The Dread of Destinations - The Red Bike Rides in Bretagne, Pt. 4

04/08/12              12:55, Bar outside Quimper train station, en route to Brest

For the first four days of my trip, the journey easily outweighed the destination. I saw a few sites and sights – the forest, the town, the small city, the beach – but mostly, I biked. My diary has reflected this, I think, focused more on how I move than what I see.

Yesterday that changed. I visited three veritable destinations, places that attract tourists, events that are known, items written up in my guidebook. It changed the tone of my trip: expectations about other things entered the picture. With expectations come fulfillment and disappointment. Indeed, yesterday had a bit of both.

***

People sometimes say I'm on the track to nowhere...

The first site belonged to nature. Le Côte Sauvage, the wild coast, marks the western edge of the Quiberon peninsula (peninsula, in French, at least for smaller ones, is “presqu’île” – almost island). Both a coastal road and a worn-in runners’ and bikers’ path mirror the water imperfectly. The coast begins on the Southern tip of the peninsula at Quiberon and runs 8-10 km, stopping just short of Penthièvre, where I was staying.

I took the creaky peninsula train (le tire bouchon – the corkscrew) to Quiberon, loaded up with bread and an apple, and took off. The coast begins with a dramatic stone house or castle just past a roundabout. From there the dramatics continue: craggy clifflets and rocky shores; inlets and mini pools; stark changes in elevation on a small scale; clouds looming and evaporating on the horizon; tall grass and short shorn brush and shrubbery adorned with purple glowers off the coast; and the odd hosue or tourist couple breaking up the scenery. The ocean roars and gulls squawk, but there is no smell of seafood, seaweed, sea stink, just of moist, fresh air. Stone monuments loom on and off shore in all directions, whether ancient or imitative, and in the water a double-bumped “island” 50 meters off shore looks like a beached Loch Ness monster, trapped in shallow sand.

Le Côte Sauvage ends and I drift inland. Inland though a couple kilometers up the peninsula narrows to an isthmus no more than five football fields wide. Later, a small forest encloses the bike path. The peninsula is full of delights. Nature, even when predictable, not stunningly wilder than other natures, is worth it.

 

***

I’ve been reading that large book by the Pole nobody I know knows. It’s also a diary, and old Witold Gombrowicz entertains in his cantankerousness. One of his many targets for rhetorical attack was painting. “Painting is one great resignation from what cannot be painted. It is a cry: I would like to do more, but I cannot. This cry is oppressive.” He argues we only like paintings because everybody else does, and we fear looking stupid. Aspects of the artists’ biographies intrigue us too (he mentions Van Gogh as an example), but the painting itself is static, plastic, and thus of little value.

This idea of liking something because everyone else does infects travel as well. Such is especially the fight with the guidebook. The guidebook is an indispensible source of ideas, phone numbers, and lame essays. One wants to travel to the best sites, but also to do it freely. Hence the struggle with even the best guidebooks; with those less than best, one suspects the must-sees are not quite musts.

My guidebook’s top recommendation for Bretagne was to see the megaliths. Stone monuments dating back 5,000 years, to a time before any reasonably engineering – the wheel, e.g. – existed to help build or erect them. Grandeur on the order of Stonehenge, but less grand and with more stones.

After eating the best crepe I’ve had yet this trip (the complète with onions, ham, cheese, and egg) from a place not in the guide, I rode to the site in Carnac. In the summer, one is not allowed into the actual site without a guide, but can walk or bike around the alignments. I left the “Maison des Megaliths” next to a family of four Italians. The mother took photos and exhorted her children, the father biked eagerly, the teenage daughter fended off her younger brother, and the brother, when not teasing the sister, ripped off sarcasm-tinged lines: look ma, there are the stones. Wow.

And not to be a child, but I empathized with the ragazzo. The site was full of stones. Granite stone monuments, some to a tall man’s height, others two or three times that high, set in long, precise lines, with tall wild grass growing among them. A few of the monuments were shaped differently or set one against the other. A small circular guard tower next to the middle alignment site offered a nice lookout point to see those lines.

My book asks how and why these were erected. How is a question for archaeologists and engineers, why seems obvious enough – with spiritual or religious purposes in mind. Further, this is not as bold a site as I imagine Stonehenge to be, or Easter Island (nor as comic as the version in Spinal Tap). It is a collection of tall granite stones in a grassy field with limited majesty.

Actually, the location excited me. The path led through forests and past ponds. The better question is why here? Presumably, the proximity to water matters, and the forest helps too – we imagine old druids chanting under a canopy, wearing bear skins as a designation of status.

There was also an amazingly life-like statue of an oversized head...

The best collection of megaliths at the Carnac site is “Le Petit Menec.” Just off the last main alignment heading east, this little row hides under trees. These monuments are smaller, shorter than me even. Where the rest of the megaliths stick out as slightly incongruous, like overgrown cemeteries, these felt humble, understated, and in line with their surroundings.

I’m not sure I would recommend the site to other people. Maybe the guided visit would be better. Maybe you really like stones. I cannot confirm the consensus positivity, nor my guidebook’s affirmation of the site. But if one were to go, I would tell him/her to see the trip out to the end, where a little secret hides. Even in the (mild) disappointments, good surprises can be found.

***

Lorient was turning sour on me by the minute. The bus left me two minutes late. The rain doused and delayed me. The music did not deliver on its promise. A bus would leave for my hotel at 21:30, and I was ready to give up for the night, to go back to my room and read and write, such as I do every night.

Lorient was my first real deviation from plan. Instead of biking off the train some 20 kilometers to Concarneau, a small coastal town, I would stay in Lorient, a city big enough to have a first division football club, if one that barely survived relegation last season. The city also hosts the Festival InterCeltique Lorient (FIL), a large gathering of Celts from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England, Galicia in Spain, and, of course, Bretagne. My book claims 600K visitors descend on the city, though strangely Lorient receives no other mention.

Due to the crowds and my last-minute change in plans, I only found a room just outside the city, across an étang. I stumbled into the center, where a genuine buzz emanated from the booths and stages along the port. The sunshine and the ever-young late evening assured me that I had done well to come here, to change.

Less than two hours later, clouds loomed and I found that I had unwittingly missed the bus by two minutes. My legs had logged 45 kilometers on the bike that day, and 165 over the last three days, but I had not choice but to walk another four. The étang crossing, beautiful to the hotel with a lush forest and that sun, was bleak this time. Boats floated off the port to my right like toys in a dingy bathtub.

When the rain came, on the other side of the crossing, I at first pushed on, using the sidewalk trees for scant cover. After five minutes of dousing, I escaped under a bus stop. No bus, of course, and I twiddled my thumbs for ten minutes while the drops, as measured by their impact on the street puddles, slowed.

My plan had been to take the 22:45 bus back after 2+ hours of Celtic fun, with the midnight bus as an option if I was having great Celtic fun. By the time I got to the center, it was about 20:40, I was wet and tired, and the festival had a lot of work to do to re-impress me.

I went to the Celtic tent to eat dinner and avoid drizzle. I bought an Estrella Galicia, a mediocre Spanish beer that would never be sold in France except for the festival. I exchanged seven Euros for plastic tokens and bought a(nother) crepe and fries. By the time I crammed the fries and their three attendant sauces – mayo, ketchup, and orange mystery – I felt ready to go home in a body bag.

Nothing about this distinguished FIL from a typical European festival, each with its own local flavors, except that the music over the loudspeakers often featured bagpipes, and the young folk acting like jackasses wore green hats and kilts.

Really guys? Really?

I left the tent. The rain had stopped, and only music could save my life. The first band I came across had blue-striped white sailor shirts – Picasso was photographed a few times wearing these – a nice, local uniform. Unfortunately, they played corny American music, New Orleans jazz and doo-wop and the like. The music was neither good nor appropriate, costumes aside. Another strike.

The 21:30 bus and the white flag loomed as a more and more tempting option. What can I do if the festival is disappointing, the weather dismal, and staying out late to me disagreeable? Such is me, and fighting my innate sense will only lead to later regrets.

I walked past the bus stop. I’d give another street a try. If no good, either a bus or a cab could get me closer to bed. One must validate one’s choice in destination, after all.

Around the corner, I heard a tone, a reedy sound, the tumult of a crowd. I turned. At the Porc de Lorient bar (or some such name – their emblem included a pig, and I learned French pigs say “groin-groin” instead of oink), a band played on the terrace. Six men from 30-50 years old, the band featured two guitarists, a drummer, a bald bespectacled dude on a wooden accordion/squeezebox, and two, of course, pipes players. These two would alternate, one between bagpipes (or uilleann pipes, I don’t quite know the difference) and a flute, the other between pipes and something like a mini-clarinet, with a tone similar to the pipes. None, by the way, wore costumes.

This last was the leader of the band, calling on the crowd to join in and, when he could, waving a Bretagne flag at his side. The Bretagne flag is great – black and white stripes with triangular figures meant to represent the initial bishoprics in the corner. It looks like a bizarro, pirate version of the U.S.A. flag – I’m sure there’s no connection, though the U.S. flag came first.  

The music was all well and good, traditional Celtic music with a modern rock backing, but what made me stay was the crowd. In front of the stage, 16-20 people danced the appropriate traditional dances, either in pairs or in a circle as called for by the song. None of the crowd was dressed up, and most looked like they were copying what everybody else did, but with joy and honest intent. The exception was a man no older than me with long blonde hair and a long gray kilt. He had a goatee and shining eyes, and when not leading a partner or a group, he danced alone, setting the example, investing his blood and joie de vivre into the mutual crowd/band performance.

I took a seat in the back of the crowd. The band flowed through the set industriously and with attentive joy. The songs were pleasant and evocative the way well-played folk music always is. In a different setting, or for a longer period of time, or with the band wearing costumes, this might have grown dull, tedious, or kitsch.

Instead, the dancing crowd’s number swelled with each song. Around the crowd, an older drunk with a big backpack and a hat pestered the fun, trying to add to (or detract from) the music on a cheap recorder. The staff ushered him off the outdoor premises. The crowd continued; a pair of young women who had fended off the drunk danced together, then split up to dance with others for the next song. A bigger man with no hair struggled to time his claps right. Older couples sparkled in the culture of the moment. Blondie, who I called a “Viking Celt” in my head, sipped on his beer between songs, and disappeared for a song even, but returned to prance up and down the dancing space. The drunk returned through the back and, in moving one of the big parasols, drenched a group of onlookers. There’s always one. The music went on.

***

I don’t know. I’m loath to assign true, wide-spanning unity between vast numbers of people to any moment. I don’t believe the Olympics really bring us together; they just give us something to talk about amongst each other. I don’t believe nations on the scope of the U.S., France, India, even Luxembourg almost, make sense, not on a spiritual level; nation-states are convenient for wielding power, for administrative purposes, but not for identity. It makes just as much sense to build a nation out of the millions of people who own Thriller as out of people born or living in a 100,000 square mile area, say.

But on a smaller, humbler level, there are things we all share, just as humans. We can share in moments, in temporary connections. Even as they dissolve, those connections become more real and satisfying than the connections forced on us.

Nothing is better than music and dance at drawing out those connections. Movement and sound, simple sound, can bring us down to our most basic urges – to react, to thrust and shake, to act like animals. Get on the floor and just freak out: there is no better one time cure-all.

Get on the floor called the bandleader as the band circled through two riffs over and over to close down the set. I sat and watched. I’m not shy about dancing, but I prefer to do it alone or for someone I know, to amuse or irritate or impress. I sat and watched.

The last remnants from the sitting crowd got up. The circle of dancers expanded. In the middle, a few bolder dancers, the two guitarists, and of course the whirling dervish of a Viking Celt, eyes lit and hair aflame. The music both hollowed out as the guitars lost bite in the crowd and heightened to a final crest. 

I put my bag down and walked to the front. The circle had no opening. I stood on its edge, tangent to the dance and clapping with the beat.

The song and the set ended a few seconds later. The crowd dispersed happily. The band went on a break. The tension of the moment eased.

I took the bus home 15 minutes later at 22:45. All in all, I was pleased, both with day and with night.

Soft Silly Music: Meaningful or Magical? Beauty and Narrative at a Jeff Mangum show

The crowd kept clapping. Minutes after the encore, a lesser-known b-side from the artist that many fans didn’t recognize, the crowd’s needs persisted. 1,500 people, more or less united as one, stood and clapped and whistled and yelled, their rhythm fluctuating between cacophony and a focused monorhythm of quickening beats. The house lights were up. Their cause felt slated for sure disappointment; once the house lights go up, it’s over.

Five minutes into the ovation, I had already left my second floor seat. Ostensibly in the states for the wedding of a friend from high school, I texted Ben, who was waiting for me in Harvard Square to begin the 90-minute drive to the house on the Cape where we and our friends were staying. I told him that I would surely be there in a couple minutes, that the crowd would give up.

All the same, I ducked into the first floor, in the hall behind the seats. This was not an unsavvy crowd; they knew how unlikely they were to prevail against the Rule of the House Lights. They kept on anyway. Maybe it’s because the show was in and of itself so unlikely, one that for years none of us imagined would ever happen. Jeff Mangum had played for us that night, giving us 13 songs from the two albums that made up the Neutral Milk Hotel discography, and then he played us “Engine,” the aforementioned B-side. On the one hand, we could not ask for anymore; on the other hand, if we’d reached this far, how could we stop before reaching our limit, before finding if we could get one real encore out of the beloved, prodigal musician? The crowd, as such, kept clapping.

And then I had occasion to amend my previous text message, the one stating that you should always take the house lights against the crowd. I wrote, “except this time.” Mangum had returned to play. Again.

***

Those familiar with Jeff Mangum – those who can identify him by name, without his band attached to it – probably already understand the hoopla, and understand how the announcement of his concert was what pushed me to fly over the Atlantic Ocean for the weekend rather than anything else. For those who don’t, a brief explanation:

Jeff Mangum is an American musician, probably close to the age of 40 if not there yet, who wrote and performed music in the 1990s. A member of the amorphous Elephant 6 collective – essentially a group of friends, many of them from Ruston, LA, who lived in Athens, GA and played music together in a variety of bands and songwriting vehicles, eventually garnering notoriety and popularity on a national scale, though I can’t really say how great that scale was at the time. The collective became known for making great music in a generally throwback manner, with nods to 60s pop, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds, that sort of thing. The three most well-known groups or artists from the Elephant 6 collective, I believe, were Olivia Tremor Control, The Apples in Stereo, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Each project had a Ruston native at its core – The Apples, still active, revolved around Robert Schneider in making their 60’s inspired power pop; Olivia Tremor Control, who have in the past couple years started playing shows again and even recorded a new song, had Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss at the center of their psychedelic pop masterpieces; and Neutral Milk Hotel was the name of Mangum’s longtime project.

If the Apples made the easiest to understand music of the original E6 group, and if Olivia Tremor Control tossed off two records consisting of brilliant pop but also long tracks of tape loops and “experiments,” (and if, for that matter, the younger affiliate Of Montreal actually found the most success in their second, post-2004 recording period), Neutral Milk Hotel are probably the most loved of the E6 bands. I have little grounds for affirming this beyond internet browsing and sharing a love of NMH with friends in college and through 30music, but it is the only band in the group to be enshrined into the 33 1/3 canon, which stands as at least one strong piece of evidence (Kim Cooper’s fabulously reported book serves as the major source for the info in this article, by the by).

In any case, the short story goes that Mangum made two full length albums. The first, On Avery Island, was essentially a solo record that Schneider produced and a bunch of other people played on as necessary. The second, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is the one everybody remembers, featuring a full four-piece band (Mangum on guitar and vocals, Scott Spillane on trumpet, Jeremy Barnes on drums, Julian Koster on just about everything else). After that album, released in February 1998, the band toured for much of the year, and then Mangum didn’t want to do it anymore. He stopped playing shows, broke up the band, disappeared from the indie scene, and didn’t do much publicly for about a decade. Then he started making random appearances at his friends’ shows (including the Olivia Tremor Control reunion shows), and then he played a random show in Brooklyn last winter, and finally this year it was announced he would play a few shows on the east coast and a festival in England. That catches you up as far as the quick and dirty goes.

As for my attendance, the story is as follows: upon learning about the shows, I first thought about going to the festival (I’m still considering it), but then realized that his dates in the Boston area coincided with the wedding I was invited to. And since it would have been impractical to go to Boston on a Saturday night when I was meant to be in Harwich, I fixed my eyes on making the show at Sanders Theater on a Friday night.

This was the first show I have ever gone to that involved buying tickets immediately, on the day of. Never have I had to deal with the frustrating process of queuing up online and calling repeatedly in hopes of getting through for one or two seats. I tried on a Thursday when pre-ticket sales were supposedly on sale, but they “sold out” in minutes. The next day, I geared up for the gates to open, clicked and clicked and called and called, varying between requesting one or two seats (in case I could find an interested +1), despairing that despite total preparation, I would be left in the cold. So long to the wedding as well, I thought, it wouldn’t be worth the $700 flight.

And then, at last, I got through. One seat, in the balcony, for September 9th, 2011, at Sanders Theater in Cambridge, MA. I had my ticket to see Jeff Mangum.

***

Whether instituted at Mangum’s suggestion, by Wordless Music, or by the Sanders Theater management, the controls on the tickets were stricter than for normal shows. Due to great concern about scalping, ticket holders, all of whom had to pick up at will call, were required not only to show ID but a print out of their ticket receipt or confirmation. I was not alone in not reading the fine print on the email detailing the process we ticket holders got the week before. I thought perhaps to tell the uptight dude running said process that we lived in 2011 and not 2004; he might have easily countered that most people have a smart phone in 2011, which could have shown the confirmation as well. Foiled in my mind, I found a Staples, printed out my ticket confirmation, and returned armed for music.

Sanders Theater, home to Memorial Hall, is a church-like building on the western edge of Harvard’s campus. Brick and stately, with busts of significant people on each side, and a tall-roofed hall that held 1,500 people, mostly in wooden benches, it’s a theater my grandmother comes often with her Russian-language community of elderly folks to see classical performances. The theater was the perfect setting for Mangum to play; it could have been the source of the images depicted on NMH posters like what they were selling at the show, with old-fashioned victrolas and society dames in the balcony and the general love of old and lost that in this scene, in the hall of Sanders Theater before Mangum’s 6th official show of his return, almost felt pornographically kitschy and attuned to the NMH aesthetic. What I mostly mean to say, though, is that Sanders Theater was a good place to see this performance.

I began milling around the building just after 7, waiting for doors to open at 7:30 – concert literature boasted of a prompt 8:00pm start. Also, seeing as I had pre-wedding buffoonery to join as soon as possible on the Cape, I thought I could help encourage an on-time start by setting the example and arriving in my seat early. Outside, a small crowd walked around the grassy plot in front of the building. A few stray fans walked around either asking if someone needed a ticket or, more commonly, if someone was selling a ticket. Hanging to our north was a soon to be full moon, not shining in the late daylight but nevertheless impressive, ominous. Amongst the crowd I saw a larger percentage of flannel shirts worn than I’ve seen since middle school, probably – whether the guys sporting the checkered look did it as a conscious homage to Mangum’s preferred form of outerwear or because that’s just how they roll, I quietly thanked the universe that my girlfriend’s taste do not include that style.

The doors opened at 7:30, I entered, found my seat, and began reading. Slowly, the hall filled with spectators, and by the time the show unpromptly began at 8:17pm, it was about two-thirds full, and a diverse mix – the tattooed, dads with their sons (I wonder who dragged whom to the show), college bros, and indie types like the couple next to me who spoke of not wanting to seem all “anti lo-fi” but really preferring the earlier Mountain Goats records. Of course, diverse in a relative sense; most of the crowd appeared to be middle-class white, with a few Asian, Latino, and other minorities breaking up the monochromaticity. The gender divide was fairly even however, which for a nominally “indie rock” show speaks of Neutral Milk Hotel’s broad appeal. In the background, the sound system piped in recordings of chanting that sounded African, Asian, or in between (i.e. Arabic).

The gentleman running Wordless Music, a man possibly so excited by the monumental nature of this show that he awkwardly quizzed people about whether they were coming or going in the ticket collection process, appeared to applause and introduced the show. He explained why photos and recording devices were barred; not just, as I guessed, because Mangum might have asked for this restriction but because, as I realized when he said it, it’s really annoying when everybody is recording the show and taking pictures with the phone and everything else. When we live through our handheld devices, we’re not living as much, and a live performance from Jeff Mangum was a place deserving of living as much as anything else.

Without further ado, a classical string quartet going by Acme came on. Four girls dressed casually in jeans and what not, they sat and played three pieces by Erik Satie that I noted only for the long bowstrokes that featured heavily, in the first two pieces especially. Meanwhile, the crowd seeped in during the 3rd piece and grew closer to capacity. The new arrivals, ignoring restrictions, used technology rampantly; at least, one guy in the row in front of me posted “Jeff Mangum” on his facebook status. Inescapable.

Similarly inescapable was the last song of Acme’s set, a 20-minute or so rendition of a Gavin Bryars piece called, “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” Over a tape loop of an English homeless man singing the titular refrain a few times, Acme gradually built up an elaborate backing, took over the lead melodic role, and then faded into support and then nothingness. Interesting conceptually, the piece wore out the patience of the crowd, at least based on my section and some comments I saw on a web board afterward.

The song and the set ended around 9:00pm. A few last stragglers joined the crowd, a few others stepped out for a cigarette, a breath of fresh air, or, paradoxically, both. I’d be lying if I said there was a great tension in the crowd, necessarily, but I certainly felt eager, and as the break extended to 15 minutes and then 20, that excitement surely built in other parts of the now-packed hall. At about 9:20pm, a fan in the balcony whistled loudly, exhortatively.

On cue, the house lights dimmed. Seconds later, Jeff Mangum, clad in trademark flannel, emerged from the back of the stage, sat down in a chair between four guitars and two microphones, picked up the guitar, and began to strum In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s epic centerpiece, “Oh Comely.”

***

As a person with spiritual aspirations but an overly rational mind, I allow myself very few speculations about life “finding” me in any ineffable way. One of those speculations regards music. I believe that in my life music has frequently entered at just the right moment, just the time when I was ready for it. I’m aware that as I tout my examples they could be easily ripped apart as spurious, but all the same, I have a feeling of serendipity regarding the music in my life.

The first example was finally getting into Saves the Day and the rest of the brand of emo my friends listened to in high school not long after my first and only high school break up. This example becomes all the more laughable when you consider I dated the girl for, really, three weeks, and that I had no real excuse for feeling so sad, just as most high school boys from upper-middle class backgrounds who listened to emo had no real excuse for feeling so sad, but there it was. Similarly, Nirvana, The Beatles, and Dylan hit me in college at all the right points, when I was finally ready for them. I remember listening to Blonde on Blonde for the first time on a Delta/Song Airlines flight home from Fort Lauderdale after wrecking my engine of the first car I ever owned by driving it for 5.5K miles and 8-9 months without ever getting the oil changed. Go ahead and tell me that wasn’t an appropriate time to hear about everybody getting stoned.

Few records found me at a more appropriate time than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I’m not sure how long I had heard about it before I received it, or when it first came on my radar; between hearing of Of Montreal in early 2004 as the first aural introduction to Elephant 6, listening to Pet Sounds in May of 2004 for the first time and knowing that Brian Wilson was a big influence on E6, and maybe falling in love with Saturday Looks Good to Me’s Every Night over the summer of 2004, a band All Music Guide shamelessly linked to NMH (shamelessly because there’s not much relation between the two, but AMG, personal friends of Fred Thomas, SLGTM’s front man, have supported him in every way possible, which is great by the way), as well as writing for 30music where a few people touted the album as indeed worth it, I became aware that I needed to try it out. Still, I was skeptical; besides not wanting to join the proverbial gang, I thought about the new comic someone had designed for 30music with a girl protesting that she was into NMH before everybody knew them, the joke being that everybody knew them already.

Without directly resisting or seeking out the album, I skated by until mid-September 2004. Home for my mother’s funeral, delayed by the unfortunate timing of Rosh Hashanah that year and the unavailability of a rabbi, I was on my AIM at the kitchen table in my dad’s house when one of the writers for 30music, a girl named Marisha, started talking to me. I’m sure I didn’t tell her about what was going on, being as I only knew her through online correspondence and not all that well but, perhaps because I had requested it from her earlier or, more likely, she told me she would send it to me at some earlier time, she sent me In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

Again, those who have heard the album understand why it was appropriate at that time. Simple harmonically and melodically, but with a grab bag of weird and interesting sounds (accordions, singing saws, horns, fuzz on the guitars, and so on), the album had the immediate hooks to draw me in to its songs and its lyrics, which in their classic melodies and vivid themes spoke to the heart, to beauty and sadness and joy and pain and revelry and exhaustion. In large part inspired by reading Anne Frank’s diary, Mangum concocted a gritty and sparkling tribute to music and life, revolving around nine basic songs and two instrumental interludes. It was a song cycle, with two pairs of tracks explicitly tied together, a series of intersecting lyrical themes, and very basic chord changes. Weird and at the same time immediately accessible, direct and loud and soft and naked, always honest, the album creates its listening audience, such that almost anybody who is thoughtful and patient enough to put it on two or three times will fall in love with it.

Clearly, it didn’t take me long to join the NMH orthodoxy. Still a newcomer to the guitar, I learned almost all of the songs on the album. The first two tracks are in F; 3, 4, 6, and 8 are in G; 11 in G#; 9 in E; 5 and 10 instrumentals; and I never learned 7. Also, just about the only thing Mangum does with his chord structure out of the norm is to make the 3 or the 6 chord major instead of minor; he plays a B major instead of minor on track 4, “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1”; a C major instead of minor on track 11, “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2”; and a E major instead of minor on “Oh Comely”. In the spring of 2005, I performed an open mic on my college campus where I played a song I wrote about my mom and covered “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1,” enjoying the rickety liberation that Mangum’s vocal encouraged me to sing with.

***

Mangum began this show, as mentioned, with “Oh Comely”, that E major to C major progression that, in its dissonance, sounds significantly sadder and more weighty than it would if he just stuck with the E minor (these chords, reversed, are how the Kinks get the shimmering effect on the initial strum of “Lola”). The crowd, unsure what Mangum’s tone would be on the night and afraid to spoil anything, stayed silent as he boomed through the 8-minute song, humming the horn parts that enter in the last section of the song, and then ending the song suddenly, without the ritardando of the album version. The crowd erupted, Mangum thanked them, and settled in for the night.

In terms of a concert, it was pretty straightforward. I’ll post the set list below, but it mostly conformed to expectations – every major In the Aeroplane… song was played, as were the best cuts off On Avery Island: “Song Against Sex” especially, but also “Naomi,” “Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone,” and “Baby For Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now.” Mangum played a Roky Erickson cover that he had played at previous shows on this tour, a simple lyric about love that fit in well.

Mangum also had an easy grip of the crowd. He changed a lyric in “Naomi” to refer to Cambridge and then, almost like a nervous newcomer on the scene, asked if the crowd heard the reference. He invited everybody to sing along to “In the Aeroplane over the Sea”, and then again on the last verse of “Ghost.” I never sing along at shows, a habit I must have gleaned from reading some clever bastard’s writing about why it’s lame to sing at shows instead of listening to the artist – I don’t claim originality – and while that’s a fair point for many shows, this one had the feeling of a reunion between Mangum and his fans, of a community; I joined in on “Ghost”, and later on “Holland, 1945,” and I felt the chill of union with others washing over me as I sang about the girl falling from 14 stories high.

The communal aspect played a huge role in this concert, which was as much a gathering as an artistic performance. The crowd reminded me of two other concerts I’ve been to: the first is a Jonathan Richman show I went to earlier this year, whose crowd was similar to this in their eagerness to lap up everything the performer said and then encourage him to come up with more. Some in the crowd shouted for “Little Birds”, a song mentioned in Cooper’s book as a dark, harrowing, disturbing song, the only post-In the Aeroplane… song Mangum has performed in public, and that only once 12-13 years ago. This knowledge of the artist corresponded with folks at the JR show who knew Richman’s trademark leg kick dance by heart and hoped to see it come out every other song.

The other show it reminded me of was a Cat Power show in Greensboro the summer of 2006, shortly after she had declared her sobriety, and just before she hit into the fullest boom of her career, it seems, in performing cover songs with sultry Southern swagger. There she stopped many of her songs in the middle out of frustration with the sound in the monitors, shared the news about her sobriety to great cheers, and finally ended the set only to light a cigarette and hold an impromptu Q&A. There as at the Mangum show, the crowd understood that they were dealing with a delicate artist, and so coaxed her along, supporting her at every stumble and wobble, hoping she could ride that bike on her own and amaze us with her talents therein.

This eager support did indeed coax some singular moments out of the shared Mangum/Sanders Theater crowd performance. During “Baby for Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now,” the sound system cut off, and Mangum, losing the sound in the monitors, stood up and walked to the front of the stage without breaking his rhythm, sitting down and continuing to play, his booming voice still reaching us in the nosebleeds, everybody leaning on the edge of their seat to join in the intimacy. In an interlude between songs a few minutes later, somebody from the balcony shouted, “Now I can die happy!”, leading to a funny exchange where Mangum thanked the guy without knowing what he said, then finally nodded his understanding and said he could die happy too, to great cheers. Finally, before his last pre-encore song, as the shouts for “Little Birds” and “Communist Daughter” and others, he interrupted to ask, “Ok, do you guys want to sing Holland now?” For all the stories of damaged genius and reluctant performer, Mangum had a fair share of self-awareness and detachment about the show.

***

Anybody who’s made it this far is more than forgiven for wondering what the big deal is, then. If Mangum played songs not as a crazy savant but as a normal, centered man, if the crowd enjoyed it and supported it, isn’t that enough? Can’t we just go home happy? Can’t I just die happy without writing all of this?

There’s still something to explore. There’s the issue of the museum and the battle between narrative and beauty.

In another 33 1/3 book, one about the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society album, Andy Miller writes about the fifth track, “Last of the Steam-Powered Trains.” The whole song is a joke on the Kinks still playing R&B, and on a deeper level about, as Miller writes, “How do you reconcile your past and present?” The lyric talks about the last rebel, locked up in a museum, and Miller later compares that quixotic lyric to the Kinks’ fate, especially regarding this album, a failure at the time but enshrined in the museum of rock after the fact.

Attending any rock show, especially for non-social people like myself, is something of a strange phenomenon. Often, shows are just live performances of what you can hear on the album from the comfort of your home. It’s a vehicle for supporting the museum artifacts that are modern musicians, but unless the band itself is notorious for putting on a great or special show, there is often little extra benefit to the spectator beyond the social experience and that feeling of altruism.

Further, any reunion or comeback tour becomes immediately an exercise in nostalgia. Especially the first time around, no one wants to hear anything new. So an older band or artist is reviving material from 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, playing it in a new context, but also owing great fidelity to the original. The spontaneity and improvisation that often serves as the key selling point of a live performance is not only unlikely but not desired in this case. Which leads us to narrative and beauty.

Before Jeff Mangum returned from his self-imposed hiatus to appear at shows again and then play them on his own, he existed as a narrative for his fans. We watch sports and consume art, I’d argue, for two main reasons: narrative and beauty (in sports there’s also identification, a cruder if more essential concept that, for this essay, I’m not interested in). Sports, for example, offers endless narrative, as various plot lines are shaped, erased, altered, changed, renewed, and grafted on to men hitting, throwing, or bouncing a ball at or past one another. These narratives are largely meaningless, and also rather arbitrary, but they are enjoyable, and life too is largely meaningless and arbitrary when we dare think about it.

On the beauty side of the occasion, sports suffer compared to art. In all my years of passionate and then casual fandom, I can think of only one athlete I witnessed in person who consistently performed beautifully: Pedro Martinez, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox during my high school and college years, time of my passionate fandom. Otherwise, due to us taking for granted the unbelievable athleticism of modern athletes, and the competition level that somehow renders most athletes on an equal plane with one another, I haven’t witnessed anybody else at that level.

Art, of course, provides a great deal of beauty, as well as a great deal of thought into how we live our lives and what it’s all about. On the macro scale, however, art rarely provides us with easy narrative. Everybody is accessible in our time, on facebook and twitter and all the rest of it, and it becomes hard to idolize or glorify artists, never mind construct back stories about them. I’ve been lucky enough, through my time with 30music, to meet a lot of my favorite musicians, and I understand that they’re just normal men and women who are good at music and who have gone on their own path, not heroes or idols or anything else. I could make a narrative up about them, but it wouldn’t be any more special than making up a narrative about you, or about the guy who records their sound, or who serves the drink, or anyone else.

That said, Mangum offered us one of the few time-tested narratives in art: that of the damaged artist who burned out rather than fade away. He became the Internet Age’s Salinger, its Cobain, its Greta Garbo, a feat all the harder because it’s the Internet Age, where no one can disappear and none are forgotten. A myth rose around him, a sense that in some way He was not like us, whether for ill or for good or, as it is with most chosen ones, for both.

Which of course is in some way ridiculous, as most narratives are when deconstructed. Mangum wrote a couple great records, went on tour, got tired, and stopped playing and talking to people in public. It wasn’t really that big of a deal. When pulling out that 33 1/3 book about In the Aeroplane…, I was surprised to see it was written in 2005. Of course, I must have read it as soon as it came out. In 2005, Mangum had been gone for seven years. Seven years, when observed from a few steps back, should hardly be long enough to build up a legend, no matter how good the album was. And yet, the rumor mill had long been churning, with brief reports flaring against the dark backdrop of mystery enveloping Mangum, a Pitchfork interview and the quest to find him from Creative Loafing most notable. Never mind that Mangum made it reasonably clear, as much as he could, that he just didn’t want to play music anymore, for reasons that included the grind of being a popular touring musician, sadness and depression over his friends’ continued suffering despite his own success, his desire to remain himself at a time when people overreacted to the depth of his music, and just because he didn’t want to play anymore. It sounds strange for him to stop doing what he loved to do, but it also makes sense for his mood to change, if we allow people freedom to decide the course of their own life. Mangum obviously either had that innate sense of freedom or acquired it through the success or struggle that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’s reception brought him. He changed.

Then why come back? What changed between 2003, say, and now? Did he need the money (unlikely)? Did he just finally realize how much people out there cared about him as a musician and as a person? Did he just get over it? We as consumers of culture and as thinkers and as people also have the freedom to come up with our answer to that first question.

For example, I constructed a narrative that makes sense to me – Mangum hit on a raw nerve with In the Aeroplane…, both with listeners and himself. Cooper often posits that Mangum may have “channeled” his songs rather than write them, and while the idea comes off as overly hippie-dippy, there is something to it: many of Mangum’s melodies are simple and effective in a way that makes them appear timeless, more discovered than written – a more common example of the eternal melody that blends into what came before and yet stands out on its own is Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Neutral Milk Hotel songs have that feeling. “Two-headed Boy Pt. 2” would sound brilliant covered by a professional church-type choir, especially the last bridge, the “When we break, we all wait for our miracle,” section, where a perfect harmony/counter-melody offers itself a register above the main melody.

So there’s something fully-formed about the songs on this album, eternal. The lyrics trade in ugliness, death, rebirth, pain, joy, and similar weighty themes. For this reason, the album becomes a hit with everyone who really listens to it. Those listeners react to it in a deep way, and expect something out of Mangum. Mangum meanwhile has to perform these songs over and over, songs that came out of a personal lode of creativity but also emotion and energy; he tapped into a source inside himself that maybe was hidden, maybe was painful to reach, maybe opened up other difficult thoughts and flows. Performing these things might have challenged Mangum, might have physically or emotionally or spiritually have hurt him and drained him night after night. Add that to his new obligations to the press and his fans, and to his disappointment upon coming home and seeing others don’t have it the way he does, and we can imagine the beginnings of his funk.

From there, it’s not a huge step to the end of the funk. Love and support from those dear to him; understanding (which he flexed several times in this concert) that his songs are loved and he is loved as well by strangers out there; and time and distance that allows him to process the energy released in writing these songs, to detach himself from the creative process and to wholly embrace these songs as now formed entities, as something he can perform for others without giving a piece of himself from that dark place, and all of a sudden playing music for strangers doesn’t become as hard.

That’s my theory, at least. Like most plausible narratives about other human beings, especially strangers, people we can’t really imagine or know beyond superficial levels, it’s probably total bullshit. Just like Mangum’s level-headed control of the crowd ruined every narrative of damaged genius. That’s the thing about narratives about people: they’re highly contingent on facts we don’t know and feelings that often change, and memory besides.

Which leaves us with beauty. On a night where all we wanted was the museum versions of the song, where the early bootlegs from a Mangum comeback show suggested he was playing his songs straight up, with little nuance compared to the album versions except some added sweetness in his voice, where we all knew what we were getting, and where the chance of improvisation and narrative spectacle was minimal, all we were left with was beauty. Which may be the ultimate reason Mangum came back: to perform his songs that many of us find beautiful, to allow us to reconnect to songs we’ve heard so many times we know them front and back, to hear them for the first time live (I assume), to join a community for an hour and unite in something bigger than ourselves. In something beautiful.

***

“Except this time,” I texted to Ben, as Mangum reappeared and the crowd roared and the house lights came down again. I, out of my seat, settled into a spot in the aisles. Now I was closer to the stage, anyway. Mangum wanted added closeness too, apparently – after picking up the fourth guitar, the nicest looking one, a red and white one he hadn’t used yet, he walked out to the front of the stage again, away from the microphones, and began strumming vigorously. There were only two songs he really hadn’t played yet, “Communist Daughter” and “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1,” and the latter, one of the clear highlights of an album and career chock full of highlights, was the obvious choice, both from context and the vigorous strum.

So Mangum ended the night with his spookiest, most unfettered hit. His unamplified voice still rang out in rickety liberation, but there was the triumph of the return in the air, not a chauvinistic triumph but a communal one. In Cooper’s book, E6 member and contemporaneous Mangum girlfriend Laura Carter suggested, prophetically, that what Mangum wanted to do was, “be a recluse and then come out with an album in ten years and shock everybody.” While little can shock or surprise us in the Internet Age, and we’re still waiting on the album, a couple of years after the decade Carter suggested, Mangum has returned. Locked up in a museum, but returning to his songs and their beauty.


***

Jeff Mangum show setlist for Sanders Theater on 9th September, 2011:

1. Oh Comely
2. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2
3. I Love the Living You (Roxy Erickson cover)
4. In The Aeroplane Over the Sea
5. Song Against Sex
6/7. A Baby for Pree/Where You’ll Find Me Now
8. Naomi
9. Ghost
10. Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone
11/12. King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 1-3
13. Holland, 1945

Encore
14. Engine

2nd Encore
15. Two-Headed Boy Pt. 1

Source: My memory and this website.

Three Last Thoughts on Rwanda

I don't pretend to be able to summarize in a few pithy words what my/our trip to Rwanda was like. Actually, I can easily pretend to be able to do it, I just don't feel like it. Enough internet ink has been spilled on this site about the trip to Rwanda, I think: this post will bring me over 14,000 words. So anybody who is reading this and cares about what my overall impressions on the trip were should be able to pull something together based on the seven (including this one) posts and all that is contained therein.

At the same time, I want to write one more post about Rwanda. Not only because I promised it in the first post on Rwanda (more to myself than to anyone else), but because there is more I can say. And more I want to tell. So in lieu of any grand conclusions about the trip or huge statements, I give to you three little snapshots, events from the trip that encapsulated much of what happened as a whole, while also providing some entertainment. These events are not in chronological order.

Live at Gisenyi

Lake Kivu the morning after the storm.

The trip was harrowing; twice I have mentioned the thundering rains that could have ended our trip prematurely. We rode 10 passengers in a van designed to carry 14 passengers max in theory, but a van with bulky but thin cushions that did little to hide the feel of the steel bars beneath, a van with seats too close together so that there was no leg room even for the midgets like me, a van that had a multi-colored lamp inside that could do the disco rotation as needed, and a van that came from Dubai, where it was apparently the van for a hair salon. Riding in the van for four hours already that day (with stops), we were worn out as it was, and in no condition to weather the storm peacefully. We were saved by the steady driving of our main man Pascal, a driver who switched on to our group with the new van and who, on his first day, wore a bowling shirt with the name "Baker Hughes" stitched on the back. Maybe a code name? Or his bowling nickname, ala The Jesus?

In any case, the trip was harrowing. It led to our only night out of Kigali, a small hotel on a hill overlooking Lake Kivu, a Great Lake (Africa style, obviously) on the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. We arrived shortly after dusk and, after divvying up rooms and unpacking, a few of us went out on the porch and talked and watched the lightning storm. I brought my guitar out and provided quiet and (I hoped) non-intrusive background music to the more serious conversations around me.There was an uneasy beauty of the moment.

We went to a relatively lame hotel restaurant by the water, mosquitoes infiltrating the overpriced dining hall, but our bonds were tight and the chocolate mousse cake I ordered (for dinner) good. Indeed, though I was weary from the car ride and the trip in general, hitting its 11th and 12th days, and though this trip marked the final high water mark before travel and group fatigue wore on my experience, we were at a high water mark at that restaurant, and the glow of our mzingu bubble on Kivu preserved that positive feeling.

We returned to the hotel just shy of midnight. I was most interested in going to sleep, but there was a general clamor for some music. And so I pulled out my guitar and played some tunes, pulling from the back catalog of hits ("Barcelona," "Ain't No Minivan Mama"), the fruitful summer of 2010 writing I had done ("Cellulite", "Stuck at the Start"), and the two Rwandan-inspired tunes I had written ("Any Given Day," "Hey, Mzingu", and yes, I did just cite a bunch of my own songs that most people have never heard. It's my blog, roll with it). My lovely audience that I would have liked to take home supported and enjoyed cigars, waragi, tequila, and the company, as well as the scenic backdrop, one of the nicest I will ever play in front of in my amateur musician career. The beauty here was easier, more exhausted, but joyous, a true cap on the high water experience.

An hour and a half later, I woke up in my bed in the hotel room to the evil sound of a nearby buzzing mosquito. My roommate was not on anti-malaria pills and had avoided vaccinations and in general was doing things all naturally to protect his body (we enjoyed watching him put together his herbal cocktail each morning at breakfast). No problem; I had all the respect in the world. And when we roomed together in Gisenyi, with two beds but only one mosquito net, I said, "No problem, you take it. Mosquitoes don't like me much anyway." My macho stubbornness striking again, as you see.

So when the mosquito woke me, I lay still for a few minutes, thinking I could wait it out. I slapped at the air aimlessly as well, or not aimlessly since I could hear him, but with very poor accuracy. The quiet desperation of hearing a mosquito buzzing around you and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop her, and knowing that the noise (definitely the noise and not so much the fact that she will bite you) would not let you sleep, and that sleep is the thing you most need to preserve your calm, your patience, and your sanity, this quiet desperation set in for me.

My roommate, fortunately, is a good sleeper. Fortunate, because my solution was to turn on the lights, sit as still as possible in a poor lotus position, and kill as many mosquitoes as necessary to allow me to sleep. There is always the illusion, after all, that it's only one mosquito that is buzzing around your head; their buzzes sound the same. I killed one mosquito. A buzz returned. I was not fooled. I killed another mosquito. I swung and missed at a few more. Somehow, my roommate stirred but did not wake. I imagined myself to be a modern day Mr. Miyagi with a lower hit-rate. Much lower.

In the end, I killed about 10 mosquitoes over 20-30 minutes, turned out the lights, and pulled the sheet over my head. I slept soundly if incompletely until the morning.

The World's (or at least Rwanda's) finest football pitch (Or backdrop)

A group photo of the memorable pitch.

East Rwanda, on one of the rare spaces in the country flat enough and big enough for a football (i.e. soccer) pitch, with 25 some-odd (we played about 13 v 13) boys aged from 16-24 or so who were ostensibly sophomores in high school, all orphaned or made vulnerable by the genocide, in the sunny but fading late afternoon light, with a beautiful vista to the east that suffered not at all for the fact that we wouldn't be able to see the sunset over it.

That was the scene. We were visiting the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village, and as part of our visit, we got to play football with the kids (or basketball, or volleyball, but I chose the footie). The village is an oasis, of sorts, for the aforementioned vulnerable and/or orphaned population of Rwanda, operating as a high school for these kids. So far they have 250 students, admitting a new freshman class of 125 students each year to hit a maximum of 500 students in two more years.

But enough about the technicalities. On the pitch, the kids are about what you would expect them to be: talented, able, but lacking savvy, teamwork, or foresight that comes with coaching and paying attention to sports. Understandable, of course, considering they have a lot more important things to deal with than being good at football; this isn't a factory or even a competitive high school. It's just a place for kids to play the game.

So a couple of us joined in the game, running up and down, making a couple plays here and there and getting frustrated from time to time. I learned the appropriate words to call for the ball, "Karibu" (meaning "welcome") and "he-he" (short e's; the word means "here"), and called for the ball plenty, but didn't really get many touches - there were a couple sweet crosses I made that didn't lead to goals, but ah well, I screwed up plenty times too. Meanwhile, the light grew hazier and the beauty rose to match it.

And then we had to leave. The game was still going, and we had to leave. My unfortunate response was to fall into "Cheese Fries or nothing" mode*. I ignored the first several calls. Then I turned in and gave up, gathering my t-shirt, walking sulkily off the field and probably spitting to the side a few times more than necessary. I entered the car and, making sure to voice my frustration, said, "Tha's some bullshit."

After a pause, somebody asked what this so-called "bullshit" was.

I hemmed and hawed as I got the words out, then said, "When will we ever get a chance to play on a field like that in a setting like that? We can eat in Mzingu restaurants for the rest of our life," in reference to our rush back to Kigali.

Well then.

Another lost temper. Another blown fuse. And though I won the battle this time - I got the cheese fries, so to speak - I lost the war, failing to make it two weeks without losing my cool. Haval, as we would say. Haval.

But it was a good line. And a pretty place.

Our Redemption From the Children

The scene as I first saw it.

I sat in Nyamata church, the second of two churches on the day. We had been to the Nyabarongo River earlier, where genocidal killers dumped their victims' bodies to "send them back to Ethiopia", via Lake Victoria. We had been to Ntarama church, of the bloodied Sunday school wall of the previous post. Whatever one might say about the reasons for our trip, the futile nature of it, the inability we faced in plumbing the depths of our or others' trauma, it can at least be conceded that we had not had the most pleasant day.

After writing a poem in my journal and sitting inside the church on my own for a few minutes, I heard a harmonica play. Evan was blowing out a tune; "Love Me Do" it sounded like. In an otherwise solitary and silent moment, it made for a pleasant break. I went outside to see where he was.

When I got outside, I found that Evan was not just playing on his harmonica, but playing on his harmonica for twenty or more schoolchildren. Others from our group were out there dancing and smiling and talking to the kids, taking pictures and then showing the kids their image on the camera. No better balm in this world did God invent than the smile and laughter of a curious child.

We spent the next hour walking around the village, chasing after different groups of schoolchildren and picking them out, spinning them around, hugging them, and laughing with them. We drank over-sugared Coke and broke into sprints after the over-cute kids. We alternately terrorized and brightened everyone's day. On my trip in Europe,

Ben made the point, in Hamburg, that no matter how unsuccessful we were in achieving our objectives, or how annoying our requests might have been, we certainly made everyone's day a little bit more unusual and, dare I say it while trying to avoid sounding arrogant, more special. Well, that was at least ten times as true in Rwanda, and even more true in Nyamata village.

But we, of course, were the bigger beneficiaries. I talked about the dissonance between visiting terrible sites and experiencing beautiful people and scenery: this was the greatest dissonance we felt, and the loveliest. It was the most special moment we had on the trip, I feel, and I doubt my companions would protest too much.


Ah hell, one more bonus note from Rwanda - the last night


Our going away party featured a long round of speeches from everybody we managed to rope into our goodbye circle from our friends in Rwanda - potential sugar daddies, sons of reggae stars, good friends we had met in Israel, our friendly hostel security guard, our guides, friends from our blog we weren't as close to - and from us. Then I played on my creaky guitar, loud enough over the roar of the fire to bother the other guests in the hostel and lead us to leave the hostel and go to a nearby traffic circle. Where, after waking up the guard on duty sleeping in the fountain itself (no running water), we proceeded to run through a few more songs. Then a few more goodbyes. Then a giddy, solemn march back to the hostel, I on an improvise-ready little riff with Evan accompanying on his harmonica to a little ditty while the others reveled in the beautiful possibility and sadness of Kigali's night sky, together for the last time. The trip was everything it was supposed to be, even when it wasn't. It was every happiness we could hope for even when we were sad, every calm realization we sought even when we (I) lost our cool. It was certainly a success, a victory, an experience, and something to remember. And, almost a month later, I can still say with certainty that I don't think it'll be a last time, either in Africa or Rwanda. No, one way or another, this was just a beginning.







The Chorus of the other Rwanda related song I wrote, by the bonfire.

Meditations After the War

Because after all, war grants even the most unimportant thoughts gravitas. Anyway, collected herein are a few different observations, short tales, and comments on life in Israel, or more specifically, my life in Israel. Scattered within are photos taken either by me in Masada or Akko, or pictures from my brilliant photographer cousin.




It's a small thing, but in two of the three movie theaters in our area, and I presume in movie theaters around the country, an intermission is taken during the showing of the movie. Sometimes, it's at the midway point, like when we saw the urban gritty Linha da Passe, and sometimes it's well past that, as with Oscar darling Slumdog Millionnaire stopping with our chai walla just about to answer the final question, it seemed. It's an interesting non sequitor for a society that always seems to be rushing, a contradiction among many.

***



Just this weekend I made it out to my first show in Tel Aviv of live guitar-based music that portends to be modern. Really, I made it to two shows, if briefly.

It started with a certain colleague, call her, say, "Amy", and I picking up another colleague and friend, Karyn. The three of us drove down Ben Yehuda and then Allenby, driving on streets officially reserved for commercial traffic, and after some circling, we found a parking spot near the club we had our eye on, on Lillenblum St. Lightning lit up the sky to our south, ominous but we hoped not impending.



The gate was 25 shekels to get in (these days just north of $6). We paid for three and walked in to a dark, crowded bar room. The bar itself was opposite the door, with high tables and stools to the right of the door, along the wall, and a stage area in the opposite corner. The place was small but packed (i.e. about 40 people). On stage, a girl with curly brown hair that almost covered her face when she leaned over her acoustic guitar sang in Hebrew. While we couldn't understand her, the mood translated quite well: gloomy, emotive, and dark. Even though she was an opening act, the singer's downward pull, combined with the lack of seats, pushed us out of the bar. Fortunately, it was a quick enough rejection for us to get our money back.

This led to plan B. We called a fourth friend, Andrea, who was stationed near her home in Florentin, a working-class neighborhood in south Tel Aviv known for its nightlife. She was at the 8'' MM Pianobar, and they too had live music. This would reunite our dinner/bar group of a weekend before, and seemed like the only appropriate option.

Well, we did try to add someone else to the mix, but she was driving from somewhere amidst a pounding hailstorm and so was unenthusiastic about continuing her night.

Anyway, after some wandering the wrong way down one way streets in a strangely deserted Florentin, we found a decent parking spot. I ingested a quick dinner as the girls drank coffee and warmed up, and then we walked over to the bar.
This was also a crowded bar, but bigger, with a second tier for the bar itself, the lower floor reserved for the stage, the piano, and a few tables. Andrea and a friend saved us seats, and so we squeezed into the corner of the bar and watched the show.



The show was put on by the performer Zaak. Zaak, I gather, is the singer, a handsome sabra with a high voice who strummed on the acoustic like all folkies should, except with a little more South American-styled rhythm. With him was a shaggy-haired bassist who looked quite similar to the girl on stage at the other bar, except he was a smiley dude rather than a mopey woman.

It was a cute enough performance. Zaak held sway in two languages (Hebrew and English), and played a few cards nicely, if repetitively. The big one was the covers card; first he played back to back Prince jams, which was fun, but for every surprising Pearl Jam tune ("Indifference", though he muffed the poison lyric) there was a too cutesy reach into "No Diggity" land. And on all the covers, the bass player had a little bit too much fun with upper registers and wah-wah pedals. Add that to the crowd being a little bit over clappy (i.e. clapping out the beat for every song), and the show dragged a little bit.

Some of that dragging was saved by the fact that we apparently sat at the VIP table. Squeezed next to Andrea was the father of the artist, and his family spilled around the table. While sitting next to them, we found out that Zaak is fluent in a bunch of languages, that all the songs he played were original (well, except the covers), and that, well, he's a charming young man.

Anyway, an inroad of some sort has been made. Will this lead to another true breakthrough performance? Future remains hazy.



***

A fantastic window into any society, if the opportunity presents itself (so perhaps we should qualify that as a fantastic window into any urban society), is the train system.

I ride the trains twice or three times a week. The ride from Herzliya to the south Tel Aviv station is just under 20 minutes, a huge save on gas and aggravation in evening TA traffic. Then there's the chance to catch up on reading my morning paper - usually by that point I've finished the Israeli paper, the Ha'Aretz, and I'm on my way through the IHT. Round trip costs me 15 shekels, and the only real drawback is that I usually have to wait for the return train twenty minutes longer than I'd like.

There are a few basic facets of the train system that one has to accept in Israel. There's the obvious - it's not a metro, it's more of a commuter rail, riding along the eastern frame of the city, side by side with the main highway, the Ayalon. The ride is much more comfortable than one in Moscow, or even Madrid, as the trains are amply sized, suited for the amount of passengers that ride the rails. I rarely have to consult guides for how to get a good spot on the metro, for example, as a seat is almost always available.

At first I was very impressed with the speed and punctuality of the trains. This was mostly because the impression I got from past teachers at our school was that the public transportation system in Israel was in shambles, a no man's land of dirty buses running on disjointed schedules. Of course, those teachers were trying to sell me cars. Anyway, that positive first impression wore away as I realized that trains often showed up late and I got used to having a pair of seats to myself, an accomodation that the trains could not always meet during rush hour.



The other things that you have to get used to are particular to Israel. Like the prevalence of rifles on the train. Assault rifles or sniper rifles, occasionally handguns, all a part of your trip into the city. Now, they're not quite floating around; usually they're in the hands of a young man or woman dressed in dull green army garb, a soldier for the land. Nowhere else in Israel have I encountered such a concentration of soldiers in uniform with their guns in tow, and the viable reactions are two: to get used to it and pay no mind, or to freak out and jump one of the soldiers, breaking the end of the gun with your bare hands so that they can't use it to fight back, and then continue in their humiliation by stomping on the gun, confirming your overwhelming masculinity and alpha male status. Or you can just not take the trains, I guess.

Then there are the non-stop political ads. Billboards line the train station tunnels, representing not only the big three parties (Likud, Kadima, and Labor, from right to left), but also a few of the fringe outfits. In addition, the big ones often campaign against each other, so you might see a picture of Tzipi Livni (Kadima) looking leaderly and strong (as well as pretty) on her own party billboard, then an unflattering picture of her along with an imposing picture of Bibi Netanyahu flanking the strong yet shrewd Ehud Barak on his Labor party poster, and then a picture of Livni getting a midnight phone call and looking in distress for the Likud poster. The three faces of Tzipi Livni, you might say.



The trains most especially offer a glance into the mindset of the Israeli people. There are the simple reactions, like when a soldier cries out, "Of course" after it's announced that the train will be five minutes late. There's the general habit of leaving a bag on a second chair on the train or in the station, even when the crowds would dictate giving up that luxury. If you leave something or have shampoo leaking in your mesh bag, they'll point that out for you, a kind gesture in a gruff voice.

But the Israeli character at its most prickly is seen in the way that, almost unfailingly, those in the station waiting to get on the train will try to squeeze into the train car even as the passengers leaving the train are fighting to get off. The courtesy of allowing your neighbor to go in front of you is a rare discovery in the Holy Land. After all, you have to make sure you get into the train so you can choose between any of 20 empty seats to get the best one for you and your bag.

***

But if the trains show the negative potentiality of Israelis, there are times when the citizens remind you of their sweet, kind cores.



I wanted to buy a home stereo system. Nothing fancy, just a system that played CDs and had decent speakers, so it wouldn't be completely rinky-dink.

I went to a strip mall near our school on the way home one day. My first stop was at Best Buy, a store whose goods match its American counterparts in theme, but whose scope is laughably limited. Also, it looks kind of junky on the outside. And small.

They didn't have what I was looking for, so I walked over to Home Center, another store in the shopping complex. After a little bit of looking, I found the stereo section, and then I narrowed down my choice to a black nakasumi model. It looked basic but effective, with two nice handheld speakers and a cd player. There was no corresponding price tag, so I figured I'd go for help.




A man came over, and in my pidgin Hebrew I found out from him that this was the last one in the shop, that it cost 200 shekels (just about my budget), and that if I wanted, we could test the cd player. We couldn't find a CD to test it with, however. The radio worked fine, and I felt like going home, so I told him that I was sure it was fine and I'd take it, so no worries. Or I told him, "I have horns sticking out of my side and it's giving me cramps." Either way, I made my choice.

The purchase itself hit a snag, as the stereo was not only the last one they had, but also not even in their system. So they gave it a different serial number - 9090803838, as I remembered from them typing it in a few times - and sold it to me. That different serial number carried a 400 shekel tag, but they knocked it back down to the promised 200 and I went home.

There should be no doubt at this point that when I went home to try the stereo, I found out the CD player didn't work. The disc wouldn't spin, and there was nothing that could be done about it (at least, nothing that could be done with my technological illiteracy). It would have to be returned.

Here's where the drama raises a notch (and you're wondering how a story about a broken stereo system could get any more dramatic, aren't you?). Despite remembering when I bought the stereo, which did not come in a box since they didn't have any for it, that I must keep the receipt, because there was at least a 50% chance the stereo wouldn't work, I couldn't find the receipt. So while I was right about the unreliability of Home Center's random stereos, I was wrong in my method for holding onto the receipt. I turned my car and my bedroom upside down, but I couldn't find the thing. And why didn't I just keep it with the stereo? Because it was a gift, and I thought it would be tacky to have the receipt near the stereo, even though I told the recepient of the gift the price just like that. It's just my foolish pride.

Anyway, I decided I'd go to the store after school on Tuesday, a day after I bought the stereo, in hopes that maybe they'd remember me and help me out with the stereo regardless. I didn't have much hope, but I didn't have many other options either.

I arrived to find the woman behind the help desk already engaged with a customer in a heated discussion. The woman looked to be in her early 30s, with that darkly Caucasian Israeli skin tone and long gold curls that had a brassy tint to them. She looked like a regular spitfire, hardly someone who would help me in my sorrow. Besides, she and the customer were going back and forth in loud tones, he a little bit more aggressively, about a phone he had bought at Home Center and how they weren't responsible for the service plan, or something.



A younger, pudgier girl, a cashier, came over and told me to wait. Since there were no customers at the checkout line, she decided to try to help me. In Hebrew, I explained that the stereo wasn't working, or more specifically the discs, but that I didn't have the receipt (kabbalah) or the bill (heshbon), and I knew you needed that, but I had lost it, and was looking and looking and couldn't find it, so she told me the verb for search, and then she said she'd check with the manager behind the counter and maybe she could help, and I said I bought it yesterday and pointed out the picture on the wall from the Home Center staff retreat of the manager who sold it to me the day before, as if that would help. I had my most resigned, world-weary face on, prepared for the inevitable teeth-pulling argument that would get me nowhere.

It may have been that my face is what saved me, not so much for its stunning form and general presence as for that "I give up and just want to go home and curl up" aura glowing around it. In any case, by the time the manager turned to me, I had a well-practiced story about my situation (in Hebrew), an advocate in the cashier, and a steady lean on my right elbow as if I knew I had no chance of getting anything. Because that's what I thought.

After confirming that I was dumb enough to request a return for a stereo without a receipt, the
the manager pulled out the purchase list from the day before. I recited the serial number at some point, and while I wasn't sure if she heard me, the manager managed to find my purchase. It was a day before at roughly the same time, and so it wasn't perhaps as hard as it seems. It made me think that for all the wonderful things that technology has done, it still hasn't completely eliminated the need for holding onto receipts. But Home Center is close.

It was easy after that; she took my name, number, and a few other details down, and promised that in the next couple of weeks I'd have a new stereo system to replace this one. She printed out a new receipt for me, one which I actually held onto. She even switched to English a little bit for me, speaking it much better than I speak Hebrew. It was a happy ending.



And one with a nice epilogue: when I came to get my new system about a week later, not only did it work, but it was a fancier, nicer version, without costing me any more. So if you go on a scavenger hunt and find the last piece of a type of merchandise, grab it and hope it's broken. Then you can get an updated version for the same price and a little extra time.

Also, Israelis can be very, very nice when they allow themselves to be. Which is good.

***

And there are the times when I'm in a restaurant in the old city of Yafo, hearing stories about how Golda Meir was known as "the Mattress", for the relative ease which it took to lay on her. The eggplant is bad but the company is just fine, and we're late for the show we're going to but the waitstaff is very nice, if a little inattentive, and work and politics and gruffness seems faraway even as we're talking about someone's stolen bike, and when we go to the next bar and there are vulgar visual puns on common ad themes, like a grotesque alien baby sucking on a voluptuous woman's breast as "Got Milk" is written above his head, or a Coke bottle turned to a phallic image, replete with phallic wordplay (think about it), and a little brown dog runs under tables, stopping only to be petted and held, and then only for brief periods of time, and the night goes late but not too late, then the place becomes unimportant and the people and the haze and the combination make up for everything, and Israel is ok.

Or when I'm in that same restaurant with somebody else, and while we talk about giving and receiving, the soundtrack features three Leonard Cohen songs, two of them outright classics and one a less obvious pick, and Dylan's "Don't Think Twice" rolls out of a Neil Young jam, and all of a sudden the potential has exploded into a humble happy home. Then all is ok. Israel is ok.



Next post will be a little more focused, on the many ups and downs of contemplating life-changing decisions. Or getting into a country for good. Cheers!