Carnival of Madness (Concert Season Review 2012 Edition Part 3)

My rock concert schedule is once again in lockstep with GOP headlines.  This time, I’m faced with the choice of reviewing the Carnival of Madness or discussing the GOP convention.  My selection should not surprise you.

I missed the entire opening performance, New Medicine, and most of the second performance, Cavo.  I’d never seen New Medicine and I’ve seen Cavo previously, but that was before I started doing concert reviews in the past couple years.  Having missed all/most of these performances, I won’t review them.  Rock shows that start at 5 on weekdays are hard for people who have first-shift jobs to be on time for.

In any event, Halestorm was up soon after Cavo finished.  The arena was pretty much as full as it was going to get for the evening by the time Halestorm started, which I wouldn’t realize until later for obvious reasons (my crystal ball is broken).  As you may know, I was only exposed to Halestorm a few weeks ago when they opened for Avenged Sevenfold, which I reviewed here.  The strong talent and energetic stage presence I highlighted then were all on display here again.  They were on for about 45 minutes this time around, as well.  The set list was slightly different, but included Love Bites (So Do I), Mz. Hyde, I Miss the Misery, Freak Like Me, Rock Show, You Call Me a Bitch (Like It’s a Bad Thing), and Here’s to Us from their second album, along with It’s Not You and I Get Off from their first album.  The excellent Familiar Taste of Poison performance was not repeated this time around, but we were instead treated to Break In as a piano duet between Lzzy Hale and Evanescence’s Amy Lee.  Yes, you read that right.  Two of the best female rock vocalists out there today did a duet.  This was an unbelievable performance and somewhat ironic for me because I did connect the two to a small degree in my last review (which was before I knew Halestorm would be at this show).  Like I tweeted after the performance, Halestorm killed it. 

Chevelle followed Halestorm and was on for about an hour or so.  This was not my first time seeing Chevelle, either.  I saw them a couple years ago, again before I started doing reviews.  Both times, they put on a solid musical performance, but the stage presence wasn’t there for me.  Audience interaction was rare and awkward when it did happen.  We heard mostly newer songs from Chevelle, along with their classics that I prefer, such as Send the Pain Below and Comfortable Liar.  They also did a sort of acoustic, sing-along version of The Red.  It deserves credit for creativity and experimentation, but I don’t really think it worked.  For whatever reason, the crowd didn’t seem too into it and I wasn’t really feeling it.  Maybe it works most other nights and this was just an off night for whatever reason, but I wouldn’t know since I’ve only seen them twice and they only did this once.  Hey, it’s an opinion blog.  I’m just calling it like I see it (or hear it, in this case).

With that, Evanescence came on.  They played for about an hour and a half or so.  This was my first time seeing them despite nearly a decade as a fan.  Evanescence put out a new album nearly a year ago, so this show spent a lot of time on that album.  I’d guess they played over half of that new album (Made of Stone, The Other Side, among others), along with a few songs from The Open Door (like Call Me When You’re Sober, and Weight of the World).  They also played songs from Fallen (some of which overlap with Origin, but they did not play anything that was from only Origin and they did play songs just from Fallen, so let’s simplify and say they all came from Fallen).  The Fallen songs included Imaginary, Bring Me To Life, and Whisper. 

They opened the show with What You Want, the first track from their new album, and they followed that right up with Going Under, the first track from Fallen.  Starting off that way was genius because it engaged both the ‘new’ and ‘old’ fans right off the bat (I am decisively in the old camp, yet I’m still under 30).  Their lighter performances were generally more riveting for me, including Lost in Paradise and My Heart is Broken from the new album.  Their best performance was, by far, closing the show with a piano and My Immortal.  This was a haunting and powerful performance between the piano, the lyrics, and Amy Lee’s voice.  It’s not a jab at the rest of the show so much as heavy praise for this last song.  Talk about ending strong.  Overall, Evanescence’s performance was solid and memorable.  Personally, I would have preferred more from Fallen (Hello, My Last Breath, Tourniquet, maybe?) and even something from Origin (Anywhere, perhaps?), but that’s just me.

So, here’s the bottom line.  Halestorm stole the show.  Both the Break In duet and My Immortal to close the show were absolutely spectacular and unforgettable performances.  This show was well worth the money, even though I missed the first two bands.

Links: http://timsopinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/avenged-sevenfold-and-halestorm-concert.html

Boston and Mercury (Concert Season Review 2012 Edition Part 2)

I didn’t end up getting to the Rockstar Mayhem Festival earlier this month.  I did, however, end up going to see Boston and Mercury while visiting family out of town.  There was another blog-worthy event that weekend, as the GOP now has their vice presidential nominee in Paul Ryan.  Come on, you didn’t really think I was going to write about that before doing a concert review, did you? :-p

Mercury opened the show.  They’re a local band in the Pittsburgh area.  As I’ve said before, unknown opening bands are very hit or miss and the opener’s job is to get the crowd going for the headliner(s) while making a name for themselves.  Mercury was a hit and did the job quite well.  They were really good live, so we picked up their CDs after the show (hard to resist at $5 each).  I hadn’t listened to any of their music before the show, so I was able to listen to the CDs and recognize some of the songs they played live like The Undertow, River, and Automatic Savior.  Mercury did a great job getting the crowd ready for Boston, too.  It was good and authentic crowd banter with the local crowd, too.  My nephew caught a drumstick and the band was nice enough to sign it, so that was cool, too.  If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, I highly recommend checking them out.  Their music had the feeling of spanning a couple decades based on the live performance, which was also interesting. 

Then, there was Boston.  This wasn’t my first time seeing Boston, as I’d seen them once before (I think this was my brother’s 10^th time seeing them, and that is no exaggeration; he saw them three times in one year).  They put on an excellent show.  I liked the set list.  They played a roughly equal amount from their first four albums, including 6/8 tracks off their classic first album (leaving off Hitching a Ride and Let Me Take You Home Tonight).  Used to Bad News from their second album was a pleasant surprise to me.  Interestingly enough, they didn’t play anything from Corporate America, their fifth and final album.  On the whole, I was pleased with the set list. 

One of the coolest things about the Boston performance was the giant gong they had behind the drummer.  It wasn’t just a prop, as it was used in a couple songs.  This was a nice touch.  Add in all the lights and you have a pretty cool stage.

Here’s the bottom line.  If you’re a fan of classic rock, Boston’s still got it and Mercury put on a great show, too. 

Book Review – "Intellectuals and Society" by Thomas Sowell

I finally read Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society.  This is the second Sowell book I’ve read and reviewed, along with reading his syndicated columns.  I’m reviewing the original version here, not the recently expanded version.

The central themes of the book are two-fold.  First is how the intellectuals and intelligentsia have shifted their tactics.  Instead of trying to directly influence the leaders directly, which has historically been the way to go until the rise of mass media, they aim to influence the people themselves, who put pressure on the leaders because of the election process.  Sowell also demonstrates repeatedly that, not only do intellectuals and the intelligentsia often get it wrong, but the costs of them doing so enormous and much larger than one might think.

Sowell starts in Chapter 1 by defining what he means by ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘intelligentsia’.  Intellectuals as a profession, which is his focus here, deal in the generation and cultivation of ideas (the ideas need not be original) while the intelligentsia helps to spread and refine them.  In other words, intellectuals are a subset of the intelligentsia.  Intellectuals can be found in think tanks, academia, education, and the media, among other places.  Their work starts and ends with ideas, while validation comes from peers.  This is in direct contrast to people like engineers, doctors, and scientists whose work is intellectually demanding, but produces tangible products/services that are validated by real-world results   The irony that Sowell himself is an intellectual writing about intellectuals and the intelligentsia is not lost on me.

Chapter 2 is built around one key point, namely the importance of grasping the limitations of an individual’s knowledge base.  It explores notions versus knowledge and the value and perception of knowledge, as well as incentive structures, using experts to help make a decision versus helping to justify a decision already made, reasons as often a poor substitute for knowledge, and isolated incidents versus the bigger picture.  We also face the question of whether individuals or central planners are better suited to make decisions.

In Chapter 3, Sowell explores income, economic systems, businesses, and the economic cycle.  Some key themes that emerge in this chapter highlight the importance of looking at people as individuals, not as merely statistics or aggregates or groups and the intelligentsia’s tendency to transform an opposing argument rather than address it with logic and/or evidence.  He also spends some time discussing the Great Depression and how government intervention in the economy via central planning was a failure.

I suspect Sowell’s focus in the next chapter is what he spent a whole other book on, namely A Conflict of Visions.  Here, he details two core ways of looking at the world.  The vision of the anointed, as he calls it, is that the world is full of problems that intellectual elites alone are qualified to solve.  The tragic vision, on the other hand, sees civilization as something that needs strong and constant effort to preserve based on experience rather than theory.  Also in this chapter is discussion of more tactics intellectuals use, namely arguments without arguments, simplification of an answer by expansion of a question, and dismissal of an opponent’s worth.  He also rejects the left-right dichotomy in US politics and discusses change versus the current state, rhetoric and preferences, age, and notions versus principles.  The conclusion of this chapter, with its focus on real human beings in the real world versus abstract people in an abstract world, is also some excellent commentary.

Now, Sowell really gets into the intelligentsia’s tactics.  He talks about how they filter reality via selective sampling, suppression of information, making up characters, and shifting words (swamps become wetlands, for instance).  Objectivity versus impartiality pops up again.  He also mentions subjective versus absolute truth and multiculturalism.

Sowell then takes us into legal matters, focusing on property rights, judicial activism versus restraint, and gun control.  The latter is particularly important, as the issues of whether weapons or people kill people and whether being armed encourages or discourages violence will come up in the next two chapters. 

Next up are two chapters on war.  The first of these focuses on the two Great Wars, how the intelligentsia got it wrong both times, and how their error the first time directly contributed to their error the second time.  This is an extremely insightful chapter.  Anybody who wants to learn about what was really going in these decades should read it because there’s truth here that has been largely whitewashed out of history.

The second war chapter looks at the Cold War, Vietnam War, and the two Iraq wars.  This chapter disappointed me in two ways.  First, I would have liked to have seen some discussion about the Korean War.  I think the Korean War needed to be presented here, even if only because it provided some additional rhetorical fuel for the intelligentsia to use during the Vietnam War.  Second, Sowell pretty much glossed over the reasons behind the US entering the second Iraq war and instead focused almost entirely on the surge and whether it worked.  Don’t get me wrong, the section on the surge was very well done and I agree with his argument that the surge clearly worked despite the intelligentsia’s portrayals to the contrary.  I just feel like he missed an opportunity here because the intelligentsia was a very significant driver in getting the US back into Iraq in the first place.

And we come to the conclusion, where Sowell ties everything up quite nicely and drives home the point that intellectuals and the intelligentsia have done great harm to the modern world.

Here’s the bottom line.  I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in 20^th and 21^st century US and European history, members of the intelligentsia and intellectuals, those who fall outside those spheres, and anybody interested in concrete examples of and effective counters to the logical trickery so often employed by intellectuals and the intelligentsia.