Comcast Center

Lindsey and I took the MBTA train from South Station to Mansfield, and on the ride we talked about different Buddhist traditions' meditation practices, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to pupil, the years that lamas spend alone in meditation and study, whether Buddhism could save the world, Heidegger vs. Buddhism. I knew I was on a commuter train talking to a friend about Buddhism on our way to Phish. Thank you God! The seats were wide and leathery, and the windows were yellowed and scratched. We couldn't see out, but the people behind us knew when we were in Mansfield. The acoustics of my sun hat made it impossible to talk while wearing it, so I left it in our hotel room. We walked to the venue. There was an amazing rusted bicentennial sign in the town green. There were long roads for cars only that we crossed with caution. We walked under a couple overpasses, the kind of bridge underneaths that are always black and drippy. There were modest suburban homes with decent lawns. The sidewalks were mostly good. We talked about karma (causality), depression, drugs, Wallace, Phish. Dancing bear tie-dyes we had once owned, how we had imagined the Grateful Dead in early grades. And where were all the other walkers? We expected sleepy Woodstock masses, but it was just us. At the end of the four miles, the travel and pre-show anxiety had floated away, and we were sun- and walk-perfected, ready for Nothing. Everything was easy. The workers were helpful. The venue, though no longer called Great Woods, was still surrounded by very tall, breezily treetopped trees, and the place was overgrown with summery plant life, and the trails inside were little rock garden trails bending around shrubs, and the wooden walls were weedy. It was perfectly dense with people. Phish came out and played. No one could guess what they would play next. The songs were linked in a perfect folding twisting non-flow of substitution, risk, and reversal. How wonderful to be lost again in Phish! Trey seemed to be at the center of a tunnel of sound, and the music was science fiction. We met Beth beneath the flagpoles (America, Massachusetts, Comcast) and the three of us walked home. A balloon floating in the road ahead of us led the way.

Fenway

My friend Lindsey emailed me a picture she took at the Nikon Theater, where Phish is playing tonight (right now, blazing that weird trail of the musical present with the cutting, killing edge that exists only in the immediate performance, the always-disappearing part that makes even a familiar song impossible to understand, especially when it's very loud. She's looking down an extremely steep slope of seats toward the stage, which is contained under a corrugated shell spanning the towers of a concrete castle, and the whole thing sits in the water like it is undergirding a drawbridge or processing sewage or producing nuclear power (what is it about Phish that makes their music so uniquely suited to brutalist municipal architecture?

All day I've been thinking about the concrete underside of Fenway Park, the dark and echoey ring of corridors and chambers beneath the seats where all the human business of the ballpark is conducted. Hearing Character Zero as vibrations in the walls of the men's room seemed to confirm the many dreams I've had lately about going to Phish shows in infinite concrete basements, hangars, and locker rooms. This music is about modifying space. Whatever the music might be reduced to on a recording, however much detail it may contain in itself, the point of the music at the moment it is being made is to overload the medium in which it is resonating, to find the harmonies of this accidental surplus, the strange congruences of vibration in stuff never made for music (bridge resonance and the longer waves of rooms