For those of us of a certain age, that merits a wow.

Modern English’s “I Melt with You” was a nightclub staple when I started venturing to dance clubs in the Midwest in nineteen something-something. I loved a couple of the band’s early albums.

From today’s press release:

Legendary English rockers Modern English will play a one night only concert in Savannah on Wednesday, August 28th at Dollhouse Productions event space at 980 Industry Drive. One of the defining post-punk/new wave bands of the 1980’s, the band will tour the U.S. behind the release of a new album, the first to be recorded with the original members of the group in 25 years. In addition to newer material, their hit songs “I Melt With You”, “Hands Across the Sea” and “Ink and Paper” remain some of the most recognizable and beloved tracks of the last 40 years.

An 80’s themed dance party will follow the 10pm show. Tickets are $15 in advance and $18 the day of the show, space permitting. Tickets will go on sale at 5pm today on Showclix.

MusicFile Productions is the same LLC, headed by Kayne Lanahan, that’s behind Savannah Stopover, the indie music festival that began in 2011.

The MusicFile’s summer series starts with a free show by Widowspeak at The Sparetime on July 8:

The series kicks off on Monday, July 8th with a free show at The Sparetime featuring Brooklyn’s critically acclaimed Widowspeak. The Captured Tracks recording artist will give a rare, stripped down performance at 9pm.

Widowspeak is comprised of Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas, renowned for their dreamy, western-tinged take on rock and roll. Their atmospheric, hazy sound has drawn comparisons to 90’s standout Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Widowspeak’s second album, Almanac, released in January of 2013, was recorded by Kevin McMahon (Swans, Real Estate) in a hundred year old barn in the Hudson River Valley of New York State during the transition from summer to fall. The album has received critical praise from NPR, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Spin and many others.

Ponderosa and Yip Deceiver will play a show on July 12th at The Jinx:

Ponderosa and Yip Deceiver (featuring members of Of Montreal) will perform on Friday, July 12th at The Jinx. Both bands are Stopover veterans. Local band Hallucinex will open.

Atlanta based Ponderosa has gained both critical success and momentum behind the release of their 2nd album Pool Party last summer. Stomp and Stammer magazine praised the band for “soaring, interstellar harmonies, booming drums, spatial textures, offbeat tangents and reverb aplenty” stating that the new LP “brings them closer in approach to that of groups like Band of Horses, My Morning Jacket and Athens’ Futurebirds.”

The of Montreal spin-off project of Davey Pierce and Nicolas Dobbratz know as Yip Deceiver offers playful, high energy dance pop with a buzzing funk vibe.

Tickets for the event are available at The Jinx and are $8 in advance and $10 at the door.

And here you go:

The study has been completed by BEA Architects, which designs such facilities, so of course the document will argue for the viability of at least one site.

I’d love to have to eat my words on that last sentence, but, really, give me a break. Click here for more on the study.

But the question that we need to be asking before we waste any more public money and civic time debating this issue isn’t about the viability of the waterfront.

We need to be talking now to the folks at the Georgia Ports Authority, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Coast Guard (I guess they’d be the right people) about the viability of cruise ships in the same long channel that will carry an increasing amount of cargo traffic for the foreseeable future.

In fact, we’re on the verge of spending $700 million of public money on a massive economic stimulus project to increase the efficiency of private shipping companies that use the Savannah River. The deeper channel will allow larger ships and more heavily laden ships. Some vessels will no longer have to wait for higher tides before coming in from the sea.

We also have liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers that come routinely to the facility at Elba Island, and the frequency of those trips seems likely to increase too. As I understand it, river traffic is completely shut down when those tankers are in use.

So how are all these commercial interests going to react when they find out that cruise ships on relatively tight schedules have to use the Savannah River at specific times?

It seems sort of ridiculous to spend $700 million in large measure to speed up freight traffic and then turn around and lure cruise ships that seem likely to dramatically slow that traffic.

So before we get too deep into all this, it’s time for the folks at the Georgia Ports Authority to get involved in the discussion.

Savannah’s Free People will be at 217 West Broughton St., right next to Urban Outfitters, in the space last occupied by the Clothing Warehouse.

Free People is under the same corporate umbrella as Urban Outfitters, so the location seems more than apt. Anthropologie, which is slated for the southeast corner of Congress and Montgomery, is also under that same corporate leadership.

Free People was actually the original name of the store that evolved into Urban Outfitters. Free People was reborn as a woman’s boutique just after the turn of the century.

Here’s an image from last week’s submittal to the HRB:

St. Charles is probably best known for its streetcar line, but construction has forced the temporary suspension of service on the western end of the street and on Carrollton Avenue.

Without the usual groups of people standing in the neutral ground waiting for streetcars, both avenues seemed oddly empty.

There was another change to St. Charles since my last trip to New Orleans a couple of years ago: far more cyclists. And this is summertime, when many college students at Tulane and Loyola are out of town.

On the portions of the street nearest Tulane, there’s now a bike lane going each way on St. Charles. It runs right alongside the parked cars — the exact configuration that we have in Savannah on Price Street and Washington Avenue.

So, as you can see in the photo below, long stretches of St. Charles now have the following configuration, working our way from left to right: sidewalk, tree lawn, parking lane (which wisely does not even have lines to delineate spaces, thus allowing for more cars), bicycle lane, vehicular travel lane, large median with streetcar tracks and with vehicular cut throughs for cross and turning traffic.

Here’s a shot taken a few evenings ago looking east, with the gates to Audubon Park visible on the right:

Let me add two other notes:

• Even when streetcars are active, the neutral ground is wide enough, flat enough, and comfortable enough to make an excellent jogging path.
• The width of the neutral ground, i.e. median, is sufficient to handle cross traffic and turning traffic in ways that make streetlights unnecessary except at significant intersections.

So here we have an historic street that far predates the automobile era — and an incredibly beautiful street too. The design has adapted beautifully for cars, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, even joggers.

It’s rather remarkable.

The configuration is one that could be adapted almost exactly to Abercorn Street between Victory Drive and DeRenne Avenue in Savannah. Modified versions could work on other streets.

Savannah’s food culture has developed in positive ways in recent years, with larger numbers of residents investing in some way in healthier, more local fare. Whole Foods is still a major grocery chain, of course, but its presence in Savannah will encourage those broader trends, force other grocers to step up their games, and make some local naysayers view the city more positively.

It’s a big deal.

Oddly, Savannah still hasn’t appeared on Whole Foods’ list of “stores in development,” but the company has listed 19 different job openings, some of which presumably represent multiple positions. There’s general information about employment at the Whole Foods website.

By the way, I was in New Orleans for part of last week. While I didn’t visit the existing Whole Foods, I did see the site of a new one that’s a key part of redevelopment on North Broad Street. I hear a lot of Savannahians say they’d rather have a Trader Joe’s than a Whole Foods, but New Orleans — one of the great foodie towns in the entire nation — doesn’t have a single Trader Joe’s.

Maybe the age of those systems is contributing to the new search system’s abject failures here on day one.

If I do just one search — even just a simple search to get to a friend’s profile — I’m not able to do a second search without entirely reloading the Home page.

And if I’ve reloaded and click in the search bar, here’s the dropdown menu that appears:

If I click on “Movies My Friends Like” (surely that must be worth viewing, right?), I get a list topped by the 48 Hour Film Project Savannah (which is not a movie), CBGB the Movie (which only a handful of my friends have even seen since distribution is still months away), and Savannah the Movie (ditto).

And here’s the problem with Facebook’s prioritization in search of things that we have “liked”: often users “like” things that they don’t necessarily like. Yes, I want to keep caught up on new developments regarding CBGB, but I haven’t even seen the film; I want to follow the page, but I have NO idea if I actually like the movie.

From that lame list of Movies My Friends Like, when I try to type something else into the search bar, Facebook won’t even let me change it.

Once I’m back out to a clean search box, I can type in something like “Restaurants in Savannah that [insert friend's name] likes”.

But that’s just more of a muddle. The list of results is a mishmash that includes places that this particular friend might have “liked” but are hardly her favorite spots. The second page of the results includes SubDogs (which is closed), Abe’s (which is not a restaurant), and Live Wire Music Hall (which is closed and which is not a restaurant).

How will any of this information prove truly useful?

I will be curious to hear others’ experiences with the new search function. Its debut on my screen has just made Facebook even more cumbersome.

I’ve been following The Wild’s energetic, passionate music for about a year and a half — ever since the band opened for The Queers in a great night at The Wormhole here in Savannah.

The sound is a beautiful melding of folk and punk. The punk label fits because of The Wild’s unbridled, anti-establishment energy — many of the songs touch on social causes and on the dehumanizing dangers of overarching bureaucracies. But the work is more idealistic than cynical, more innocent than jaded. Add in the acoustic elements and the sometimes lilting vocals, and the sound is in the tradition of American folk music, not afraid to ask the big questions: Why? and Why not?

From the opening track “There’s a Darkness (But There’s Also a Light)”:

One song deals with migrants crossing the border and later facing violent expulsion from the country; another catches the spirit of protestors at Fort Benning, home to the controversial School of the Americas.

But the majority of the songs are about more existential journeys — about making the most of the time we have and loving the people around us along the way.

I used to kill myself to feel like I was alive,
But since I lost you friend, I learned it was a lie…
All those walls we build so tall and wide,
It’s a coward’s way to be alive.

The Wild is Bryan Scherer (Drums, Guitar, Vocals), Dianna Settles (Vocals and Tambourine), Steve D’agostino (Banjo, Pedal Steel, Vocals, Fiddle, and Guitar), Dakota Floyd (Bass, Vocals, and Bad Puns), and Witt Wisebram (Guitar, Vocals, Harmonica, and Piano).

Take a listen:

But the New Orleans-style processional after the funeral service at Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Ascension was joyous and beautiful.

And it was an amazing display of Savannah itself.

If you’re from Savannah and personally invested at all in civic life, you’re likely to recognize at least a couple of dozen people in the pics below. I’m not going to try to point out who they all are right now.

After Ben’s family and friends go through a period of mourning, we’ll begin thinking about ways to permanently honor him, which would be richly deserved.

But there was something beautiful yesterday in the procession from the church to Ellis Square, where some of the city’s best players performed in Ben’s honor just a few yards from the Johnny Mercer statue.

I ended up with a lot of photos that are nearly identical, and I literally ended up with well over 100 that I wanted to post, but that’s a little excessive . . . But I found it too hard to whittle it down much

It will also be interesting to see, given the number of photographers and other folks with cameras around, how many photos get publicly posted. Mangue Banzima has some great shots up at his Qui Style blog. I’ve seen a few great isolated shots posted by media outlets and one beautiful album shared semi-privately by a photographer on Facebook, but I’m hoping we’ll see more.