8.28.06: Verified

Rode out to Grand Army Plaza on Saturday and yes, Kenny is right, the arch is indeed filled with puppets. While we were there a woman and her daughter stopped by and the little girl was trying on (some of these are big puppets) some of the heads for size. A spiral staircase winds up to the crossover, where performances are sometimes held!

(They’re open Saturdays noon to 4PM tel: 718-853-7350. Link)

8.26.06: Revenge of the Book Eaters

Participated in a benefit concert (“Revenge of the Book Eaters”) last Wednesday for the “826” young writers mentoring projects that the McSweeney’s gang have established in a number of cites. Volunteers help kids with their writing on a one-on-one basis and publish collections of the results now and then.

The concert was larger than the 826 benefit I did two years ago in Brooklyn — this recent one sold out the Beacon. Well, this one featured Jon Stewart, Sufjan Stevens, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, John Hodgeman and myself, so it promised an entertaining evening — the typical eclectic McSweeney’s event, but with more well-known names.

Benefits are funny things. Often the public pays exaggerated ticket price to see “watered down” versions of the musical acts — most times I myself play a few songs on acoustic guitar, as do many of the others. Now, watered down it maybe be, but sometimes the “unplugged” version is more moving and emotionally involving that the more fully arranged version — well, sometimes. When that happens it’s not a bait and switch deal.

For this show I decided that since Sarah Vowell liked my version of Webb Pierce’s “There Stands The Glass” that I did in Brooklyn I would take that as a hint and do an all country set. My rhythm section consisted of Mauro, Paul and Graham augmented by Jon G. on pedal steel, fresh off a recording session with Ryan Adams.

I asked Sufjan via e-mail if he wanted to do “Saginaw Michigan”, the song made famous by Lefty Frizzell, with me. (I thought many would think he wrote it for his Michigan-themed CD. I wonder if anyone fell for it?) He agreed and I sent him an MP3, chords and lyrics. My bunch also did the country-ish tune that I sang on Mauro’s upcoming Forro in the Dark CD. So, a lot of new stuff.

Anyway, the evening went well — it was scary doing so many new (to me) tunes, but I think it came off O.K. Jon Stewart did an American History skit with his producer as foil, and Eggers explained the 826 project and showed slides of the wonderful work of a young writer-collagist. Sufjan softly sang some of his catchiest tunes, and won over the crowd, many of whom may not have been familiar with him.

826NYC is also home to the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company — a sort of art installation/store.

Upcoming 826 benefits will be in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Ann Arbor and Chicago. There will be different lineups for each show. (Tonight is LA.)

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Language and ideology

The torturer aims to dehumanize his victim, and becomes dehumanized in the process.

Recent doublespeak:

War in Iraq used to refer to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Unlawful combatants — a meaningless phrase intended to allow trial without due process, which turns back the legal clock in a developed country by at least 100 years.
Rendition has been substituted for kidnapping.
Freedom has been substituted for economic exploitation and corruption.
Globalization has been substituted for corporate rule.

8.21.06: Bochum, Songs

Last night was the second performance — much better technically than the first, but without the nervous edge, which is strangely sometimes a nice thing. For the audience it must be like watching a high wire act and wondering if the performer will slip and fall; it’s usually less than perfect, but there’s a riveting voyeuristic appeal. For the performer there is an added adrenalin rush generated by the terror and fear of trying to get through it alive.

Photo © Helge Thelen

Last night I sensed that the orchestra, having witnessed our reception the previous night, was in a more generous and accepting mood, and their playing and smiles showed it. The band — Greg, Kenny, Charlie — were less glued to their charts, and they played more as though they knew where the songs were going, which they did.

“Empire”, the ironic national anthem, was well received, as was “Here Lies Love” and “Un Di Felice”. We threw in a couple of old favorites like “Road To Nowhere” (without the orchestra) and “Psycho Killer” (with) and Joe Henry joined on a country tune and Allen Toussaint’s “Soul Sister”.

Now Kenny and I are at Düsseldorf airport, having just gone through two security checks — the second more thorough one for passengers headed to the U.S.

More about songs

At last night’s farewell dinner either Thomas or Greg, again musing on the roots of popular song, suggested that it was the Russian Jews who immigrated West, in successive waves, carrying with them metaphorical “suitcases of songs” — an approach which had a huge impact on the development of popular song in the West. These songs did not consist of sheet music or scores, but musical seeds, in their heads, that would mutate and sprout in the West, evolving into the composed song pre-rock and roll, country and R&B. (Interesting that the huge infusion of African elements into song also came from structures and elements carried in the heads of slave/immigrants.) Elements of folksong (already appropriated by Russian composers) were combined with compositional technique, and there you go, the 20th century popular song. When asked why this form took root in America, Dimitri Tomkin was quoted as saying, “the taiga is the taiga” — meaning the steppes of Russia and the American Great Plains fostered similar sensibilities.

8.20.06 Pt. II: Marshall Plan

If the U.S. and UK wanted to win the hearts and minds in the Middle East they might think of giving out reconstruction money, as Hezbollah is doing, to families whose houses and businesses have been destroyed. The West might think of offering these reparations and aid to both sides — the destruction in Israel was minor, but is still devastating for those involved. The southern Lebanese know that the U.S. sold cluster bombs and missiles to Israel during this time, so to them all the talk of democracy looks like a scam, a front for arms trading and arms testing, as revealed in a recent New Yorker article. As it is, the conventional wisdom in the area is that Hezbollah cares — they will defend the villages and aid the families whose homes were destroyed and whose family members were killed. If this aid, this care, came from elsewhere, the loyalties of the recipients might not be as polarized now and in the future. The Lebanese government might not be as reticent to condemn and limit the influence of Hezbollah if there were other aid societies. For many urban communities it is the Mob or the local drug dealers who hand out small business loans and help families in need — so no wonder the eradication of these institutions is impossible.

From a purely pragmatic and self-interested point of view, when you help create a self-sufficient economy, a solid society, from the ruins of war, you create a future trading partner. When you punish and point fingers, when you continue to fund dictators and corrupt politicians, you create future enemies. Ditto with prisoners — not just in Gitmo and the various hidden branches of the American Gulag, but the regular old prisons as well — punishment, however emotionally satisfying to the one administering it, ultimately creates more desperation, alienation and future prisoners. Good for the prison industry, bad for the rest of us.

Here they call it terrorangst.

We pass a large graffiti tag on a bridge, the name is Chintz.

8.19-20.06: City of Machines

Went to visit the UNESCO world heritage industrial ruin in Essen. It’s not really a ruin, as it only closed a decade ago, but it does have the feeling of an abandoned city, from a sci-fi movie maybe, or City Of Lost Children. From the web: “The Zollverein mine-cokery combo started in 1847, creating the largest coal mine in the world.” The goal was steel, and the region is dotted with coalmines and foundries. Here they connected an incredibly large mine in one area with a cokery via an elevated tube that moved the coal, in train type cars, hundreds of meters through the air to the cokery — a wall of vertical ovens that would cook the coal and covert it to coke, which burns hotter, and is needed for making steel. The cokery is a factory, but looks more like a bizarre machine that puny humans attend and feed. It’s as long a two football fields, and the heat (these are ovens, after all) and the coal dust must have been unbelievable. (The venue we’re playing in Bochum was a former gas works, supplying gas to these various factory-machines.) The architects, Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, inspired by the Bauhaus style, designed the buildings. Zollverein XII remained in operation until 1986. I remember seeing it right after it closed — I was scouting locations for a film interpretation of The Forest, the piece I did with Bob Wilson. The Gilgamesh character in that story had been updated to an industrialist like Krupp, whose steel factory was nearby.

It’s a massive site — the size of central park, almost — and has been turned into a combination park, memorial to industry and cultural center. The cultural center part is aided by the legendary German arts budget, but even so it still moves incrementally. Only one of the giant gasworks buildings has been converted into performance spaces, for example. Next to it sits a turbine hall — 2 turbines still squatting there in the semi darkness.

The Essen site sprawls across grassy paths linked by pipes and elevated conveyers. One building houses Russian artist Kabakov’s “Palace Of Projects”, a kind of imaginary world’s fair pavilion as if made by a group of high school science students — crude, handmade and full of preposterous utopian and visionary proposals. It’s like a magical Calvino book come to life.

Another building will soon house the Essen art museum, which has outgrown its current site. There are plenty more empty shells available after that.

Buildings like these, but on a much smaller scale, have been converted in the U.S. — the Mattress Factory in Pittsburg, MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., and the DIA Nabisco factory in Beacon. But nothing approaches this scale or sheer amount of metal. This region is doing a wholesale changeover from industrialkulture to the culture industry.

The next day Thomas takes me to another Essen industrial site — this one the blast furnace complex. We view a semi-outdoor venue that is often used for the Century of Song dates and an indoor black box theater above a turbine room that can be reconfigured according to the needs of the show. A possible venue for Here Lies Love?

The blast furnace here, and its small hole, about half a meter across, at its base, is the ultimate focal point, the goal of this whole industrial valley — the coal mines, the cokeries, the gas works, the trains, the barges and ports are all about making the molten steel pour out this relatively small hole at the end of the process. Hard to conceive so much manpower, effort, creativity, sweat and resources with their vanishing point, their glorious final product, the glowing red steel that spews out the mouth (or ass?) of this giant furnace. All the elements brought together — by pipe, road, train and sea — all to make this substance that would be used to make other machines. Trains, rails, cars (eventually), cannons, ships, tanks, bridges, dynamos, girders, tools, guns. The steel makes machines that allow for the production of more steel.

There is one bridge over the Rhine from which one can see the smokestacks and cooling towers dotting the landscape in an amazing 360º panorama. Most of these factories are inactive, but a few are still puffing away. I was told that during its heyday the Ruhr valley was like Pittsburg, where the skies were so darkened by the amount of smoke that one had to turn on lamps in the daytime.

Someone else said to me, “it was here that the two world wars were ‘made’.” It’s puzzling then that the factory buildings are still standing — Berlin and Dresden were reduced to smoking hulks while so many of these factories and steelworks, so essential to the German war effort, survived. Did the Allies think they would do a Halliburton and take them over for themselves, and therefore they spared them the bombing? Or maybe they realized that without industry a defeated Germany would have no possibility of reconstruction — they would be shattered refugees — desperate, pathetic, ready for anything that would restore some dignity.

Before/after photos of bombing in Essen (Link):

And more about the bombing of the factory (Link):

Q. During WWII, what made Essen, Germany, a primary target for combined US/British bomber forces?
A. Founded by Alfred Krupp and greatly extended by his son Friedrich the Krupp iron and steel works at Essen became one of the most powerful industrial combines in the world and the largest manufacturer of arms in WWI. In the mid-1930s the factory was the centre of German rearmament. Bombing had destroyed 70 per cent of the works by 1945 and the Allies confiscated the remainder but the courts restored the works to the Krupp family in 1951. See The Encyclopedia of World War Two edited by Thomas Parrish.

Thomas W. tells us that the Chinese wanted to buy this entire site when it closed — their own coalfields are not entirely depleted — not just yet — so they can actually reanimate this creature. As this Essen colliery/cokery was the last one in the area to close the local government hesitated approving the sale, and decided instead that their glorious industrial past should be remembered, memorialized rather than obliterated and forgotten, so they declined that particular offer. They call them industruialkulture monuments. Cathedrals of Industry. Other nearby sites had been sold in entirety to the Chinese — in Dortmund a similar site was completely dismantled and shipped to China. Hundreds of workers were shipped in, housed in tents on site, meals and facilities provided, as they took the beasts apart. How did they do it? We gaze at the tangle of pipes around us, the huge metal machines that dwarf human scale. How could anyone keep track of the parts? Where would you begin? The scale is like ants taking a car apart and then reassembling it — and hoping it works.

Last night was our first performance — 3 encores, so I guess we did all right. I was pretty nervous — if you get off the rails with the orchestra they don’t accommodate, they keep right on playing what they’ve got in front of them… so you have to kind of surf their wave, and if you’re successful the connection feels natural and the intensity of my singing, for example, will anticipate what they’re going to do. If it works it doesn’t sound like anyone is following or being led; it sounds like you and the orchestra are emotionally linked. Luckily for me many of the songs have some kind of groove, so I can focus one ear on Kenny’s percussion or hi-hat and hope the orchestra and Anthony the conductor do the same. Watching and paying attention to Anthony’s baton is fun and exciting, but conductors tend to give the rhythm almost a full beat ahead to an orchestra — sort of a “this is where we’re going not where we’re at” — so looking for a downbeat from the baton is hopeless — but the tempo and the crescendos and diminuendos are all there.

The orchestral Philly soul version of "Here Lies Love" went over well, as did "Un Di Felice", which was a surprise, as I thought I’d get giggles from the classical crowd on that one.

8.18.06: Volare, Klein, Puppets

A story from Thomas Wordehoff, one of the coordinators of this festival:

“Volare”, that song some of us remember as a kitsch lounge standard, and others from a TV commercial advertising a car of the same name, was about…Yves Klein, the painter! The chorus of the song goes “volare”, but the original title is “Nel blu dipinto di blu”, a reference to the famous Klein blue that the painter made his signature.

I wonder if volare, meaning “to fly”, is a reference to the famous photo of Klein caught in mid air, seeming to be doing a swan dive out of a Parisian window?

Drummer Kenny Wollesen revealed this morning at breakfast that the “arc de triomphe” at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn is hollow, and it houses the New York puppet lending library! The arch is filled with puppets! In fact, a spiral staircase winds up and the walls are filled with them, many life-sized, categorized by type, one of which is insects. (Verification)

8.14.06: Duisburg, Germany: The Venue Shapes the Music

I’m over here for a part of the RuhrTriennale called A Century Of Song. The Ruhr valley was the former Germen rust belt, and in recent decades became Germany’s poorest, most depressed area — so a fair amount of money was poured in for revitalization, including arts budgets. Former factories were converted into venues and industrial ruin parks. Bassist and arranger Greg Cohen has been curating a performance series and I was invited to join him and his friends as well as the Duisburg Symphony for two shows. To prepare we have almost a week of rehearsal.

We had dinner last night and Greg talked about the roots of popular song structures. Most standards are AABA form, and many jazz pieces, being adaptations of the chord changes of standards, follow that pattern. (A lot of rock and roll and R&B is ABABCB — B being the chorus, A being the verses and C the middle 8 or bridge.)

But these structures are not static; they evolve and change over time. Greg said that ragtime — Scott Joplin, etc. — used much more complex structures. He said their pieces were like potpourri cut-and-paste tunes, medleys that had a number of sections not only in different keys but even in different rhythms. (One might say that contemporary pop songs vary the rhythms on the choruses in order to raise the level of intensity in those parts — build and release.)

This variety pak song structure emerged out of practical necessity — to cater to a dancing audience. This was originally music to dance to, and the audiences were acquainted with a variety of dances, often European in origin. If a song, or even part of a song, allowed you to show what steps you knew and to dance and meet a partner then those particular rhythms were what was demanded. So the dancehall venue, and the dancers within it, shaped this music and its structures.

The influence and development of venues went further. Some of the performers in St. Louis and New Orleans began to improvise. I imagine if a certain song section and its attendant dance came into favor and became extra popular, then the audience would naturally prefer that the section go on longer. So if a smart performer had exhausted that section as written, as it naturally occurred in the song, then he or she could make the part continue longer by improvising some new sections in that same style. The dancers were “creating” the music as much as the musicians and composers were, in a way.

Popular acts got booked on the riverboats that went from St. Louis to New Orleans. These were pleasure boats, not freighters or mere transportation. In order to be heard above the noise of the paddle wheels, and probably above that of the audience, the bands had to find a way to be louder. Mandolins or tenor banjos replaced fiddles, basses were added, cellos were originally there, but were often replaced by alto banjos — and in addition the guitars and everything else hit the grooves harder. The venue had changed the music once again.

I wrote about this for CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Rock — here’s an excerpt:

In my opinion it is the venue that makes the music scene happen just as much as the creativity of the musicians. There is continually and forever a pool of talent, energy, and expression waiting to be tapped—it simply needs the right place in which to express itself. […]

The space in which music is to be heard can determine what kind of music the artists create. The physical shape, acoustics, floor plan, and layout of a venue can contribute to the sound. For example, The Kitchen, which was an art-music-performance-loft in SoHo, was austere, reverberant, and echoey. The resultant music, from Phil Glass to Rys Chatham, was pretty spacey and trancelike. Jazz clubs tend to be extremely intimate. The music that results is one of details and an intricate, narrow focus of expression. Arena rock is written to be performed in an arena—it sounds and looks ridiculous in an intimate club. Symphony halls work best for classical music written during a particular era, opera halls…you get the idea. It might seem dispiriting to believe that the brick and mortar determines what form of music a creative soul pours out, but I think there is an element of truth here. Songs and performances are, one hopes, absolutely heartfelt, passionate, and true — but we both consciously and unconsciously guide our feelings, passions, and ineffable creative urges to make that which is appropriate work in the given situation.

The same process of the venue changing the music also happened in country music, especially honky-tonk. When this music began to be played in bars, to drunks and dancers alike, it needed to be loud and forceful — and the writing and instrumentation evolved to fulfill that need. Electric guitars replaced acoustic ones, drum kits were added, and rhythms got emphasized.

So how is this process happening now? In arena rock, for example, the songs are intuitively written that will song good booming out to a sea of fists in a sports arena. Some of us have seen bands used to playing arenas doing their “intimate” club dates — and often they can’t adjust. They retain their stadium gestures and grandiose musical stylings and it all just seems completely over the top and out of place.

Is music being written and recorded expressly to cater to the iPod wearer? Is music being written for an audience of one? Private music, intimate, personal — full of details and space?

Is hip hop made to sound the way it does so that it sounds good on a giant booming car audio system?

And what of the dance music of today? DJs play for dancers — their back and forth relationships and interplay with their dancing tranced out audience might be similar to that of the early jazz musicians. They can sense what the audience wants next, and they search through their box of vinyl in hopes of providing it by the next segue. Their sets, therefore, are shaped as much by their audience tastes and desires as by their own. The art is a balancing act between merely giving people what they want and surprising them with what they didn’t even know they wanted because they haven’t heard it yet.

Usually the process is a little slower than it is with DJs — most acts can’t come up with a whole new direction for their set determined by how an audience is reacting. But the next show’s set, the next day, might reflect the experience — more intimate tunes if it’s a small venue, rousing favorites if it’s a big space. And eventually, when it’s time to write more songs, they’ll be written with the past performance experiences in mind — well, for those of us who actually perform — and a kind of evolution will occur.

8.9.06: Outlaws and the Business of Show

Saw Lenine, the Brazilian “rocker” last night at Joe’s. In a way I enjoyed it better than Manu Chau a couple of nights ago — probably because this show was more intimate. I could see up close that the band was having a great time, and there were almost no arena rock gestures or urgings to sing along, jump or pump fists — all of which I snobbishly recoil from. What’s the matter? Don’t I want to join in? Well, I did dance and sing along at the Manu Chau Brooklyn show, but whenever I am urged to do so I get suspicious.

With Lenine “rocker” is in quotes because although the first impression might be that Lenine and band are playing straight rock, beneath it is a foundation of maracatu and forró rhythms from the Northeast of Brasil that informs every song. They swing in a way that most rock doesn’t.

I had only seen Lenine in a sort of folkloric setting before — singing with percussionist Marcos Suzano and Banda de Pifanos — a traditional group focused around some cane flute players.

He’s named after Lenin, the Russian revolutionary, and he looks like Wild Bill Hickok, the western gunfighter who was later a showman with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show.

From Wikipedia: Hickok was level-headed even while fighting, as evidenced by a legendary exchange of words with Phil Coe. Supposedly, Coe stated that he could "kill a crow on the wing" (i.e. flying), and Hickok replied, "Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shooting back? I will be."

Speaking of gunfighters and show business, the connection might not be as silly as it seems — there were two songs (at least) that distinctly mentioned Lampião, the legendary Brazilian outlaw. He was a figure from an era of vicious landowners, desperate poverty and slavery — and the exploits of Lampião and his men became Robin Hood like examples to the people and songwriters of that region. When he was captured his head and those of his henchmen were displayed in a box that toured the countryside.

Chechen rebels also displayed the heads of captured Russians on sticks. (No picture). U.S. military displayed this picture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after he was killed in an explosion. The picture ran in the NY Post and other newspapers as proof of the elimination of a baddie.

…

Further thoughts re: PL's lawsuit with the man he photographed. From Time Out NY:

A Korean artist becomes the Leonardo of the rabbinical set

Never put a rabbi’s image on the floor. That’s one lesson learned by Ki Yong Sung — a portrait painter who runs a small shop in the arcade at the Fulton Street subway station — when a troop of Jewish schoolgirls accosted him and demanded that he move a likeness of their rabbi up onto the wall. Another useful tidbit gleaned from limning more than 50 rabbinical portraits over the past three years: Honor the Sabbath. “Friday evening, I never paint Jewish picture,” says the 69-year-old Seoul native, whose Jewish clients are so observant, they don’t want him to work on their commissions during holy days.

Sandwiched between a barbershop and a tie store, Sung paints from photographs of his subjects, which include not only hoary rebbes, but blushing brides, pooches and deceased parents. (He charges $200 for a 12 x 16 canvas.) He painted his first rabbi in 2003, after a fellow Korean artist told him about a framing shop in Midwood, Brooklyn, that needed artwork to sell to the local Orthodox community. Sung and the owner worked out an arrangement to produce portraits of religious leaders at a bulk rate. Like the tablets Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai, word of Sung’s skills soon spread, and today, orders arrive from as far away as California and Florida. Still, he remains puzzled by his customers. “Not his wife’s picture, not his parents’ — he only wants the rabbi’s picture,” he muses of his typical Orthodox client.

What about the injunction against idols and graven images?

8.8.06: Manu Chau in Brooklyn

Caught Manu Chau’s benefit concert for Celebrate Brooklyn last night. I’d never managed to see one of his live shows, though everyone who saw them raved about them. I always wondered to myself how the music on his two CDs — which tend to be pretty acoustic and light-sounding (I think there might be no drums on many tracks, for example) — would translate to big outdoor shows. The answer is — he doesn’t even try to translate the recorded sound. The live shows use the tunes on the recordings simply as raw material for extended jams (though every build and release was obviously worked out and incredibly well rehearsed.) Or maybe I should say, extended jam singular, as the songs segued into one another — more or less — and made the show resemble a set of DJ remixes of his own material — performed by a crack live band. Does any of this make sense?

Needless to say, the show was higher energy than the recordings might imply. The rhythms of many of his songs are similar — a sort of folky punky ska groove — and the chords tend to cycle around and around, so the catch phrases and hooks of one song almost invisibly merged easily into those of the next. The melodies became merely additional textural elements in a set that was one long groove, and the lyrics were often repetitive phrases that even those with limited language abilities could sing along to — “Que hora son mi Corazón?” These tunes reminded me of Woody Guthrie songs, simple catchy melodies that anyone can instantly access, with memorable slogans and phrases that are political (in the broadest sense) without being didactic. Maybe Woody Guthrie songs interpreted by the Clash in reggae mode, or maybe Woody via The Specials. You might even look at the whole show as one long piece — one extended “song” elaborately orchestrated, deconstructed and remixed.

The band entered rapidly one at a time — all of them with either shaved heads or buzz cuts, and most of them shirtless — a practicality in the summer heat, but also a look, obviously considered as a unifying device. Once Manu joined, with a shirt and hat on, and the singing began, the music practically never stopped — there were only very brief pauses now and then during which the audience applauded, but most of the time as soon as one song ended someone on stage was beginning the next one.

The audience was energetic and multinational — I saw a Mexican flag held aloft and the crowd was a handsome and sexy mix of African Americans, Anglos and Latinos — an enviable coming together of what are, in the U.S. at least, usually groups with very diverse tastes — maybe some of that is a testament to what he’s achieved and maybe it’s also reflective of Brooklyn. I overheard someone say it sold out quickly — which is notable for someone whose records were not the huge successes here as they were in Europe.

The fact that the audience didn’t care that the light sweet sound of the CDs was not being reproduced on stage struck me. As performers we’re torn between the two extremes of faithfully reproducing a recording — because those specific sounds, textures and arrangements are for many part and parcel of the song itself — and doing what Manu did, using the songs as a framework and a springboard for something different, new yet comfortably familiar. Keeping it fresh but still recognizable.

Easier to do if your songs are like his — repetitive phrases over chord cycles — but maybe here I’m just being jealous. Other kinds of songs can be deconstructed and re-presented in a new light as well. One needn’t go the Dylan route of rewriting the songs every performance — changing the basic rhythms and melodies until the songs are unrecognizable is a pretty extreme way of keeping it fresh and “authentic”.

I love Manu’s Clandestino record; as a fan I can’t help wishing that the intimate light sound of that recording was something that could be experienced live, but it wouldn’t work or be appropriate in a venue this size. That delicate sound would work in a living room, a porch, a small bar or club, but the legions of fans these records attracted would never fit or be accommodated in those venues. One might say the music adapted to the audience and the venues, as it always does. in this case there was also a history and experience of less intimate shows for Manu to draw on — shows with Mano Negra, his previous band, who were also hugely popular in Europe.

8.2.06: American Madrassas

Saw a screening of a documentary called Jesus Camp. It focuses on a woman preacher (Becky Fischer) who indoctrinates children in a summer camp in North Dakota. Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim — the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an “army” to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie. (This last one is a puzzle — how did accepting the evidence for climate change and global warming become anti-Jesus? Did someone simply conflate all corporate agendas with Jesus and God and these folks accept that? Would Jesus drive an SUV? Is every conclusion responsible scientists make now suspect?)

Awareness of the rest of the world is curtailed — one can only view or read that which agrees with the agenda.

Naturally, the kids being so young, there is no questioning of any kind — they simply accept what grownups Fischer and the others say — they get pumped up, agitated, they memorize right wing and Jesus slogans and shout them back obediently. They become part of a support group — a warm, safe, comfortable feeling for anyone, for any social animal, for you and me. No one strays or gets out of line even the slightest bit. (More on peer pressure later.)

There were some perfect sound bites — at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus — the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, “Oh no, we’re not like them” — but they admit that the principal difference is simply that “We’re right.”

In another scene a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirking smile, is brought out and the children are urged to identify — many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands.

I kept saying to myself, “O.K., these are the Christian version of the Madrassas (those Islamic religious instructional schools in Pakistan and elsewhere, often financed by Saudi oil money)...so both sides are pretty much equally sick, there’s a balance." (Although it must be said the Madrassas provide some regular education and literacy where no other option is available, they do community work that is non-religious...and they take in aimless troubled youth.)

They want to turn the U.S. into the "Christian" version of Iran or Saudi Arabia. A theocracy. The separation between church and state, already shaky with Bush in charge, is under full frontal assault by this bunch — and they are well organized, too. The megachurches tell their parishioners who to vote for, what judges to support, letters to write, and where they should stand on the issues. Well, we all do this to some extent — even in casual chats with friends we attempt to deduce and arrive at a consensus of opinion; a sloppy democratic give-and-take on any number of subjects often gives way to agreement. But this is top-down messaging — no discussion allowed. There’s a scene in the Colorado Springs megachurch run by the Preacher who talks with Bush once a week — same deal as with the kids, only most of the attendees are pliant adults.

What is it about Colorado Springs? Littleton is right next door to these megachurches. I think they are 2 sides to the same coin. One breeds the other. The dissatisfaction and alienation that leads folks to join this weird non-“Christian” Christianity (much the same has been said about fundamentalist Islamic groups, that they are a perversion of the Islam of the Prophet) leads down a road to both Littleton and Colorado Springs — and in the sense that they allow the mind to be pleasantly emptied, they are identical.

The documentary juxtaposes scenes of an Air America radio call-in guy, a former preacher himself — who rants against this version of Christianity. These scenes seemed almost unnecessary, as to many of us in the audience Becky was pretty much indicting herself, though she wouldn’t see it that way. But they did give some relief from the scary view of the heartland as harboring an army in formation. Zombies from the wheat fields.

Sad, as the heartland and areas untouched by the big city sicknesses are also the home of much practical down-to-earth wisdom. Wisdom borne of the land and of experience, unsullied by the trendy political and ethical philosophies that periodically sweep the urban jungles.

When one sees religion perverted — in the U.S. or in Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan or India, one wonders if the spiritual seeds, planted by visionaries and enlightened prophets like Jesus, Mohammed, Marx and others, are just too volatile for large societies to deal with. One asks if religious visions are better off kept as a personal thing, or at least confined to a small group — otherwise the death and destruction sown by and in the name of religions more or less balances out their moral and personal virtues (which are many.)