At the late-night double feature picture show

The Dresden Dolls.

Phenomenal.

Although I would have been very surprised had they been anything else, especially since they started off their set with "Science Fiction Double Feature" (with audience callbacks: I defy anybody to sing with a straight face while various portions of their audience are shouting "Fuck the back row!" "Fuck the front row!" "Why is the middle row always getting fucked over?!") that slid straight into "Girl Anachronism," my initial attractor to the Dresden Dolls and still one of my true favorites. I had heard "Backstabber" at the LHS concert last April, but this time it really made an impression on me: quite selfishly, I want their new album to come out so I can listen to this song until it gets unstuck from my head! The classic "Coin-Operated Boy," with live-performance rather than studio lyrics and about 95% of the audience singing along; the NPR paian "Christopher Lydon" by request and apparently for the first time in a couple of years; "The Jeep Song" also with enthusiastic audience participation, and slightly altered lyrics. Then the phantasmagoric "Mrs. O," "Missed Me" in all its skipping-rhymish, deeply disturbing glory; and "Boston," whose lyrics I had read online and which I had never before heard in concert: I loved it. This, I want recorded. ("Come back to bed, my darling / There is nothing in the world that we can count on / Even that we will wake up is an assumption / But I know for a fact that I loved someone / And for about a year he lived in Boston . . .") "Half Jack" for a finale, and that song can raise chills on my skin. I never got the name of the encore; Amanda Palmer performed it alone, Brian Viglione being down for the count with a heavy-duty cold and, it seems, having dragged himself out of bed just that day for the concert. I wouldn't have known from the way he played. That is a dedicated drummer and I raise my nonexistent glass (Toad's Place serves its beer in plastic cups, for some reason) to him for it. And Amanda by herself is no little thing to hear.

All in all, an amazing show. This is what live performance is for. This is what music is meant to do.

WWYDR?

Stolen from conversation with muchabstracted and fleurdelis28:

Everybody owns their own Death. Most people just don't know about theirs. Occasionally, during the cleaning-out of a particularly recalcitrant basement or an attic full of outdated receipts and clothing that no longer fits anyone in the house, a Death is discovered sitting among the dust, often on a filing cabinet, reading a paperback novel in a foreign language. (Which foreign language, and why, depends on a system whose particulars no mortal has been able to discern. It is possible that some Deaths simply like nineteenth-century French romances, or postmodern Brazilian mysteries, better than others.) Such encounters are invariably a little awkward, generally polite, and mostly forgotten once the archaic cardboard boxes have been hauled up into the light and their contents set out for recycling, the dust-gummed typewriter either junked or repaired (or, in a few rare cases, turned into modern art), and the neglected doors closed once again. Those who have met their own Deaths prematurely remember the incident only in dreams, in disjointed symbols glimpsed through the random meshes of REM: a page of yellowed paper printed over with a language that cannot be read, a filing cabinet with drawers ajar, slanting light through a dust-glazed window or the smells of gritty cement and spilled detergent. Presumably the Deaths return to their novels, to their patient, pragmatic waiting. Their only worries are whether they will have time to begin the next Mann or Bulgakov or Amado, before they must rise, and put away the novel, and perform their appointed task at last.

So. What Would Your Death Read?