From: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org (precious-things-digest) To: precious-things-digest@smoe.org Subject: precious-things-digest V10 #77 Reply-To: precious-things@smoe.org Sender: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-precious-things-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "precious-things-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. precious-things-digest Friday, April 8 2005 Volume 10 : Number 077 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Ticket Upgrades [aklink8489@aol.com] Re: Ticket Upgrades [Amanda Bradley ] Richard does the Warner [Richard Handal ] Re: Richard does the Warner [OriginalSin24@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 09:43:57 -0400 From: aklink8489@aol.com Subject: Re: Ticket Upgrades Is this internet upgrade by special invitation only then? For the Street Team, or something? I'm confused... - -----Original Message----- From: Amanda Bradley To: Precious Things Mailing List Sent: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 19:49:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Ticket Upgrades So, I'm wondering, when will anyone know that their tickets have been upgraded? I've read two reviews that mentioned this on the Dent. The first one just said that she had been upgraded. The second review said that as she was waiting for Tori to come out, Smitty came up to her and told her that she had won the internet upgrade contest. He put her in first row center. My question is whether or not everyone who won has to wait until right before Tori comes on to be upgraded? What would be the point of that? Is Tori reading the emails personally? Is she the deciding force? Please, if there is anyone on this list that had the opportunity to be upgraded, let me know all the details. I'm curious because I'm really hoping that I will be picked (like no one else is, right?). Thanks. Peace Out, Amanda ~~~She's a girl out working her Trade/and she loses a little each day/to ghetto pimps and presidents/who try and arouse her turquoise serpents~ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 13:43:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Amanda Bradley Subject: Re: Ticket Upgrades Yes, it was an invitation from the Street Team. You didn't have to do anything special like post so many banners, etc. You simply emailed them (not sure who they are), and explained why you are Tori's biggest fan. Then you wait to be notified on whether you were upgraded to the first two rows. Supposedly that's how many rows were being reserved for this contest. My confusion was in how you found out. And now, I'm wondering who decides, and how many ticket holders get upgraded. So, any information on that would be helpful. aklink8489@aol.com wrote: Is this internet upgrade by special invitation only then? For the Street Team, or something? I'm confused... - -----Original Message----- From: Amanda Bradley To: Precious Things Mailing List Sent: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 19:49:38 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Ticket Upgrades .AOLPlainTextBody { margin: 0px; font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; font-size: 12px; color: #000; background-color: #fff; }.AOLPlainTextBody pre { font-size: 9pt;}.AOLInlineAttachment { margin: 10px;}.AOLAttachmentHeader { border-bottom: 2px solid #E9EAEB; background: #F9F9F9;}.AOLAttachmentHeader .Title { font: 11px Tahoma; font-weight: bold; color: #666666; background: #E9EAEB; padding: 3px 0px 1px 10px;}.AOLAttachmentHeader .FieldLabel { font: 11px Tahoma; font-weight: bold; color: #666666; padding: 1px 10px 1px 9px;}.AOLAttachmentHeader .FieldValue { font: 11px Tahoma; color: #333333;} So, I'm wondering, when will anyone know that their tickets have been upgraded? I've read two reviews that mentioned this on the Dent. The first one just said that she had been upgraded. The second review said that as she was waiting for Tori to come out, Smitty came up to her and told her that she had won the internet upgrade contest. He put her in first row center.My question is whether or not everyone who won has to wait until right before Tori comes on to be upgraded? What would be the point of that? Is Tori reading the emails personally? Is she the deciding force? Please, if there is anyone on this list that had the opportunity to be upgraded, let me know all the details. I'm curious because I'm really hoping that I will be picked (like no one else is, right?). Thanks.Peace Out, Amanda ~~She's a girl out working her Trade/and she loses a little each day/to ghetto pimps and presidents/who try and arouse her turquoise serpents~ Peace Out, Amanda ~~She's a girl out working her Trade/and she loses a little each day/to ghetto pimps and presidents/who try and arouse her turquoise serpents~ ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 11:41:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Richard Handal Subject: Richard does the Warner Hi, Gang: Oh, RIGHT; *now* I remember why I love going to Tori Amos concerts. It had been since just before Thanksgiving 2002 that I'd attended one. If last night's D.C. show is any indication, and I have every reason to suspect it is, this isn't merely a concert tour, this is a traveling music, keyboard, and piano clinic. What an astonishing experience. Thoroughly mesmerized. It took me a few minutes before I was finally able to leave behind me the enormous amount of distracting tension that seems almost inevitably associated with attending the shows, but once I got my groove on, I went on along off with her for the rest of the night. And what a glorious voyage it was. As I begin writing this exactly two hours hence, I'm still in the thick of lingering excitement and emotion. The epiphany came as the waning "Josephine" faded toward memory, being abruptly and chillingly usurped by a powerful left hand as "Yes, Anastasia" was revealed. A music teacher friend of mine left voicemail for me as she was driving home in which she mentioned the start of "Yes, Anastasia" as her signal moment of the concert, too. I will quote her: OH . . . MY . . . GOD. For those of you who believe it makes little difference what sort of piano is being played, I will assure you that those low end power chords on almost any other piano will not be taking your body and tossing it about as did this Boesendorfer when "Yes, Anastasia" began--and you will not be feeling those same chills even the next morning. The Moscow connection to the just ended "Josephine" immediately clicked, and that upped the ante with respect to feeling connected with self, universe, and everything through this gloriously foreboding music. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream; you will understand that these songs are connected one with the other, and that you are connected with *them*. For those prepared to receive it, the sense of being tuned in to this music and of being in harmony with the world tags along with one's attendance at these concerts. Music is capable of doing nothing that's more worthwhile than this. Let us rejoice for this music and pay it all of its due respect, as we are indeed blessed by it. I've witnessed Tori perform "Boys In The Trees" before, but not with this easy sense of determined longing. She painted the picture when she introduced it of having played it over and over again when she lived fifteen miles away in Rockville, and surely she'd used it as a sonic fetish to lure boys, as might have been possible, to drop down from trees into her life. The sweet tenderness of this teenage yearning was supplanted when she next began Madonna's hit, "Like a Prayer." What a riot: it was at once a performance that was powerful and *highly* valid musically, and it also served as a supplementary "fuck you" to her recent interview mentions of the current generation of neo-vaudevillian pop stars who dance always, and sing only when they can manage it. No small part of the clinic was in the song "The Beekeeper," which was rendered on the same type of chord organ my aging aunt has to this day in her living room. I assure you that few people ever managed to coax such sets of tones out of a device like this as does Tori. In comparison to anything I ever heard my aunt play, this performance didn't bear any. And musicians take note: none of the higher glory of what Tori's doing can be achieved with a drum machine or sampled loops running inexorably down their road to nowhere. No, this is music that derives its deep emotion and ridiculous amount of expression from impeccably brilliant but always natural phrasing, dynamics, and rubato. Surely, this is the most important lesson to be learned from these concerts by musicians. In 2001 we came to understand that Tori had determined to play most of her material more slowly, and I wondered then, as I still do, whether much or most of the reasoning behind this decision was due to the physical toll that the pyrotechnics, of the kind we came to accept as normal on the 1996 Dew Drop Inn Tour, had come to take on her body. We'll likely never know the answer to this, but as I said when I returned my music teacher friend's call late last night, the musical justification for this exists in spades, and it matters little to me if she may have begun performing slower versions of her songs, in part, because it's less taxing on her body. I think back to an interview I read a couple years ago which had Jonsi of Sigur Ros saying something to the effect of "anything that's good is even better when slowed down." There's much to be said in support of this idea, and the opportunity to be taken on a longer, deeper ride during a song serves, to me, to be as much evidence as I'd ever care to have that even if Tori were playing with bionic arms, it would have been a well-reasoned decision to slow down the songs as she's done. It's the same concept that explains why 78rpm records can have more presence than 33 1/3rpm LPs: there's more real estate in which to encode information over each equal period of time. If you have X number of notes, bars, chords, accents, and everything else that makes up a work of music, and you decide to allow yourself more time to shape the presentation of all of these things and to allow them to unfold rather than breezing through them, of *course* there's more opportunity for the expression of emotion. Now, you'll still need to know what to *do* with this enriched opportunity for higher levels of expression if you determine you want to avail yourself of it. Tori does. It's wonderful. She owned every note of this concert; if she played it, there was damn good reason for its having been played--and just as it had been. "Goodbye Pisces," the first encore song, not only led me by the hand down her primrose path, but the easy forcefulness of its shapes took me up hill and down dale in compelling fashion. I looked around and marveled with confusion as to how so many people who had paid a lot of money to attend this concert kept themselves so fully in rein that they sat stonily as if they were watching television in their homes. In case it hadn't occurred to you long ago, television is the natural enemy of music, and if you have acclimated yourself to sitting motionless inside and out while the evil rays wash over you, I'm not sure that you're likely to be reaping many of the benefits of music as are available--in particular this music--and you might as well save yourself some money and stay home. This is music that can move an attentive and empathic listener in more than a few ways, and I suggest if you're to attend any of these concerts, that you fully give yourself unto its power. By the time "Putting the Damage On" brought us in for a cushioned landing, those of us who had surrendered to this force were ready to dust ourselves off and look around so as to discover this new place in which we found ourselves. I suspect most of us felt we were now somewhere that had been tremendously improved. I know *I* did. For the set list and other details: http://thedent.com/more.php?id=2431_0_1_0_M Be seeing you, Richard Handal, H.G. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 17:01:05 EDT From: OriginalSin24@aol.com Subject: Re: Richard does the Warner In a message dated 4/7/05 3:28:12 PM, handal@min.net writes: > and it also served as a supplementary "fuck you" to her recent > interview mentions of the current generation of neo-vaudevillian pop stars > who dance always, and sing only when they can manage it. > I know this comment was intended for all pop and I completely agree. But since I love M equally as much as T...I must say her latest show was completely LIVE except for 2 songs, due to them being techno and voice altered to begin with. :) I think T did LAP much better than Madonna though...just me. ------------------------------ End of precious-things-digest V10 #77 *************************************