Ruhee Dewji

Retro #11: March

Hello! It’s been a hot minute … monthly feels like a nice cadence but sometimes it feels like absolutely forever between posts. Maybe it’s just because it’s finally spring-ish and things are happening again but March felt busy!

I saw a number of really good shows this month, including one of the best top-to-bottom bills I’ve seen in some time: Mod Lang, Shadow Show, and Daniel Romano’s Outfit. We could have left after the opening bands and still had a fantastic evening. Rock and roll isn’t dead, folks.

Mod Lang at the Great Hall

Shadow Show at the Great Hall

Daniel Romano's Outfit at the Great Hall

Other great shows included Fucked Up (playing the culmination of the Zodiac series!) with Concrete Vehicles (fka Computer); my former university professor Matt Brubeck with vocalist Caylie Staples in a fully improvised set (examples here); and The Bad Plus with Craig Taborn and Chris Potter playing a full set of Keith Jarrett’s work (!). Great month for music.

I also attended this fun event where Sloan’s music videos played on the big screen at the Paradise Theatre and then Chris Murphy and Jay Ferguson were interviewed for the Revolutions Per Movie podcast.

Chris Murphy and Jay Ferguson of Sloan being interviewed on stage by Chris Slusarenko

I have a much longer post about Sloan that needs writing—for those of you who are unaware, I met many of my close friends on the thankfully-no-longer-online Sloan Message Board, I have been pulled on stage to sing with them, a great deal of my life revolved around this band for a long time!—but it was really fun to see their music videos on the big screen with theatre sound. I have watched some of them hundreds of times. I was obsessed with their shot-for-shot Easy Rider recreation for “The Good in Everyone” (with a guitar standing in for the drugs). The “Money City Maniacs” video continues to be an incredible influence on me—I think of it every time I see a Hiwatt in the wild.

I didn’t really vibe with the interview portion. I thought the interviewer did a lot of talking and not a lot of guiding them to questions (there were a lot of moments like “Are you asking about –” or “Did you mean –”), but still enjoyed what came out of it in the end, like a lot of inside-baseball talk about getting videos made, the process from idea to release, and some delightfully silly oddities.

I’m also really proud of my efforts at consistency this month.

Notebook with quite a few days crossed off in March for ear training and mobility

That’s a pretty solid series. Everything’s about where I’d hoped it would be. The ear training progress is incredibly slow but I am improving.

Mobility is something I’m trying to care about more because wow, when you sit for a job, it just wrecks everything else. Aging is certainly part of the picture, but it’s remarkable how much just sitting all the time can throw off your body—I think we ascribe many things to the passage of time that are just, as Casey Johnston writes, “movement debt”:

I believe a lot of people would jump to age as the problem here, but permit me some space to cope. I’ve been wanting to put this idea into words for a while, but I’ve wondered lately how much of “feeling old” in the body is due to just having a debt of practice, versus some actual ceiling of ability. Maybe I’m delusional, but at the ripe old age of 38, I don’t think I should be stepping gingerly down some terraced bench seats just yet. I just sit so much, and have been staying in my strength-training lanes (plus a little cardio) for a long time. Absolutely do not quote me, but I’ve never felt more on the verge of doing a Crossfit some kind of cross-training class, a bootcamp, anything that would move me in unfamiliar ways. I don’t need to walk more; I need to, like, play dodgeball.

The real advantage of “youth” is that young people are maybe only a few years out from the last time they were running around in a playground, or jumping off cliffs, or whatever; there hasn’t been time to accumulate that movement debt. If they could somehow be 20 years old, and yet also 20 years out of physical practice, they’d be nearly as stiff as me, a 38-year old. There is just no art to being young or new, versus maintaining something well over a long period of time. I think. I hope. I will have to find out.

In related news … I turned 37 this month! I have so many half-baked thoughts about aging while female, not being a youth in the tech industry, the way everyone in my life acts like their lives are completely unchangeable in any way once their age begins with 3 … but I haven’t fleshed them out because I’m busy going to shows and the gym. :)

Assorted good things