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| November 2006 »
Went to an NYIH lunch organized by Ren Weschler. Writer Marina Warner talked about fairies.
Warner has written about mythology many times. This new book focuses on the “fairie faith” as it is called in Scotland and Ireland — the belief in tiny creatures, little people who are linked to the wild and evocative landscape. Sometimes these beings or spirits are benevolent, and at other times they cause mischief, steal souls or children.
I read a book some years ago called The Fairie Faith in Celtic Countries which was a kind of massive oral history of sightings, beliefs and suspicious goings-on. Evans-Wentz, who brought the Tibetan Book Of The Dead to a Western audience, was the author or presenter — Tibetan-Celtic — a somewhat similar enterprise of revealing a whole spiritual world.
There was a fair amount of laughter among the academics as instances of sightings and empty graves were mentioned; it all seems a bit like implying that some folk believe that the stories of childhood are real. We tend to view the Grimm’s tales and others as potent and psychologically powerful narratives passed on from generation to generation maybe because they are such good stories. But the truth is they were told because many of the events were believed to have actually occurred.
These beliefs are no stranger than that a man parted the entire Red Sea or that a man walked on water or that the creator of the entire universe wrote a book (or two).
Warner showed one of the famous 1917 Coddingley Fairie photos — a faked image of a Fairie and a Fairie cocoon taken by some young girls (who worked in a photo lab) and made by placing cut-out illustrations in a woodland landscape.
The girls, Warner said, never claimed these to be true photos of fairies — they created the images after all — but soon enough many others who saw the photos did. Grownups. Learned men and women. “Expert testimony”. Most famously, Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes — the detective who needed only his rigid foolproof rationality to solve any crime — testified that the photos were obviously NOT fakes and that here was proof that fairies were real. Other learned men and women came forward and all agreed the photos were not fakes — they were proof positive of the existence of the little creatures.
What surprises me now is how Conan Doyle and others could not see how fake the photos look — when to me and most contemporary people it is as plain as day. Anyone can see that they are cut-out illustrations, can’t they? It’s laughable, but also baffling how learned men and women could convince themselves to see things in a way that contradicts reality.
But maybe it shouldn’t be baffling. We tend to believe that it is the eye that sees, and the ear that hears. But those organs are merely the input devices — it is the brain that “sees” and “hears”. The brain can, in this case, choose to ignore obvious imperfections and evidence and see only what it wants to see. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical way — I mean it in an absolutely literal way — the brain only sees what it wants to see and disregards the rest. One can stare right at something and simply not see it. The contradictory information is simply not acknowledged. I don’t mean “seen and later denied”, but simply not seen at all. Denial is a built-in ability we have, it is essential for our survival, but sometimes, when applied to faked photos of fairies it seems pretty damn goofy. We do not all see or hear exactly the same things — key objects have been censored in the perceptions of some individuals…one wonders if objects could likewise be added to the world in other individuals. (See Happy Idiots, below.)
Anyway, Conan Doyle was maybe at the tail end of what is sometimes referred to as the Scottish enlightenment, a clumping of scientists and engineers in the mid 19th century to early 20th. This group had an extraordinary influence in the second industrial revolution. Here is Thompson’s (later known as Lord Kelvin) machine for predicting tides. He is most well knows for the Kelvin scale of temperature — absolute zero, entropy, etc. James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, was one of this crowd. Etc. etc. 
Well, Warner threw out a zinger in passing that there might be a link between the belief in the uncanny and this scientific enlightenment. A kind of secret union of opposites.
Yeats claimed that the Irish were better writers than the English because of their belief in Fairie culture — that these irrational roots left the imagination less fettered. Whether or not he’s right about the 2 nations’ respective writing abilities, he might have a point re: the imagination. I could imagine that somewhere in the unconscious of Thompson, Watt, Doyle and others lay a buried belief, or non-denial, of sprits, forces and entities lurking in the barren misty glens to the north. Could these irrational suspicions have allowed the leaps of faith that are required in a scientific and engineering revolution? To imagine a concept like entropy or absolute zero must surely have seemed just as far fetched as the existence of wee folk. (I’m not saying these guys were literally Fairie believers, but that the deep cultural marinating soaks all parts.) (See Arboretum.)
A bird flew into my home/studio yesterday. Not that surprising, I guess, it happens in NY now and then…except the little incident was somehow like a dream. It was a little finch (?) sparrow (?) and the window was only a little bit, a very little bit, open. (The loft is not a big veranda with large floor to ceiling windows so it’s not an indoor/outdoor space.) I was over in the music studio nook working, looking the monitor, and talking on the phone, when I noticed the little creature a couple of meters away, very close, and looking at me. We glanced at one another, and then it flew back to the ledge in the “living space” near the open window, hesitated a moment, then flew back out the window. (In my past experiences birds indoors have become trapped, confused, flying against window panes frantically — but this one knew its way out and in a moment it was gone.) How did this one instantly know its exit? It was like a little “Hello, I’m with you, I’m aware of you, you’re O.K.” and then, perfunctorily, gone, goodbye. Isn’t the bird a symbol of the soul in paintings? Is it crazy to project a real event as if it were a dream event?
I immediately thought, what it the symbolism here? Was this a good sign? A visitation? Did I see this? Did it really happen? Is the bird in a house a soul come to say hello? My own soul? Is it good luck? Bad luck? An omen? A message? A messenger? A metaphor? O.K., it might sound crazy to read so much into a random unexpected occurrence — it’s simply an odd NY thing — but the incursion of “nature”, the wild, the beautiful and fragile, into the urban workspace is so unexpected (my loft is 6 flights up.) It did seem like a dream image, a symbolic metaphorical image, come to life.
From a Guardian article about Cheney endorsing water boarding:
“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Mr. Hennen asked.
"Well, it's a no-brainer for me," Mr. Cheney replied
Further down in the same article:
Military officials said such techniques did not yield reliable intelligence from prisoners.
Here’s a link to an article that outlines Bush and Cheney’s steps towards allowing them to declare martial law (without congressional approval). I saw these steps in my recent research on the Marcos regime in the Philippines — there is a step by step process before the final leap, and despite effectively being an end to democracy, martial law is often accepted by much of the population, given all the extraordinary circumstances and specious justifications established prior to the declaration.
Happy Idiots
If religious people do indeed live longer and are indeed happier, as some studies claim to show, then the evolutionary basis and reason for the continued existence of religion in the face of rationality and common sense is self-evident. Humans would have evolved a propensity to become religious because it helps their survival.
The truth may set you free, but you might not be as carefree and happy. It will eat away at you — what hurts you does not necessarily make you stronger.
I would maintain that a healthy (i.e. substantial) amount of denial is therefore genetically heritable, that it allows us to blithely go on (despite reading Beckett) and to ignore the basic sadness and desperation of life. We can live in an illusion — in fact we are genetically predisposed to do so. These illusions can be small — I am just as good at catching game as Bob, my rival, for example — or they can be very large — that death is not the end and that I will be rewarded for my faith and Bob, the apostate, will rot in Hell.
Either way, they allow me to go on, to persevere in the face of unlikely odds or limited chance of success. We have evolved to be less rational that one might think, and to be slightly more delusional and even stupid.
Weimar Reality shows
This was in the 20s. Erwin Lowinsky’s Weisse Maus was a cabaret night that encouraged hopelessly amateur performers to get on stage — dreamy housewives, deluded bank clerks. They were encouraged to make fools of themselves. Sounds familiar.
The Black Cat Cabaret featured theme nights — nude girls in imaginary sacrificial Mayan ceremonies, mock bullfights, and naked novices being humiliated by lesbian nuns — with rituals involving silver crucifixes.
Then came Hitler.
Saw Anthony Minghella’s ENO production of Madama Butterfly. The visuals are occasionally sumptuous — as one expects when one pays for opera tickets. Then, after elegant entrances or little choreographed bits, there are bits where the singers mostly stand and sing, gesturing a little. But, as this score has lots of tunes, moving melodic motifs and catchy fragments, there was plenty to wash over one, even when there was little stage action.
The story is so basic that one isn’t constantly wondering — What’s going on? Who’s that? Did I miss something? It’s easy to follow.
(AP photo)
The love child is played by a puppet operated by bunraku-type operators in black, an often used technique that in this case worked for me. “Pinocchio” was more simply expressive than many of the flesh and blood singers — the turns of its head and longing looks — it’s up there with Gollum and Yoda. Here are pictures from the web — unfortunately the puppet looks stupid close up — from a distance it works much better.
Brownian Motion
Last night saw the second of Steve Reich’s shows at Carnegie Hall. A sexy cellist played with a video sextet of herself playing the accompanying parts. A drummer hit midi percussion pads along with a video of himself playing the other parts (the audience loved this one — it was a real techno tour de force.) A new piece followed, dedicated to the murdered reporter Daniel Pearl (I think it was commissioned via Pearl’s father.) It incorporated references to the Biblical Daniel and to the slain journalist, who was also a fiddler. Large ensemble for that one. (Who will commission the pieces for the hundreds of thousands of slain Iraqis? — though Pearl was in Pakistan at the time, his reporting was about the U.S. invasion.)
All these pieces sounded African-inspired, as Reich has often noted (he traveled there early on.) The repetitive patterns and layers of parts, the interlocking rhythms that shift slowly, the pulse and sense of stasis in motion (homeostasis is a lovely metaphor.) Reich avoids the sweeping build-ups and climaxes typical of Western music — build ups are slow and gradual, not the tsunami-like emotional waves of Puccini (above). You can hear the structural antecedents of these melodic modules and riffs in Sunny Ade recordings (and those of others — high life bands, field recordings etc.)…where there are layers of multiple guitars shimmering over percolating percussion. Reich sometimes writes for strings, not for guitars, and for high-pitched percussion rather than for drum kits. The intended audience is Western classical — they wouldn’t dance to this in the context of MoMA or Carnegie Hall, as they would in Africa to music with similar structures. Context makes you listen to these structures in a different way.
The music shimmers; it’s a kind of musical Brownian motion. Even when he incorporates cellos and strings the effect is percolating, bubbling.
The last piece “Drumming” was a big breakthrough when it was performed and released on vinyl in 1974 and was released on the Deutsch Grammaphone Label. I bought it back then, a boxed set of LPs. That piece involves a lot of phase shifting — rhythm patterns going out of phase and then, after a moment or two of chaos, a new syncopated pattern appears. It’s a sort of technical demonstration of cross rhythms, a moiré pattern in sound.
When the players moved to glockenspiels and began playing their intricate patterns the sound was almost aggressive — loud, piercing and shimmering — like that sound when your ears ring, but imagine if that were really loud.
This music is as radical as it ever was, which is saying something. It’s still new and even shocking. A lot of music from that time sounds dated and avant-garde corny, a parody of “experimental” music. This still has a rigor that holds up. My complaint would be that it doesn’t groove. Oh, occasionally it hits a pulse and stride, but having stood for hours around Candomblé drummers in Bahia, rumba drummers in Cuba and elsewhere, having seen Ade’s band — who also play non-stop for hours — a few times and joined the sweaty dancers, I miss the body connection with Reich’s compositions. When music of this type physically and neurologically connects it has the effect of generating a feeling of transcendence, a liberating out of body feeling that most of us have felt, however briefly, at one music concert or another. These kinds of interlocking melodies and rhythms can be transporting — it can make you feel like you are floating…but cooled down for this classical context some of that is removed, and we are left with — well, maybe not just something less — maybe something new.
Friday the 13th
I am planning a public bike forum/arts and entertainment event in the spring with the help of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. I imagine a meeting of ordinary people, biking advocates and city reps from the Dept. of Transportation, Parks, police and urban planning. Interspersed with this dream of reaching a compromise and progress on making the city more livable will be bike-related entertainment — to be announced when confirmed. I dream that civic work, improvement and action can be mixed with art and entertainment — that culture and politics can mix and be fun. Well, we’ll see.
As a result, the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives invited me to a meeting organized by Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer about transportation, held at Columbia University. I wasn’t able to stay for the whole thing, but was excited to meet Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá (Colombia) who revolutionized the transportation and parks in that city. Here he is on a bike.  He created a new bus mass transit system, bike lanes, pedestrian streets — all of which had the effect of relieving congestion, boosting the economy and making Bogotá and its surroundings a better place to live. (Some inspirational credit should go to the Brazilian city of Curitiba, a town that made these kinds of changes some years ago and serves as an example. Unfortunately, Curitiba is, to me, a pretty boring town, but these changes have made it more livable for the residents.)
Here’s an excerpt from a piece Peñalosa wrote called “The Politics of Happiness”:
One common measure of the cleanliness of a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.
When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. [more than 20km!] It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important — not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.
More Peñalosa links:
Project for Public Spaces
Institute for Transportation & Development Policy
Bikes Connecting Bogotá and the South Bronx
The Transportation Alternatives people arranged that we all meet on the west side greenway — very near where I live — at 7:30 in the morning. Peñalosa and the TA folks — then we’d all ride up together to Columbia University (116th Street) as a symbolic gesture. Moby and actor Matthew Modine were supposed to join as well, but they were no-shows. (To be fair, maybe they had never committed and their inclusion was just a publicist’s hopeful rumor.)
At Columbia I was introduced to some of the political players — taxi and limousine commission dept., dept. of transportation, borough president’s office, etc. It’s another world. Then there were short speeches from some of those — Iris Weinshall from Dept. of Transportation said some wonderful things. If those hopes and promises are fulfilled it would be wonderful for NY.
Peñalosa showed slides of Bogotá and talked about what he did.
Here are some quotes (paraphrased):
“If a bike lane that isn’t safe for an 8 year old child it isn’t a bike lane.”
“Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority is not always to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.”
“Building more highways never relieves congestion.” (This was not his insight, but he reminded us how true it is.)
“Transportation is not an end — it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life — the real goal is not to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.”
“A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.”
(Peñalosa tended to link equality with democracy — an idea that is anathema to many in the U.S. I am simplifying here.) “Upper-income people have always had access to nature and recreation. They go to country houses, golf clubs, restaurants, hunting preserves. What do the poor, especially in the Third World, have as an alternative to television? All poor people have are public spaces, so this is not a luxury. They are the minimum a democratic society can provide to begin to compensate for the inequalities that exist in society.
“Since we took these steps, we’ve seen a reduction in crime and a change in attitude toward the city.”
For New York, Peñalosa recommended first imagining what a city could be, what would one wish for, what could be achieved in 100 or more years. As with the great Gothic cathedrals one has to imagine something that one will not see in one’s lifetime, but one’s children or grandchildren may experience it. This also frees one from quickly dismissing ideas as too idealistic or practically improbable. Of course, like dealing with global warming, it needs political will to accomplish, something that ebbs and flows, rises and falls. So looking at the bright side, if there is precious little of that will now, that doesn’t mean there will never be any.
Peñalosa asked that we imagine Broadway, the longest street in the United States, as a pedestrian street. He asked that we imagine reclaiming contact with the East River and dismantling the FDR drive.
As an interim measure, we might turn one long street, like Broadway or 5th Ave., into a pedestrian street just on Sunday afternoons. (The fact that NYC businesses don’t rely much on car access and on having massive parking lots out front like in the suburbs makes this all within the realm of possibility.)
Imagine 42nd Street could be a pedestrian street… it almost is now, with all the stalled traffic and jaywalking. Imagine it as a long plaza, with theaters, restaurants, trees in the middle of the street, seats, outdoor cafés…free wi-fi.
Show Business
Saw Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twins last night at Town Hall. I love her record, and her lyrics are some of the best around — they take some unexpected turns and hit some resonant truths in completely unclichéd ways. One song begins, “I was born, secular”, which already, from the 1st phrase, is unusual.
The twins sing harmonies that only twins can do so perfectly, and they make a perfect visual complement on stage — both they and Jenny in black satin dresses at the beginning, changing to Vegas spangley outfits halfway through. The showbiz elements are meant ironically, but they make for a better show as well, so the irony is not complete. 
The musicians — a vaguely alt country outfit of LA hipsters — rarely cracked a smile, but the twins in matching outfits seemed to be enjoying being on stage immensely; when they weren’t singing they turned and watched Lewis and the band, smiling with obvious enjoyment. They grinned when receiving applause after the songs and occasionally they’d turn to each other and smile — nice to see musicians having a good time on stage enjoying their own music, it’s pretty rare. Actually, even the po-faced hipsters on their instruments seemed to be holding back smiles, but maybe I was imagining it.
For me the voices could have been louder in the mix — I pretty much always feel this, as I like to hear the words and whatever subtle inflections the singer might be adding….but overall I left feeling good. Hope she does a new record, as she mainly drew from the one, with a few new songs sprinkled in — I liked the one with lots of voices near the end, maybe because I could hear the words.
Music models — scientific and financial
Scientific quotes:
“When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”
— Lord Kelvin, 1883
“How satisfying for the human spirit to contemplate these laws, so beautiful and simple, which may be the only ones the Creator and Ordainor of things has established in matter to sustain all phenomena of this visible world.”
— Pierre de Maupertuis 1745
He goes on to identify action with evil [inertia being matter’s default state according to him] so that the principle of least action becomes the principle of maximum goodness….and says that God ordered the universe to maximize goodness. (From a NYRB article by Freeman Dyson.)
“Nature’s great book is written in mathematical symbols.”
— Galileo
Montreal
“The Royal Mountain” — the mountain that dominates the city park — was visible from the hotel window. The trees have turned yellow, orange and bright red.
I did a talk at the Future of Music Policy Summit here. My talk was called “Record Companies: Who needs Them?” My manager, David Whitehead, drove up from his home in Woodstock and joined me, helping out and answering some questions.
The answer to the question was too simple: some people do and some don’t. Not a very satisfying answer.
Most of the talk, however, was about how as record stores disappear — and CDs too, eventually — the ease with which artists can make more money by doing it themselves (or with a small office) increases rapidly.
In my talk I went over some of the various possible record distribution deals and models, some of which might have been familiar to the audience, which was largely music-oriented digerati. But some parts of it were new, and rather than focusing on one aspect I was pulling as much as I could together and examining what to me were the obvious repercussions. Maybe Whitehead and I can do it again at SXSW?
Afterwards the Arcade Fire gang showed up and I told them I had previously talked to Daniel Levitin, author of “This Is Your Brain On Music”, and a McGill professor of cognitive (music-focused) neurology, about visiting his lab. Many of the band were up for it, so we walked over and Daniel demonstrated and talked about some of what they were doing. Susan Rogers, who worked as recording engineer with Prince, and worked on one of my records and also with Geggy Tah, has been here for 3 years doing graduate studies in this lab. Tommy from Geggy Tah was there too, which was a surprise.
There were a number of what looked like small project recording studios, and we settled into one with an upright piano in it. A young woman demonstrated that the piano was actually a Disclavier, a piano that “records” the performance of anyone who played it and then plays it back with the keys moving exactly as they had been played. One of the lab’s projects aims to get a sense of where the emotion, the feeling, lies in a performance. To do this they had a classical pianist perform a piece expressively and with feeling — we heard part of it played (or performed) back. They then used a program to remove all the feeling from the performance. It sounded like an early digital sequencer; all the notes were of the same length and volume and the rhythm — the timing — had been “squared up” as well. Regine, who has some musical training, said it sounded like a 4 year old after a few piano lessons. To me this “dead” performance was also a faithful transcription of written music with no expressive markings. Much of Bach is like that, I believe, the expression left to the interpreter, but if played exactly as written it would sound like a machine. The limitations of musical notation.
Then the expressivity dial was turned to 50%. It still sounded pretty mechanical, but a little better. At 75% there was feeling there, but not played very well — “a promising student”, said Regine. But it took until 75% for the performance to begin to have what we would call feeling, expression, and humanity.
Then we heard the same performance with randomized expression — notes and time held and accented at random. We laughed, though some in the room thought it sounded eccentric, but good. Daniel said he thought only musicians would think it was interesting, because they have an acquired sense of how it’s supposed to be played, and confounding and surprising those expectations can sometimes make a piece even more interesting. I thought it sounded a little like Thelonious Monk.
One of their more involved projects involves wiring an audience while they attend a performance by the Boston Symphony. Some audience members had EEGs strapped on, others had their brainwaves monitored and others had sliders that they would use to rate the amount of emotion imparted by the performance at any given moment.
Furthermore, later these performances were played back on High Def video to other similarly wired participants (to see if they reacted at the same points and with the same intensity). Others watched the performance without sound and other groups listened without the picture. Interestingly, many of the emotional cues seemed to be visual — body language, facial expressions and eye movements would be tells about whether a performer was struggling, about to hit a high note or winding down. All of which would help explain why sometimes a live performance is often more moving — even with all its faults — than a recording.
The Arcade Fire gang and I agreed to meet later at a Ukrainian Hall where a performance that was part of the music festival Pop Montréal would be happening. Tonight was a Danish group who someone said was good and the harpist and singer Joanna Newsom.
Under Byen
….was the Danish group, and they were good, as rumored. A cellist sat in the center downstage and a blonde woman in a pink dress sang in the semi-darkness further upstage. To the left was a keyboardist — there was also a bass player, two drummers (one in a Betty Page doo) and a fiddler/saw player also stood downstage. Lights like frilly wallpaper patterns played over the whole stage. Their sound, as you might imagine from the instrumentation, verged on lush sweeping melodic lines from the singer or the strings over pulsing meticulously arranged beats from the two drummers. Unfair to say, but a bit like Sigur Ròs, but with words, songs and more aggressive and fractured rhythms…come to think of it, there might be a little Arcade Fire in there as well. The interplay, the spaces left out by one instrument, into which another player would insert a sound, seemed carefully arranged, and this sort of socket approach grabbed me instantly. The mood is one of beautiful desolation and melancholy. The words were in Danish. 
[Photo by Vincent Ferrane]
This Ukrainian Hall seems to be a new venue here, so I was told. It’s a lovely place. Holds maybe 300, with a nice proscenium stage, a balcony and beer and wine served in the side hallways. Hope they keep this venue active. As someone who gets around NYC on a bike I was happy to see about 100 bicycles locked up along the entire perimeter fence.
Joanna Newsom was the headliner. The Globe and Mail ran a large piece on her upcoming CD, describing epic-length tunes, orchestrations by Van Dyke Parks, recording by Steve Albini and mixed by O’Rourke. Who’s left? Sounds like something new.
[Photo by Amy Cobden]
The set, however, was her solo with harp…and yes, some of the songs were epics, at least 12 minutes long, not repetitive but like a series of suites — melodies and song structures strung together. The audience went pretty nuts, even with just her and harp….imagine if there had been all the other instruments the recording promises. The tunes sounded like little novels — too much to absorb on first hearing.
Caught the Sufjan Stevens show at Town Hall last night. It was a beautiful theatrical extravaganza — costumes, inflatables and video imagery for every song (though some were simple abstract kaleidoscope designs.) The songs sounded bigger live, maybe partly because the band included 6 strings, 3 brass players, singers, drums, bass, guitar and Celeste (or xylophone) — but I think the live dynamic helped, too. Many songs were structured with very quiet verses (Sufjan’s voice rarely raises above a whisper) and then soaring brass and strings as instrumental counterpoint.
The feeling was of whispered intimate reminiscences of a midwestern childhood juxtaposed with their transcendent implications — the glory of the world discovered in the backyard, on a cross country trip, or at summer camp. Videos that looked like super 8 movies helped reinforce the aura of transcendental nostalgia, along with costumes that looked like they came out of a Jr. High theater production (everyone wore bird or butterfly wings and matching outfits.) Inflatable Supermen and santas were tossed off the balcony into the audience during appropriate songs — more images of childhood myths. It certainly all hung together.
Unlike most pop concerts, which often appear to be merely a string of songs, this came pretty close to being a coherent theater piece. Some songs were more memorable than others, but that’s normal, and it didn’t really matter in this context — the evening was more about establishing a mood of ecstatic reverie than delivering hooks.
[Photo by sarahana]
I also felt was what I can only describe as a kind of Protestant reserve and reticence. Sufjan’s voice — most of the time a fragile introverted whisper (see also Chet Baker or João Gilberto) — was juxtaposed in this case with the emotional and even majestic spiritual release of his string and brass melodies. As if what he was feeling inside, but couldn’t express, was expressed in these instrumental passages. The other band members also remained pretty stoic throughout — a little swaying was about it for dancing. To me this is a typical of the Northern European religious heritage — British shoe-gazer bands being the prime example — fierce and grandly romantic music played by immobile people who rarely smile. Glum ecstasy. Stiff upper lip and all that. Bad form to wear your heart on your sleeve, as the Queen said in the recent movie.
Sufjan did smile from time to time and told some jokes, too. With this show the reserve exploded every time the full band entered, echoing a feeling shared by the audience. One could sense people feeling, “Yes, I have so many intense passions and feelings within me, inside, I wish I could tell you”….but let the music do the talking.
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