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10.06.11: culture blotter {portishead @ hammerstein}



rocktober rolled on yesterday evening with a portishead show at hammerstein ballroom, site of a memorable david bowie spotting at a pixies concert a few years ago.* i expected a fairly sexy show, as dummy was considered one of the greatest hookup albums of its day (but for "roads," a song which makes one want to cover one's genitals with duct tape). what i experienced was more of a violation: hammerstein's ultra-motivated security team took searches to a new level of weird (i saw the bag-searcher ahead of me checking a gal's prescription pill bottle against her driver's license), the woo!-drunk guy next to me kept lurching over and then clutching whichever part of me he'd just jostled as he turned to apologize, with 80-proof plosives, for doing so, and the audience decided en masse to numb themselves prior to "roads" by smoking all of the pot in the world (it is all gone now! all of it, smoked at hammerstein) during the encore. that said, beth gibbons is still an icicle in your ear: her voice was crystalline and wondrous for numbers like "wandering star" and "glory box," and it humanized newer, kerwhompity sternum-rattlers like "machine gun." rocktober's kinky secret: its violations aren't universally unpleasant.

*torn between staying for the encore and ducking out to follow bowie when he dematerialized from the mezzanine, i decided to stay put; i then ended up with tickets for another pixies show on a subsequent evening, and they played the same damn encore. takeaway: always follow bowie.