The Pixies at Waterbury

Went to the postponed concert for The Pixies on Monday, October 31st, with a Brazilian graduate student friend from the law school. That's right, it was Halloween. I had to drive to Waterbury, CT, to hear them play at The Palace. Although there were power lines down from the freak heavy snowstorm over the weekend that led the governor to declare a state of emergency (hence the postponed concert), and no traffic lights for the last fifteen minutes of the drive, we made it there safely. It was a fantastic concert, with two encores. The crowd did not want them to stop playing. Nobody wanted to go home.

The Pixies were my favorite band when I was a student at Trinity College Dublin in the late 80s and early 90s. I can still remember the first time I heard them, on some weekend Irish television show hosted by Dave Fanning. He said something like "Here's the band everyone's been talking about." It was their set from the Pink Pop Festival in the Netherlands in 1989. I was hooked instantly.

The B-Side track "Into The White" used to play constantly on the jukebox in the "JCR" (Junior Common Room) while I was a student at TCD. It became my favorite Pixies song. Little did I know that many years later I would hear them play the song in an encore, and fill the auditorium with smoke, so that you could only hear the music.

I picked up some cool merchandise at the show. I also recorded and uploaded some clips of the conert to YouTube. Longer clips of the show uploaded by others who were there are also available here.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy

Wiley-Blackwell published (in October 2011) a new collection of essays in their Philosophy and Pop Culture series. It's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy, edited by Eric Bronson. It is about the best-selling series of novels by Stieg Larsson, who died before they were published. The collection includes an essay by me, entitled "To Catch A Thief: The Ethics of Deceiving Bad People." It was very gratifying to see it for sale in the Yale Bookstore (pictured above) later in the year.

I was interviewed by W&L about the book and my essay. You can listen to the interview here.