Is it Porpoisehead or Portishead?
by Matt Worley

A few years ago, when there was a war about concert ticket prices, Ticketmaster fees and general bitching about the state of live shows, I made a pronouncement. I decided there weren't any shows I would pay more than $10 for unless it was Prince. And $30 was my limit for Prince. I said this thinking the Purple One wouldn't come anywhere close to where I lived.

Well, I paid $15 to see the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion about a year ago. I was making a little bit of cash at the time, and the last Blues Explosion show I saw (cost: $7) was so phenomenal, I didn't think I should skip the band when it came to town. I don't think I'll pay $15 if they come through again--their energy is much more substantial in a small bar than in a theater.

Prince is going to be in town on Tuesday. Crappy seats cost $40. The show is in the worst venue in town for large shows (Tingley Coliseum). I'm not going. I tried to score some review passes, but the arts editor at our paper has first dibs and she used them. I thought long and hard about this. Prince is my favorite musician who is still alive, and even when you put a couple of dead people on the list, he's still very high up there. But I've been to so many live shows since I was 13, I can't justify $40 to hear bad acoustics screw up a good show. And if Prince is so small on stage from my point of view that I can crush him with my thumb and forefinger, I just can't understand why I shouldn't just turn out all the lights in my room, light a candle, load my CD changer up with Prince CDs and crank the stereo up for 2 1/2 hours.

* * *

Halloween is on Friday, and I don't know what I'm going to be. I also don't know if there will be a place to go and be whatever I end up being for that night. I have to work the next morning at 5:30, so maybe I'll just be lamo working boy like I was last New Year's Eve. I guess it's better than a half-dead heroin addict from the late 80s, my costume for last Halloween. No, not too many people got it.

* * *

An AP poll quizzed Americans on their belief of Jesus' return. 66% of U.S. adults believe Jesus will return to Earth someday. Of the Christians who believe Jesus will return, 23% believe he'll be here before they die. I think the most interesting statistic was from this 23% group. Of those people, 97.5% believe getting their own lives right with God is important since Jesus is going to be back soon. Shouldn't this percentage be 100%? I mean, if you can't do that, what are you doing being a Christian who believes Jesus is returning?

* * *

The little black flying bugs are back in mass once again. I suspect the plants residing in our abode are responsible for the bugs continued resilience to our attempts to kill and dismember. If we kill all the plants, though, how will we breathe?

* * *

Thousands of woman attended the Million Women March in Philadelphia on Saturday. I was really hoping women would be able to stay out of this battle of mass congregation. We had the Million Man March for black men. We had the Promise Keepers for middle-class Christian men. I understand the men's point of view because men have this tendency to blurt out in public how big they perceive their dick to be. I was just hoping that women wouldn't be pulled into this kind of sick segregationist rhetoric. I don't like hearing about the size of women's dicks any more than I like hearing about the size of men's.

I'm just going to suggest one thing before this Million People thing gets way too out of hand. There are over 5 billion people on this planet. Let's see if we can't all be nice to each other for a while before we start breaking up into exclusionist discussion groups.

* * *

After loading and fixing my brother's computer up with Mac's OS 8 (it took about 3 hours or so), I told him he could now use any scanned in picture as his desktop graphic if he wanted to. "Is that the only new thing this does?" he asked. Maybe.

* * *

"It's not that you can't see the forest for the trees. You've never been out in the woods alone." from "My Philosophy" by Ben Folds Five

Matt Worley will return to his regular "one coherent thought" column schedule next week. He apologizes for his current schizophrenic-ness.

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