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A pretty cool statue in front of the admissions office at Carnegie-Mellon.



Sean outside the Cathedral of Learning, which is where we saw the Chekhov play.



A better shot of the Cathedral of Learning.



Look! They did Sweeney Todd last year. (Sean would really like to do Sweeney Todd.)



Gorgeous theater...better than most professional ones.


We took my son Sean to Pittsburgh last week to visit Carnegie-Mellon and just got back last night.

Sean is interested in the acting program at CMU, which looks to be incredible but also incredibly hard to get into. They audition 1000s and take 16 for acting and 12 for musical theater. It's a conservatory program so all acting all the time, but they do a really good job getting their graduates into actual acting jobs afterwards. Sean is thinking now that Carnegie-Mellon is his #1 choice, ahead of Northwestern, which scares me a little (Northwestern is more an academic institution with a good theater program, rather than a conservatory.) He will have to go to NYC for unified auditions in January or February...I think he might audition also for Ithaca College, maybe Emerson, possibly (on a lark) Julliard.

The trip was really successful in terms of giving Sean an idea about what CMU is all about and figuring out whether he wants to go there. Personally, it was a lot more difficult. I made all the arrangements and really made a mistake in choosing a place to stay. All the hotels were $200 a night, so I got us an Air BNB advertised as "Suburban Bliss" which turned out to be in a very desolate, all-black neighborhood, very close as the crow flies to CMU, but because of the hills and windy roads, hard to get there, and also, to walk, you would have had to go through some fairly dicey areas. (I lived in NYC for 8 years and there were several blocks at the beginning that reminded me of the South Bronx...one of my first freelancing gigs was for the South Bronx Community Development foundation, so I've been there.)

Anyway, my husband was FURIOUS with me for not knowing that this place was what it was. It didn't help that there was no TV and no internet. The inside was fairly nice, actually, two bedrooms, clean, carpeted, comfortable. But we shouldn't have been there and it was my fault.

So what we did was avoid it as much as possible. We went to the Andy Warhol Museum, the Strip (which is conceptually like the Fulton Fish Market/South Street Seaport, a historic food lading terminal now turned into shops and bars and such), ate at Pamela's and Primantis, caught a really interesting production of "Ivanov", a very seldom produced Chekhov play and toured both the campus and drama department at Carnegie Mellon.

We left a day early and drove to Wilkes-Barre, where we stayed at a nondescript chain hotel that had internet and TV (and, incidentally, the Giants game), and felt enormously better, though Bill is still not very friendly to me.

So anyway, that's what I was doing instead of posting soundcloud links. I'll get back to that tomorrow.

Hating Yeasayer, liking Blockhead, celebrating victory…

So I think I might have mentioned how much I hate this new Yeasayer album Odd Blood. Apparently, I’m out on my own on this. Charlie Wilmouth, who is one of my favorite writers at Dusted, was offput but not wholly negative, and the chatter on ILX is that PFM will give it Best New Music and a rating probably north of 8.5.


I repeat, I really hate this album and had lots of trouble getting through it the six to eight times it takes to review something, even something really awful.

Well, okay, if you’re going to be wrong, be wrong with conviction. Here’s my Blurt review:

Yeasayer, naysayer... this album blows.

Yeasayer, the Brooklyn ethno-trance-dance celebrants, caught a wave set in motion by Animal Collective in 2007, releasing All Hour Cymbals to unequivocal praise. MTV called them "One of Seven Bands at SXSW That Matter." Pitchfork gave them a 7.8. Entourage ran "Sunrise" over its closing credits. Beck offered an opening slot. And all this for an album released on tiny We Are Free label.

Odd Blood, the second album, looks to be the band's bid for a commercial killing, released on a bigger label (Secretly Canadian) with simpler, more accessible songs and far, far cleaner production. But unfortunately, clarity is not working in Yeasayer's favor. Getting a good listen to Odd Blood is the music world's version of waking up in bed with someone who is not as good looking as you thought, not good looking at all in fact, and possibly not even of the opposite sex. What were you thinking?

Want more? Feel free.

The infamous “ONE”


On the other hand, I rather liked Blockhead’s The Music Scene, which you can read about here.


Here’s “It’s Raining Clouds”


On a final, personal note, I gotta brag a little about my son, Sean, who has had a really awesome season in XC skiing. His team finished second in the state yesterday and he, as a freshman, placed 12th in the classic race (if he’d been 30 seconds faster he would have qualified for the Meet of Champions, which would have been cool, but he’ll get them next year). He’s also on the New Hampshire J-2 team, which is the top 20 skiers aged 14 and 15, who will be competing against other state’s teams (VT and ME are apparently the ones to beat) on the first weekend in March.

Here he is clutching the runner-up trophy from yesterday with the world’s biggest smile on his face. (Thanks to Dominic St. Pierre for the photo.)