|
|
|
a little late to Superchunk
Sunday, September 14 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning after the usual coffee, toast, and communal play of Spelling Bee, I got out a needle and some thread and began fixing the great room's dog bed. Neville has a pattern of pawing at it repeatedly, and he'd dug through the fabric shell and into its foam-rubber core, causing pieces to dislodge and skatter around. To fix this, I sewed a small blanket (the kind you are loaned during transAtlantic flights) onto its top surface, running the sutures back and forth into the piping that lies parallel to the top surface and runs all the way around it.
Today Gretchen was beginning a week as a manager for NYAAF (the New York Abortion Access Fund), so she needed to monitor her phone. But she also wanted to spend time at the dock (where her phone does not work). The solution, as it was in the past, was for her to take a walkie talkie to the dock and have me monitor the phone. But the walkie talking didn't really work from the cabin's basement, where I was still running wire and testing slave firmware. But at least I could monitor Gretchen's phone there and walk to a place the walkie talkie does work if I needed to send her a message.
Once I'd gotten to where I wanted to be with things in the basement, I made myself a boozy drink and went down to the dock with the idea of taking the kayak out. Of course when I went down to the dock, Gretchen had to return to the cabin so she could monitor her phone for NYAAF issues. As she was leaving the dock, someone started shooting a very big gun. It sounded like the gunfire was coming from Ibrahim's parcel, and the loud booms echoed back and forth across the lake. Fortunately, this did not go on for very long. I paddled into the outflow bay and checked out what looks to be a newish beaver lodge on its south shore. Meanwhile, a couple people had launched a canoe from the public dock and looked to be fishing.
I hadn't seen the dogs since Gretchen left for the dock a second time (before I'd ever gone down), and when I got back to the cabin, they still were missing. Eventually this caused Gretchen to retrace her last walk down to the dock (via the older dock trail) and then to even take the Bolt for a drive up and down Woodworth Lake Road. But she couldn't find them.
So then I walked down to the lake's outflow beaver dams via the trail down through the cliffs and then along the lakeshore to the dock and back to the cabin via the Mossy Rock Trail. Gretchen likes to call for the dogs when she is looking for them, but since they don't respond to this at all, what I do is periodically stop and listen for dog noises (tinkling dog tags, snorts, or rustling leaves). Unfortunately, my technique worked no better than Gretchen's.
After another hour or so, I set out again, this time bringing a walkie talkie to stay in communication with Gretchen. I walked through Ibrahim's parcel to the public dock, communicated with Gretchen to tell her where I was, and then walked back to our cabin via the road and driveway.
By this point, the sun was beginning to set and Gretchen was worried that the dogs wouldn't return at all tonight and we'd have to stay another day at the cabin. Since we both had to work tomorrow, she might have to leave me in the Adirondacks, forcing me to ask to work remotely on a Monday. She'd pretty much resigned herself to spending the night and had even started cooking pilaf when Charlotte gingerly stepped through the pet door. Gretchen had so completely given up on her that this seemed to astound her. As for Neville, he was only a hundred feet behind her. Both seemed to be coming from the northwest, where a line of cliffs makes it difficult to go very far.
We waited for the pilaf to get done cooking, at a little, and then packed up the cabin and headed for Hurley via the Middleburgh route (Gretchen was driving).
Gretchen wanted to order oat milk lattes from the Schohaire Dunkin Donuts so we could pick them up on the way. But as we tried to pull the trigger on the transaction at the south end of the Charleston highlands, it would not go through. It turned out that that Dunkin Donuts had already closed. As we were pulled over on the side of the road, Gretchen got a notification on her phone reminding her that Superchunk was playing tonight in Bearsville. She'd bought us tickets months ago and had forgotten that the show was tonight.
We drove directly to Bearsville, using a series of small roads to follow something of a rough diagonal from Route 32 south to Route 212 west.
I'd seen Superchunk two other times, the first being back in the early 1990s at the Oberlin "disco." On that occasion, I remember drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels at the show (I'm not sure how I got that, since I wouldn't've bought it) and I recall one of the members of Superchunk getting that bottle and me never seeing it again. So, perhaps in celebration of that, I ordered an overpriced Jack on the rocks from the Bearsville Theatre bar. Gretchen appeared while I was doing that and decided to get some sort of beer flavored with lime and salt that she didn't end up liking. But it was a perfect thing to sip when not sipping whiskey, so I ended up drinking it all.
Since Superchunk is a 36 year old band, I expected the crowd to be the old farts I'd seen at the Bob Mould show, but no, this was a younger crowd, and there were even a smattering of people there who looked to be in their 20s. Usually shows we attend are packed, but not this one; I would say that it was only two-thirds of a sellout (or whatever it was when Guided by Voices played). Meanwhile, Gretchen had already run into a couple people she knows, including Carl Newman, the better of the two male vocalists in the New Pornographers. As we were headed in to the see the band, she stopped to chat with him. But when she did this, she immediately stopped acting like I existed, never turning around once to include me in whatever she was saying. So after a couple minutes of this unpleasantness, I slipped away and walked into the show. When she caught up with me, Gretchen expressed disappointment that I hadn't stuck around. But it was too complicated in that loud audio environment to explain why I'd had to go. We'd completely missed the opening band due to the delays caused by our dogs, but we didn't miss any Superchunk.
Superchunk is an unusual band in that they have no slow or quiet songs. Above buzzsaw guitars, the singer's high-end voice is kind of hard to parse. The music is so full of energy that he cannot keep from bounding around the stage or jumping up and down. I hadn't heard Superchunk's new material in decades, but it was all in the same style as the 90s-era material I'd loved.
Superchunk didn't seem to have the kind of support one is used to seeing a band take advantage of. When the singer/guitarist needed a different tuning for his guitar, nobody from backstage handed him a different guitar. Instead, he just tuned it right there to a different tuning. I then expected this to clash with the other guitar and bass, but no, they all sounded great together. I was noticing that the wall-of-sound nature of the electrified instruments featured many instances of places where interesting melodies developed in the shimmering conflict of the notes, and some of these sounded like they might've been discovered accidentally.
I ended the show with Gretchen at our front-row seats in the upstairs balcony. By then the music was compelling Gretchen to dance, so I joined her. It's almost impossible to keep completely still while listening to it.
Superchunk tonight at the Bearsville Theatre. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250914 feedback
previous | next |
