Visions of Joanna

Last Saturday I had the rare fortune of seeing Joanna Newsom perform with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, with several friends including my sister Amy and my wonderful girlfriend Bethany. While the actual experience is not exactly fresh in my mind, it has certainly left me ecstatic, excited, and bewildered this past week. Splendid is a useless word to describe what it was. I dare say transcendental, but that might just make me sound like a douschebag....but it was in some strange way. I can't explain it, but I assure you it was like no other concert event in my musically ridden short life, that I've only realized is musically retarded and musically shallow....I think... I mean definitely, but I mean what does that mean? I don't know what I mean. But I mean, I've never been enthralled by a performer to the point that I've really started asking myself huge deep whatever life questions right smack in the middle of a beautiful and elegant songstress banging away at a harp; I've never before actually felt outside myself because of a performance; I've never felt so engaged and a part of something greater as much as I had watching this performance. I don't know if it was the greatest musical thing that ever occured to me; I mean who even knows what that was, but I assure you that I and everyone packed into that symphony auditorium were stiff with the near same awe-stricken good riddance... I'm not the deepest, or the most well read human being, but I know an experience is real, when every obnoxious twitch, every nervous habit, every comforting repititious movement in my body, every present and momentary passing thought in my head is held back on behalf of something greater, more beautiful, more worthy of my attention..... And it's not just me, it's the entire scene, the setting, the people, the performers, the ushers, the color of the walls, the everything that was the experience. All of it bowed before the artistic creation in progress. (This may seem a ridiculous statement, but when your used to music as much as I am, as being a musty bar filled with smoke, drunk jackasses, and a loud as fuck P.A. system, used to drown out highway traffic and said jackasses, it's a totally welcome change... but I still love it that way too.) Because of it all, I wasn't just pleased and soothed with passion, but I was terrified. Having an entire symphony of skilled performers banging away to "Monkey & Bear" was wonderful, tearful at first but my God I never realized how frightful that song could be. While I've never totally explicated the lyrics of the song, all I know is that I had a sudden sense of urgency...like watching the killer in a movie, chase its victim for an unending set of minutes, unbearable but enthralling... rooting for good for the better, for the sweeter. Drowning, I thought about drowning and how that must feel....I don't know why; death and how it's one day going to happen to me, and I don't know what death means either. I thought it was shitty, but I thought how sweet of a moment it was to die then, and then I thought about how weird that was, but then I was once again stricken with the weird sweetness and beauty of all of it. That's the best way I can sum it up. I know I didn't really sum it up at all, but at the same time I don't even know if I thought up all of it... it was a feeling inaccessible by my vocabulary or poetic prowess.