30 WAYS OF LOOKING AT WILL OLDHAM
In which we consider His Concert, His Stage, His First Song, His Audience, His Name, His Dimensions, His Jeans, His Belt, His Feet, His Mustache, His Mouth, His Voice, His Words, His Fifth Song, His Accompanists, His Thoughts, His Forehead, His Hat, His Eyes, His Hands, His Shirt, His Guitar, His Right Hand, His Left Hand, His Accompanists (Again), His Tenth Song, His Disposition, His Last Song, His Moon, and His Final Lines.
Man, that’s a fuck-load of words.
All hail Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy!
HIS CONCERT
…tonight is in South Brooklyn, over which the Sturgeon Moon hangs low and orange and near level with the land, its light smudged thin and orange in clouds and windowpanes, drifting out dim over the streets and rowhomes and the hullish building where he now takes the stage.
HIS STAGE
...is in a place called Pioneer Works which in the century preceding this one and in the century preceding that one was an ironworks for the manufacture of boilers and railroads and steamrollers. From its gray concrete floors and redbrick walls and thick woodbeams up there in the rafters its former function is not hard to imagine. Until Oldham starts to play, and then it seems it was …
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
What the hell is it?
The new Phish, crossed with prog rock.
It comes from Australia, where men wear dresses, do yoga, and play the blues.
It’s Friday morning in Buena Vista, Colorado, and my tent is not cooperating. All around me is the tinny sound of other campers expertly pounding stakes into the earth with fun-sized mallets. I am using my left Birkenstock, and its forgiving cork-and-rubber sole is not faring well against the Rocky Mountain soil. It takes me over an hour to erect what resembles an overturned laundry hamper, by which point Meadow Creek’s Car Camping Area West, my home for the next three days, has been transformed from a grassy parking lot into a splendid tent city with row upon row of brightly colored canopies, camper vans, domed tents, and teepees. Their owners, seasoned campers all, have broken out their guitars and hung the requisite psychedelic tapestries and fired up propane grills. I have come here with my busted tent to join them for the first-ever Field of Vision music festival.
Here in Buena Vista, 9,000 …
A Triangle of Terror
The great taming of the camelids had consequences that continue to resonate from far Patagonia to a modest alpaca farm just north of San Francisco
A gentle lady rancher is horrified by the facts of life
Only humans befriend and betray their prey at scale
Among the planet’s major predator species, only humans nurture their own prey. While other predators coldly stalk their victims before they ravage them, we humans — we modern humans — prefer to spend time with them and win their trust before we slay them and masticate their flesh. This practice has many virtues and efficiencies. It saves us the tiring trouble of the chase and allows us to slaughter our unsuspecting quarry at our convenience, at any pace and in any quantity. But perhaps its greatest benefit to humans — our befriending and then betraying, at scale, the fauna we find most digestible — is the moral benefit. It lets us regard ourselves as civilized, as something higher and more refined than fanged, rapacious monsters craving blood.
The cougar, or puma, or mountain lion — the culprit in a spectacular, violent incident which we will examine further down — takes a rather more …
