MAGIC         PORK

My dear readers, after having devoured my numerous insightful Magic Pork postings, I’m sure there’s one question that’s been nagging you. But so far none of you have had the courage to ask me, so allow me to posit the question for you:

“Kevin, are you ever wrong about anything?”

Well allow me to put your minds at ease. Although my powers of deductive reasoning may far surpass those of other mortals, I do on occasion come to an incorrect conclusion. Case in point: the Pixies.

I had the great pleasure of seeing the Pixies in concert yesterday at the D.A.R. Constitution Hall here in DC. They were great seats - orchestra level, 20 rows back from the stage. I’ve wanted to see the Pixies in concert for a long time. I’m not a big concert-goer and there are plenty of bands that I like that I really don’t care about seeing in concert. But the Pixies are one of my favorite bands and I was psyched about seeing them. They didn’t disappoint - the concert was awesome! When Black Francis (a.k.a. Frank Black) was screaming and growling on “Tame“, I thought “wow, this guy sounds the same as he did 20 years ago”.

So what’s this have to do with me being wrong? Well for that, we have to go back to 1995, at my first co-op. (That’s what we call it at R.I.T. - a paid internship that’s a requirement for graduation. You take four quarters of co-op. A “quarter” is what R.I.T. has instead of a semester… oh never mind it’s not important!!) I was working the summer of 1995 at a company called Macbeth. They made these instruments called goniospectrophotometers, which I loved to put on my resume for years after that just because it sounded important. The instruments would capture color from four different angles and they had software that worked in conjunction with the instruments to analyze the color, make sure it was within certain bounds and stuff like that. For example, you might use it to make sure the cars that come off of the assembly line are all coming out a perfect “lakeshore slate”. Don’t ask too many questions because did I mention this was back in 1995? I don’t remember much more than that. There were graphs and stuff. It was kind of a funny job for me to have considering I’m colorblind.

There was a girl in her early 20’s that worked at the Munsell color lab there named Anne Marie. We didn’t work together on anything, but somehow we became work-friends. You know, a person you’re friends with at work, but you never do anything with outside of work. We’d usually eat lunch together in the break room. I remember her last name too because I’ve never met anyone with a name like that, but I’ll spare her from having Magic Pork come up on Internet searches of her name and will omit it.

Well one day she let me borrow a Pixies CD. It was Doolittle. I listened to it that night and thought “eh, it’s okay”. I told her as much the next day when I gave it back to her and she was shocked. She was blown away by the Pixies the first time she heard them and she thought I would love them too based on my musical tastes. But just didn’t do it for me.

Fast-forward to a few years later. I don’t remember when, but Fight Club came out in 1999 and I remember being excited that they were playing “Where is My Mind?” at the end so it was definitely before that. Maybe ‘98? I was in a used CD store and saw Doolittle. I don’t know what possessed me to purchase it, but for some reason I decided to give it another shot, even though I wasn’t any more familiar with their music than the last time I had listened to it. I bought it and this time I LOVED it. I then went and bought their other CDs and I became a fan. I couldn’t even comprehend how I could have not loved it the first time.

That’s it. That’s my long-winded story about how I was wrong at one point back in 1995.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 11:01 pm and is filed under general, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.