I’ve been wanting to write for a while about the excellent Martin Sexton show Mindi and I saw — almost two weeks ago now — at the Avalon in Boston with our friends Aaron and Lauren. Marty has certainly had no shortage of press (The Herald, NPR) during the last few weeks. I guess he deserves it; he released a pretty good record, Seeds at the beginning of the month. (You can listen to some of it on his website.)

The record is fine, although not his best, but the songs played live are really awesome. He’s touring with a band this time, which is a little unusual for him — I’ve seen him before with just a drummer and completely solo — both are incredible, but the band allows him to do some stuff he couldn’t do solo.

But to explain what was especially cool about the show, I’ve got to tell a little story.

Back when I was in college, I briefly dated a young woman (who I won’t name, but who was brilliant and talented and recently — I’m not making this up — won an emmy award for writing for a particularly funny show). Before she dated me, she dated a really nice guy who was a member of the superb a cappella UMass Doo Wop Shop. He and I became sort of second-degree friends, and we ended up inviting the Doo Wop Shop to come perform a joint show with the a cappella group I used to sing in, the Ephlats.

The Doo Wop Shop performed a bunch of pretty good stuff, and then sang one of the most amazingly stunning a cappella songs I’ve ever heard, called “Can’t Stop Thinking ‘Bout You.” My friend Gabe, also in the Ephlats, told me it was actually by a guy who was living in Boston named Martin Sexton. So I went out, bought all his (two, at the time) records, and became a huge fan at a time when not many people had heard of him.

So now this guy who used to be in the Doo Wop Shop named Nate Altimari, sings in this other group, called Firedrill, that I had never heard of before last Saturday. But in the middle of the concert, Martin brings this group on stage with him and, amazingly, they perform the very same arrangement of “Can’t Stop Thinking ‘Bout You” that got me interested in him all those years ago! Except with Martin singing the solo instead of some random college kid. I don’t know if everybody was into it, but for me, that was totally awesome. One of the coolest things I’ve seen, ever, at any show.

So all this by way of saying, check out the great video and recording of “Can’t Stop” on Firedrill’s Myspace. You can also listen to their studio version of the song, but scroll down for the video with MS, which is better.

Last week, Kurt Vonnegut, my favorite writer of all time — or, at least, the writer who influenced me more than any other — died. It’s impossible for me to write a post that would adequate capture his spirit, and it’s impossible for me to convey the simultaneous joy, wonder, and outrage I felt when I discovered his books when I was about 15. This incredible, 600+ post thread on metafilter probably gives a sense of how people felt about him.

But it seems to me that the only decent way to remember him and his writing, at once elegiac and hilarious, is with this passage form Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim, who has become unstuck in time and traveled to Tralfamadore, a distant planet, writes a letter to his local paper explaining his experience:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes.’

Kurt Vonnegut, Dead at 84. So it goes.

Mindi pointed out this very amusing Passsover flickr set. For those who don’t know their Ten Plagues, you can read up here first.

Sheldon Brown — who runs one of the best technical sites for cyclists on the web — is offering a new product and instructions for cleaning your chain. Read this, even if you don’t care that much about bikes.