I've served my time as a budding badass in the moshpits of death before some of the loudest, most ear-bleed inducing bands around. What could I possibly need earplugs for in quaint old Nun's Island Theatre while listening to a bit of cool jazz of a Friday evening?!

Well. I'll never again scoff at the idea of wearing earplugs at a concert when I'm told to! The opening set by The Thing sounded to me as if chaos and random had had a baby who was being slowly run over by a New York fire truck driven by bloodthirsty penguins desperate to feast on a gaggle of noisy obnoxious punk-rock swans inside the engine of a jet plane. But after the initial disorientation of not being able to find a beat, or even some related sound waves from which I could make out the ghost of a tune, I got used to it.

Then entered the japanese jazz act. Who sat at DJ decks. And who made a noise that can only be described as something the girl from The Ring would hear before the Blair Witch put her in the corner of her forest cabin to rip out her guts - via her eardrums - through the sheer force of electro-magnetic static energy. No prizes for guessing that this was where the earplugs were supposed to come in handy. But I didn't use them. What rookie rockstar would be seen dead at a concert wearing earplugs, right?! So I suffered the sounds and was happy to find that my brain hadn't turned to frothy grey liquid dripping out of all my facial emergency exits at the interval.

In the second half of the show, the Scandinavian jazzists and the Japanese jazzist joined forces to make a quartet of jazzists. They consisted of drums (with chains and gongs on top of the drum skins), double bass (played by grabbing, banging, thumping and shaking the strings), electric guitar (played with an iron file, a U-shaped ground bolt, some nails and an ordinary pick) and saxophone (which really did sound like Tommy Tiernan's donkey-who-had-eaten-a-sheet-of-ground-plastic impression). Now, I don't know whether the scar tissue that had taken the place of my eardrums since the first half had anything to do with this, but I really actually began to enjoy the second half of the show. Not only do I think I solved the Mystery of the Missing Melody, but I'm also 99% positive I caught a slight homage to rhythm at some points too. Surprisingly, I was kind of left wanting more when the whole thing was over!!!

Afterwards, I ended up in a reggae club, which was way too easy to listen to after the evening I'd had. There was nothing challenging about that experience at all! No fight between by sense of logic and order and the other part of my brain that tells me just to let go, man, be cool! One thing's for sure though, those jazz musicians last night were more hardcore than even the most satanic metal bands, and their instruments are tougher and more determined than Rocky Balboa. Last night's jazz music sounded completely accidental at first, but it was definitely all planned out skillfully I could tell by the end!

My only fear is that normal, ordinary jazz will be too easy for me now! Killer...Ya win some, ya lose some, eh!

Fathead

About 8 weeks ago, my medical student flatmate decided to make himself a large pot of pasta. Then he forgot to wash it. About 7 weeks ago, he realised the krusty kompound on the inside of the pot wasnt going to come off by itself, so he filled the pot with hot water and some washing up liquid and left it to unstick. About 5 weeks ago, I noticed that the pot hadn't moved yet, so I lifted the lid, and the goddman toxic waste inside was so putrid and full of bacteria that It almost stepped out of the pot and shook my hand. I slammed the lid down back on top of the pot, but if I'd taken the time to ask It what the hell it was, It could probably have replied to me in perfect English that It reckoned It was going to turn nuclear any day now, and once It had corroded the pot in which It was being kept prisoner, It was going to destroy the world. Or at least my kitchen counter. The people at CERN don't need to fix their large hadron collider to figure out the origins of life...I'm pretty sure there's at least 2 and a half litres of primordial soup here in Galway full of the answers to the mysteries of the universe.

After this morning's victory for Obama and change and 'Yes We Can', I was inspidered to finally take action. Although I've been mentioning to my flatmate for weeks now to get rid of it, that obviously hasn't happened and I was beginning to feel like a nag.

So I put the pot in his fridge to cryogenically slow down the putrification process and he can deal with it some time in the future.

(Yes, he bought his OWN fridge for the rented apartment earlier in the year. Damn affluence.)

Anyway, how am I supposed to become a decent lawyer when I can't even get my own flatmate (once again, 9 months away from being a medical doctor) to get rid of a large pot of toxic waste that shouldn't even exist in the first place!...Here's hoping the next episode of Raising the Bar deals with these kinds of issues because I definitely wont find help in my BarBri books for this kind problem!