Confessions of a Hired Gun:

Being Bulletproof

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There is no dearth of articles philosophizing the craft of writing. Unfortunately, at least 97% of them have absolutely nothing to do with the act of writing. Instead, the vast majority focus on the mysteries of the creative process, the sundry neuroses that inhibit writers, the unreasonable demands of markets and 99 other problems that attempt to explain and rationalize why mediocre writers aren't published, much less paid.

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Why?

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Preaching to the choir is a hell of a lot simpler than converting the heathens.

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I fall into the latter category. I'm a freelance writer. I freely admit that every word I write is geared to a specific audience, and that audience changes with every new project. That doesn't mean I have no principles--it's merely a recognition that specific audiences read specific articles or stories geared to their specific tastes. Some would call me a writing whore ( in fact, some have) because I have no problem switching gears between fiction, criticism and copywriting. It's all the same to me-- stringing words together is what I do. It's just the mindset that changes. If that makes me a whore, so be it.

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I see it a bit differently. I prefer to think of myself as a hired gun. The qwertyuiop keyboard is my weapon of choice, words are my bullets and I never miss. That's the beauty of freelancing-- I'm afforded the luxury of deciding who my clients are, and just as importantly, who my targets are. As with everything else in life, there's a trade-off. When you're not beholden to any one special interest, it's easy to become a thorn in the side of all special interests, however noble your intentions may be.

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So how do you reconcile those conflicts? Do you wrestle with self- doubt and fears that you might actually piss off somebody? Or do you throw caution to whatever ill winds might come your way, and write what is exactly your gut is screaming for you to write?

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There isn't a pat answer. There are, however, a couple of clues that serve you well regardless of the idiom in which you're writing. First, you have to realize that the universe is not hanging on your every word. Your audience could give a rat's ass about your desire to alter civilization with that book that's in your head and you will one day actually write. They could care less about your personal turmoils and neuroses. They want to be entertained and/or informed.

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Period.

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You have to be bulletproof if you want to write for a mass audience. You're a constant target, and the trick is to keep the reader guessing where you're going next. The methods you utilize to pull off that trick are up to you. All that matters is that you connect to your audience. And that requires a willingness on your part to wear disguises at times. Obviously, it's difficult to inject a personal remark into a copywriting gig. But that's where the fun comes into play. It's also where we can work our own touch of personal subversion into everything we write.

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Years ago, I wrote a script for a training film for a fast food chain meant to instruct employess as to how to conduct an in-store birthday party. It was an assignment boring beyond words. To make a long story short, I turned it into a parade of cliches, with the lead character, Timmy, uttering the immortal words,"This is the best birthday ever!!" as we fade out.

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The client loved it--to the tune of a four digit payment for what I wrote as a satire. My perception of the script and their purchase if it were diametrically opposed, but they loved it, and I ate for another month, and slept without any pangs of conscience.

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Assignments like those leave me free to do what I want, to say what I think means something. Even at that, I still think in terms of reaching a global audience. Way back in the early1980's , I got it into my head that I could reconcile all the divergent aspects of pop culture in a single magazine. The resultant product was called Pulse ( subtitled"Tomorrow's Trends Today') and while it lasted only five issues, it opened myriad doors to me.

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I am by no means trying to tell people how to write here--there is no formula for that beyond the individual soul. I am going to tell you how to sell your work, though.

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Care to listen?

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Free and Legal Music Downloads Coming Soon--sorta...

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In what may signal a major shift in the recording industry's strategy, Universal Music Group announced Tuesday it plans to make its entire music catalogue available free to consumers as online downloads. . . sorta.

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On the surface, it appears to be a win-win situation for record labels plagued by declining CD sales and for an audience reluctant to buy music online. UMG is the world's largest music distributor, with a roster including the likes of U2, Kanye West and Mariah Carey. The deal they have inked with start-up Spiralfrog.com allows consumers to access and download UMG's entire library at no cost--provided they're willing to watch advertising as they download the music.

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It's a risky venture fraught with a number of caveats.

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Hoping to reach a core 13-34 year old demographic--a marketer's dream, and also the age group most likely to pirate music-- SpiralFrog is banking on the assumption that demographic will be willing to exchange their time for free music. It sounds logical enough, until a 90 second download time is figured into the equation, considerably longer than a download from itunes or other online retailers. In a target group not known for patience, that's an eternity.

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There are other issues as well. SpiralFrog downloads are not ipod compatible. While this may be a boon for Microsoft, who powers most other online music sites, such as Yahoo!, and is set to release its own "ipod killer," Zunes, later this year, the fact remains that Apple is the gold standard in online music. In addition, SpiralFrog will require users to use the site at least once a month, and it only allows storage on a hard drive or mp3 player--no CD burns. It's also rumored that downloads self-destruct after six months, requiring users of the service to download songs repeatedly.

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Other questions arise from a creative viewpoint--how willing will recording artists be to have their music associated with advertising over which they have no control? Politics and social issues are often inherent in pop lyrics. Even when they're not, they can be manipulated to fit into any context of an advertiser's desires.

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SpiralFrog chairman Joe Mohen brushes off all such concerns. "The currency e're using is time," he says, adding, "Webelieve that advertisers will pay to show those consumers ads, and that those payments will rival what companies get from iTunes andother online retailers."

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That may be, but doubts remain. Details of the agreement betwee UMG and SpiralFrog are undisclosed, and SpiralFrog's business plan is sketchy at best. A launch date has been set as "late 2006." The company claims to be in talks with other labels, such as Sony Bmg and Warner, but no commitments have been confirmed. Regardless, the basic idea may be implemented in a more fleshed out form by online retailers in the future.

A Roundtrip Ticket to the Sun

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El Nino y El Sol is billed as the "original soundtrack to the motion picture." If that's the case, then this collaborative effort by Ocolte Soul Sounds and Adrian Quesada may have the distinction of being the first soundtrack album ever recorded for a movie that doesn't exist. More likely, it's a soundtrack for the movie that wafts dreamily through our subconsciousness. If that's the case (and I think it is), it's a soundtrack that embellishes the storyline without overpowering it.

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While not necessarily groundbreaking--at least in the traditional sense of the term--this album succeeds in fusing a number of musical idioms into a pleasant identity. Drawing on inluences ranging from hip-hop to afrobeat to Carribean jazz, El Nino y El Sol (the boy and the sun), drafts a musical storyboard for urban life. Through most of it, Martin Perna's flute stylings and Adrian Quesada's arrangements play gleefully against one another.

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It may or may not be a musical rendition of the Icarus myth, but it certainly plays as if it might be."Marindio" opens the album with a childlike sense of wonder that beckons us to the possibilities of worlds colluding in a larger scheme. By the album's closing, lilting tune, Paz y Alegria", we're brought gently to a landing in surroundings that are both familiar, yet somewhat alien. Along our flight, we visit worlds inhabited by both Barry White and Ian Anderson, by Willie Wonka and Peter Gunn.

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What Ocolte Soul Sounds and Adrian Quesada have accomplished here is a piece that works as a mild morning caffeine jolt for the freeway drive to work while also serving as a soundtrack to a romantic dinner. It may not be that great jazz album we keep hoping for (Bakithi Kumalo still holds the lead there), but it's a pretty good stopgap until that comes along.

Immortality at 1/400th sec: Joe Rosenthal Dead at 94

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The man who snapped what is arguably the greatest photo of the twentieth century died today. Joe Rosenthal was 94.

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You may not know his name, but you certainly know the photo. On 23 February 1945, at approximately 1:03 PM, Rosenthal took a quick shot of five Marines and one sailor raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribashi, Iwo Jima. He shot it at 1/400th sec, at an aperture of somewhere between f8 and f11. In other words, it was a lucky shot, the kind photographers dream of. The composition was absolutely classical, the lighting flawless, the symbolism timeless. It was the perfect photograph, the kind that stirs emotions that no word can express.

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Too perfect, some said. It wasn't the first raising of the flag--that photo was taken by Sgt. Louis Lowery, working for the Marines Leatherneck magazine. And that became the focal point of a controversy that would haunt Rosenthal for years. Rumors abounded that the Rosenthal had to be staged--it was just too good to be real.

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None of that matters. As I've said before, photography captures a moment in time that has never happened before, and will never happen again. The moment Rosenthal captured was 1/400th of a second in time, but for a nation sorely in need of a morale boost, it was the most iconic image of the preserverance of the American Spirit ever recorded. He didn't fake it-- he snapped at that moment, that perfect moment that history remembers always.

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Joe Rosenthal should be immortalized with that iconic photo. He's gone, but remember his name.

Shakespeare Behind Bars Is An Island Apart

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Shakespeare Behind Bars is essentially a film about redemption and forgiveness from the perspective of self-loathing retrospection. Using The Tempest as its centerweight, the documentary comments both on the universal language of Shakespeare and the flaws of the human psyche.

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What filmmakers Hank Rogerson and Jillann Spitzmiller have done here is quietly brilliant. Shakespeare Behind Bars ostensibly chronicles the making of a convict-produced rendition of Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the process, it offers the viewer a glimpse of people who will pay with large chunks of their lives for moments of evil. What makes it more compelling, though, is its detached approach as it follows the troupe of felons for a year as they rehearse their roles in the play. As they prepare for their roles, they are forced to wrestle with the inner demons that fated them to incarceration.

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Make no mistake, however--this is no teary-eyed, bleeding heart advocacy piece. Rather, the camera looks at the inmates through an unflinching, utterly objective eye, and leaves it to the viewer to reconcile the issues it presents. These are not nice men by any stretch of the imagination--they're murderers and molesters of varying degrees of reprehensibility. And while staging their production of The Tempest, they present themselves as real-life people seeking forgiveness for their past misdeeds. Their place of captivity, Kentucky's Luther Luckdett correctional facility is, for them, a metaphor for Prospero's mysterious island, and the play is itself almost group therapy for them.

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All of them speak of their personal need for society to forgive them, but for the most part, they lay the blame for what they are on society, or family, or anything but themselves. The viewer keeps waiting, wanting to believe that at any moment they will make that breakthrough where they realize that they alone must bear personal responsibility for their circumstances.

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It never happens. They relate not to the lessons inherent in Shakespeare's works, but to the flawed characters themselves. And that is why Shakespeare Behind Bars is often unsettling. We see the inmates for what they are --killers and sociopaths-- on one level. But on another level, they are so convincing they seem like average joes you might share a beer or two with. In that regard, the film clearly puts the face on evil--the face is no face.. or any face..

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The inmates' performance of The Tempest is relatively inconsequential--indeed, we only see snippets of it. Shakespeare Behind Bars, however is a documentary of considerable importance. Considering the opportunities the filmmakers had to exploit a multitude of social issues, it isto their infinite credit they chose to let the film speak for itself. That angle will leave the viewer more than ample time to consider those issues on their own terms.

The Liberation of Lisa Germano

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At its heart, Lisa Germano's In the Maybe World is an album rife with optimism. It's also a work that arrives at that optimism via a circuitous journey landmarked by the pain of failed relationships and emotional ambiguities.

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In a voice that rarely rises above a whisper, Germano gently guides the listener through a world that is at once ominous and strangely beautiful, an ambient landscape of almost childlike simplicity. It's a piebald land of innocence marred by the intrusion of mundane realities, and she traverses through it like a weary veteran. "Let the love go/ Let the love be," Germano pointedly pleas in "The Seed," underscoring the prevalent theme of the album--through loss, we grow stronger.

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Whether she's eulogizing her beloved cat ("Golden Cities") or playing both roles in a dysfunctional, but loving relationship (Red Thread"), Germano's trademark whisper is anything but brittle--it is the sound of a razor slicing through virgin linen. Backed by her own barebones instrumentation of piano, violin and guitar, and supplemented by Johnny Mar's haunting guitar phrasings on"Into Oblivion" and "Wire", coupled with Sebastian Steinberg's masterful string bass work on several tracks, In the Maybe World strikes at a visceral level that belies its simplicity.

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Lisa Germano has always put her craft above the demands of the machinery that is the recording industry. That is a trait that is becoming increasingly rare, but is nowhere near extinction. Germano, like Kate Bush and PJ Harvey, isn't remotely concerned about churning out a hit record. Instead, she invites the listener to join her in an ongoing debate she's having with her personal demons. Often as not, she confronts them head-on and wins, however ambiguous the victory may be.

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In the Maybe World, though, illustrates the power of little victories in our daily lives. It's the kind of album that you listen to at night--soft and melodic, with a quiet message of hope for a better tomorrow. "I try to love you when I can/ When it's alright to be who I am", she says on "After Monday." Tuesday will be better, and it's that seemingly bleak optimism that drives this album.

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Lisa Germano raises more questions about life than she answers, and that's what makes her so compelling. That she accomplishes this in an album scarcely thirty minutes long speaks volumes.

Mike Douglas: Gone, But Never Forgotten

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Mike Douglas died this morning, on his 81st birthday.

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While he has been out of the spotlight for several years, Douglas will be remembered for pioneering the afternoon talk show. From 1961 to 1982, The Mike Douglas Show was a daily staple of American pop culture. It's estimated that during that tenure, he did 6000 shows, most of them 90 minutes long, and hosted over 30,000 guests. Among that roster were seven sitting, former or future Presidents and a preschool Tiger Woods, among numerous other celebrities.

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Born Michael Delaney Dowd in Chicago, 11 August 1925, Douglas began his career as an Irish crooner in the 1940's. But as musical and cultural trends moved towards a more youth-oriented market in the fifties, he shifted his attentions to television as a means to keep his career alive. It was here that he found the niche for which he will be most remembered.

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The Mike Douglas Show, however reluctantly, revolutionized daytime television in the early seventies. He was to a largely female afternoon audience what Johnny Carson was to post-primetime viewers. Douglas himself never viewed his series as a talk show, but as a music program with conversations thrown in between tunes. Be that as it may, it was his convivial style of interviewing guests that makes him one of the true greats for any student of pop culture.

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Looking back through the fog of memory, what stands out most significantly is that Douglas never lost his cool. Even when he was dealing with difficult subjects like Jerry Reuben, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Douglas maintained a happy hour atmosphere in his shows. He was, above all else, an entertainer, and he never let the audience know if he was sweating a bit. It is not stretching a point to say that he laid the groundwork for all that were to follow him.

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Mike Douglas led a good life. Thankfully, he shared it with us.

Is Rhymefest Really the New Face of Rap?

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Che Smith aka Rhymefest emphatically wants to distance himself from gangsta rap and take the genre to a more positive plane. On his debut album Blue Collar, he delivers a set of rhymes that don't stray far from the conventions of current rap, but attempts it from a working class perspective on those themes.

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The inhabitants of Blue Collar are inner city working stiffs, by and large, who punch a clock by day and pick up a forty rather than a gat at the end of the workday. They are the people who live in direct opposition to the gangstas--wannabe and otherwise--that much of rap glamorizes.

'Fest makes this theme blatantly clear in "Dynomite (Going Postal)", a blistering indictment of gangsta trappings bereft of street cred. He's not preachy here--he attacks at gut level, using every profanity at his disposal to drive his point home. Since he is a veteran of the dub wars (allegedly beating Eminem in a duel), this should come as no surprise. The language of the streets is the language in which 'Fest is most well-versed. And as such, some audiences might find much of the lyrical content offensive. Even on "Sister," purportedly sympathizing with female victims of physical abuse, the narrator admits his initial motive to talking to the woman was the possibility of a sexual encounter. It nonetheless becomes a poignant vignette about the perils of the ghetto. While not exactly cocktail conversation, its lyrical tone does ring true on a subliterate level.

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What Blue Collar does bring to the table that's refreshing is a musical backdrop that is neither West Coast nor East Coast, but distinctly Midwestern--"Chi-Coast," maybe. There is an unmistakable Chicago rhythm permeating the entire album, ranging from steel factory beats to smoky blues riffs to back alley shout outs. A lot of this is no doubt due to No-ID's production, but the greater credit has to go to 'Fest--he may be blue collar, but he has the blue collar popped up throughout the album. Whether you agree with his stance is irrelevant--the man raps with conviction. He did, after all, co-write boyhood friend Kanye West's hit "Jesus Walks." Kanye and 'Fest rhyme together here, most notably on the romp "Brand New."

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I'd hesitate to say that Rhymefest puts a new face to rap, though. While he does steer away from the guns and crime themes of gangsta, he falls back on the older themes of clubbin' and sexin', which served as the basis of the current stagnant state of rap. 'Fest has an opportunity here to take rap forward to a more socially aware level. Rap, when done at its best, is street poetry. Let's hope Rhymefest takes advantage of that power, and not become yet another rapper caught in their own myth.

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A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Lies

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Photography is, at its essence, preserving a moment that has never happened before, and never will happen again. This is particularly undeniable in the realm of photojournalism. And that's why Reuters' publication of Adnan Hajj's altered photos of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict are reprehensible.

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One of the photos in question shows smoke rising from Beirut after an Israeli bombing raid. Lots of smoke. The other depicts an Israeli F-16 firing three missiles at an unspecified target. Very dramatic. They're the sort of photographs that rip at the soul. There's just one small problem--they're not exactly real.

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Hajj, for whatever motive, decided his photo of the bombing aftermath lacked the drama he wanted to convey--the reality of that one moment he had captured wasn't cinematic enough. And a mediocre shot of an Israeli plane firing a defensive flare, even shot through a fast telephoto lens, wasn't very provocative, either. He did , therefore, what any mediocre hack photographer would do: he photoshop'd the hell out of them and hoped nobody would notice.

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Reuters, at least their global photo editor, Tom Szlukovenyi, didn't notice. More likely, though, the news agency didn't care. After all, Beirut beneath a blanket of thick, oily black smoke depicts the horrors of war much more dramatically than a poorly composed picture that shows only a single bomb blast on the horizon clearly. Perhaps in their arrogance and rush to beat their competitors in ratings and, by extension, ad dollars, Reuters thought nobody would notice.

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But people did notice. Over the weekend, the Internet, particularly political bloggers, made Abnan Hajj something of a Web celebrity. Google him and you'll find a cornucopia of sources that have posted the before and after renditions of the above described items.

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Reuters unceremoniously pulled all 920 of Hajj's photos, most of which were sports shots, from its files Sunday, excluding them from future sales. Szlukovenyi issued a statement typical of those with their hand caught in the cookie jar, absolving themselves of culpability and reiterating the old "zero tolerance policy" saw.

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There is a larger issue that looms here, though, and it is infinitely more important than any short-sighted, self-serving political agendas, be it from a photographer who may or may not be sympathetic to Hezbollah, or pro-Israeli websites or news agencies slanting stories to either the left or the right. The issue here revolves around trust and responsibility--all else is superfluous.

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It's impossible to not slant the news--to say it's 35 degrees outside is fact--to say it's very cold is slanting that fact. That being said, it's ludicrous to refer to news outlets as "the liberal media." The media is what it is, and it's composed of a multitude of viewpoints, some vehement and some conciliatory, all beholden to who's buttering their bread.

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The Hajj affair goes beyond the pale in its sensationalism of what is already a situation of potentially apocalyptic proportions. In times like these, it is not only incumbent upon journalists to accurately inform the public, it is essential to maintaining the Fourth Estate's credibility. Altered photos do not tell the truth--they only give credence to conspiracy theories.

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A picture is indeed worth a thousand words--or a thousand lies. The realities of war speak eloquently of horror and tragedy without embellishing them through photo manipulation.

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Pure Reason Revolution:

Guerillas of the Surreal

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I don't sleep a lot-- in fact, I average four, maybe five hours a night. Seven hours is sleeping in for me. Don't get me wrong--I would love something beyond a ten minute"power nap" (another one of those pre-fab labels whose meaning completely eludes me), but the constraints of American time-sense--not to mention that pesky 24-hour solar cycle-- make that next to impossible. I'm not whining. I'm just saying.

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There's a plus side though--sleep deprivation, when utilized properly, can be an extremely effective creative tool. Once you've blurred the lines between dream and wakefulness, reality takes on a different hue. At least, that's what I keep telling myself.

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On their debut album, The Dark Third, Pure Reason Revolution nimbly traverses such territories in a work that clearly establishes them as the new prog movement's best and brightest hope. What places this British quintet at the forefront of the neo progs is their uncanny ability to translate seventies progressive rock to a language relevant to the 21st century. They've managed this by drawing on contemporary influences such as Radiohead and Nirvana and tracing them back to what influenced those bands--Yes, Led Zeppelin and, of course, Pink Floyd. The result is an album that both pays homage to those influences, and transcends them.

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While I would hesitate to label The Dark Third a "concept" album, its title alludes to that part of life that is spent in the subliterate world of dream state. As such, it flits between idioms and musical time frames without regard to obvious references. This is most apparent on the almost twelve minute long "The Bright Ambassadors." The title itself being a reference to a line in Pink Floyd's Meddle, the track intros in a Fairport Convention meets Evanescence groove, transmutes into a melodic moment of strings and synths, evolves into a literary refrain reminiscent of William S. Burroughs as translated by Pink Floyd and lopes into a Fleetwood Mac harmony interlude before shredding into a bass and drums- driven climax that echoes Led Zeppelin's Coda days. In lesser hands, the resultant piece would have been chaos, but Pure Reason Revolution pull it all together seamlessly.

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Much of the reason The Dark Third succeeds has to do with the vocal interplay between Jon Courtney and Chloe Alper, who serve as the focal point of the band. They counterpoint each other so effectively that the actual lyrics become secondary to the inherent power of the tune. The tunes, though, ultimately make the album--Andrew Courtney's drums accentuate every phrase and James Dobson's synths, coupled with Jamie Wilcox's guitar riffs, imbue every song with a power that is at once both ethereal and firmly grounded in the elements of rock.

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It's August as I write this, so I think it's safe to start passing out "best of" nominations for 2006. I was skeptical concerning Pure Reason Revolution when I first heard about them, what with all the hype about them being the next Pink Floyd. Jaded critic that I am, I thought I would dismiss them as "Pink Floyd: the next generation." In one way, I was right--they are that. They've picked up the mantle that Syd Barrett absentmindedly tossed aside one day. But they have done more than that--they have picked up where he left off, passed it around to others who shared his vision in one way or another, absorbed their scents and created something familiar yet dangerously new.

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What Pure Reason Revolution has done with The Dark Third is nothing short of revolutionary. By delving into the roots of their roots and updating those roots, they have validated rock and roll in a way not heard of since Green Day's American Idiot.

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The Dark Third is easily the best rock album I've heard this year. And Pure Reason Revolution is far and away the best rock band to emerge in 2006.

When Phish Landed on Coney Island

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On a rainy day in June 2004, the members of Phish got together for a jam session and invited 20,000 of their closest friends to listen. At least, that's the impression one is left with after viewing Phish Live in Brooklyn (or listening to the CD version.) Filmed at Coney Island's Keyspan Park, this release beautifully documents what is ostensibly one of Phish's final performances.

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In a career spanning over twenty years, with virtually no personnel changes, Phish never broke the Top Twenty in record sales, yet enjoyed mega status as a touring band. Their grassroots approach to self-promotion and their interaction with their fanbase led to inevitable comparisons to the Grateful Dead. Indeed, after Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, Phish seemed poised to be the heir apparent to the Grateful Dead's legacy, at least on that level.

Musically, though, the similarities between the two are scant. While both drew on diverse influences, Phish, by and large, leaned more towards an improvisational jazz approach whereas the Grateful Dead took a more folksy route.

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All such comparisons aside, Phish is certainly one of the all-time great jam bands, and indisputably the best to emerge on the national scene in the nineties. Phish Live in Brooklyn proves that in no uncertain terms. Directed by Eli Tishberg, this is concert filmmaking at its best-- a straightforward, but lovingly rendered rendition of the event without the usual interview intercuts and such that distract from the experience. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it rained through most of the concert, providing for some nice special effects.

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Cinematography and the fortunate events of nature do not a concert make, obviously--they can only serve to record the event. Ultimately, it all hinges on the performance. Here, Phish does a remarkable job of engaging their live audience and, by extension, the home viewer like. In a two-set concert that lasts over three hours, the band performs an eclectic selection of songs spanning their two decade career. With Trey Anastosio's loopy guitar style serving as the unifying motif throughout the show, Phish turn twenty-one songs into what amounts to one long, but infinitely satisfying jam.

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This is a concert bereft of histrionics--even the lighting effects by "fifth member" Chris Kuroda are subdued, serving to embellish the music's emotions. While Anastosio's guitar is prominent throughout, the entire band shines as well. Bassist Mike Gordon, with his bobblehead timing, trades licks formidably against the guitar phrasings on "Free." Page McConnel's keyboards accentuate each song with an extra layer of phrasing, and Jon Fishman's percussion unnerringly guides each tune.

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From the opening "A Song I heard the Ocean Sing" to the closing classic "The Divided Sky," Live in Brooklyn is a testament to the power of the jam. If this concert does indeed herald the end of Phish, then they went out with guns blazing to the very last note. On the other hand, it may be that Live in Brooklyn documents the end of one cycle of Phish's career. They've even alluded that a reunion is not out of the question. Either way, it stands on its own as a great live performance. The DVD version is the way to go for home entertainment. For a purely aural experience, or when on the go, the CD shines as well. Either way, Phish Live in Brooklyn is worthy of more than a casual listen.

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