ON AND OFF THE ROAD #15

An estranged son of Osama Bin Laden is quoted as stating that his father hated the enemy more than he loved his family. This strikes me as about as perfect a definition of war as one can devise. Hating your enemy more than you love your…fill in the blank. 

I played a solo show in Krakow last week. My time in the Polish city coincided with the 21st annual Festival of Jewish Culture. On my afternoon off, I attended a lecture by lapsed American academic  Daniel Pipes. As the talk was held in an active synagogue, all the men were requested to cover their heads and Pipes' careless positioning of his kipa yanked a clump of uncooperative hair away from the rest of his coif, producing the disconcerting appearance of a crow's beak agape and silently squaking for help from the back of his scalp. Unfortunately, this was the most uplifting feature of the event. Pipes spent his hour making the case for why Europe will soon become "Eurabia," ruled by sharia, with a mosque on every corner and schoolchildren genuflecting towards Mecca. His prescription for dealing with this imminent threat was expulsion and violence. After an hour of enumerating the many ways that Islam is fundamentally at odds with the humanism of Christian tradition, Pipes, responding to a question from the audience, expressed the fear that Christians might have to leave Europe to avoid persecution, if they were not in fact driven out. It strikes me that a temple, in a city once home to 250,000 Jews and currently, (in large part thanks to the ignoble exploitation of "Christian" values),  coddling a precious 192, might not be the ideal venue for expressing such fears. Pipes continued the question and answer session with the observation that the Front National in France exists because of the large Muslim presence in the country. While ignorant of both French history and the history of the FN, it would seem unnecessary to point out that this is tantamount to saying the Nazis existed because of the Jews. In any case, by this point I'd had enough. My own attempts at questioning the lunatic at the podium resulted in more of the same, (albeit with loud applause from a good part of the audience and thanks from the the ushers). I left the synagogue for sound-check, stopping on the way to change into my Djellaba and Moroccan slippers. Just playing my part in the inexorable advance of Islamic influence. Although my son says the pointed hood makes me look like I belong to the KKK. (They didn't take that baby away..!)

I remember, before the Berlin Wall came down, going to the Polish embassy in Vienna to get my visa. Growing up in a college town in Massachusetts, with stints in New York and Switzerland, antisemitism was something I heard about but didn't experience personally. (The big music festival where my parents weren't invited because "the director hates Jews" was one refrain.) I was completely unprepared for the look from the middle-aged, Polish clerk at the embassy counter in Vienna, whose blue eyes, perfectly framed by her stiff blonde flip, focused her disdain on the wondering Jew aiming perhaps to--what?--re-populate her decimated, but at least Jew-less homeland? This look, which has stayed with me for decades, I know because I possess it myself. It's the same annihilating stare I  fire at Hassidim on the streets of New York. If only looks could kill!  In Vienna, where I played a few days before Krakow, I had a similar experience with another blond, disdainful head. This time male and much more recent. The desk clerk at my hotel when I asked how to get to the holocaust memorial. 

And yet, Krakow and Vienna are two of my favorite cities. Places where I've had magnificent moments of revelry and music. Where the majesty and elegance of humanity are abundantly evident. And where people laugh freely--or so it seems when I'm heading east from the sad plains of Germany. This isn't a put-down of Germany. In fact, I'm coming to believe that the Germans are so sad out of a certain inchoate sense of the "perfection" of their society and the attendant emotional void. It's sad that there's nothing to be sad about here. Problems? What problems!? 

In the garden of the Kuenstlerhaus Dortmund a few days ago, I performed live music to the videos of Pat Arnao. (Again, dressed for the stage in Djellaba and babouches.) My palette of samples and loops included Mahalia Jackson's Trouble of the World at one eighth original speed. I'm guessing a more wailing lament hasn't been heard in these parts for some time. The accompanying video is from a series "I Wasn't Laughing Then." The artist refers to them as "moving paintings." 

Since the rawness of emotion is expressed without any imposition of morality, it is free of sentiment. As a provocation to the viewer to interpret any meaning subjectively and internally, it creates a personal, spiritual experience that, at this late stage of human development, I would have hoped would have replaced religion. 2010 Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson, in a recent comment on God, post-Creation and contemplating a purer time, observes that "…God remembers his long-abandoned artistry--morality has come to occupy his time now…" 

Some sort of moral system is necessary for us to survive with one another. But with morals come absolutes. And purpose. And the perceived lack of same in our opposites--from another country, another clique, another church--all too often leads us to hate them more than to love our own. Which is really where it all starts. Not with purpose or morals, but with creation. Not god's, but our own. As Dostoyevsky wrote, "beauty will save the world."

ON AND OFF THE ROAD #14

I sat down a couple days ago to write about a heckler at the last Small Beast, and Cory Arcangel too. And maybe something about Odd Future thrown in. My late uncle Sergiu figured in there somewhere as well--(never late, but he's dead now). And then I heard the Drake track "Dreams Money Can Buy" with the dopest sample ever: don't fuck with me. Over and over again; a flow so smooth; intimacy, in that most mercenary and unrevealing sub genre of modern pop that hip-hop has become. I thought, well, this is so beautiful and fundamentally, this column is all about beauty and this is what I have to write about. Then this afternoon I came across  Josa Peit and everything small and large became at least momentarily clear. I  know that the moment--what has come before, what comes just after--has everything to do with how it all hits you. But it's hours later--(almost a generation in today's attention span)--and I've got the headphones on as I type. "Simmerdown" is playing. Josa is singing. I can imagine the woman in the video I first saw and the woman with her hair up,  in the acoustic version. Or every woman that has made my heart skip for the last decade or three. Or I can also just hear the sound of this voice etch a river from ear to ear with a wake down to my soul. 

The last couple weeks I finally had some time to myself to listen to some music. This is kind of how it works with me. I say I don't listen to music because I'm always playing it, but that's not really true. What I really mean is that I'm listening to the same soundtrack I've always had, which means in a way I'm just listening to myself--and the things that people are always giving me--which are often quite wonderful, (even when they're not), but it's still somehow more of the same. Inbreeding. Then every once in a while--maybe not often enough--I try to listen to as much as I can. It drives me crazy and the mouse is often on fast-forward, 'because I'm thinking: "Damn! What a waste of time--I could be doing something myself instead of listening to all this shit dropping all around me." So it's a very concentrated experience. After a week or two, if I've done things right, the mash-up-mixing-kitchen-aid music machine in my brain is filled to overflowing and I'm ready to press play. Or is it called work?

Nicholas Carr, a man who thinks a lot about how people think, just wrote a book called "The Shallows." Acknowledging that reading on a screen--multiple windows, links, visuals, audibles and all the hell else--facilitate our ability to multitask, but arguing that the difficulty in actually reading through the distractions, compromises the contemplation born of total and solitary concentration. Carr likens the experience of today's computer reading to the time, mere centuries ago, when words on  page--or parchment--weren't separated by punctuation or even spaces; running together as an extreme scroll of thought. Solitary, silent reading was unheard of, writing only being meant for reading aloud. It was too physically taxing to decipher the mess on one's own.  Riding one train of thought at a time, Carr argues, allows connections to be made; builds memory. Advances the species. 

Tyler the Creator is the creative force behind Odd Future. He's 21, but raps with the rasp and tonal depth of a man 3 times his age. The video, (which he directed), to his latest single, Yonkers, features a hook illustrated by his body convulsing to the beat as he regurgitates the liquified giant cockroach he's just swallowed. This too is so beautiful. How can something so dirty be so clean? And when you look at Josa Peit you think: How can something so clean be so dirty? I get the feeling that Josa's beauty comes from never being bored. From not entertaining the possibility of being bored. And I think that Tyler finds the strands of beauty in the frantic, 24/7 efforts at evading boredom. Josa reads books while Tyler's got that screen lighting up his face. I'm more Josa than Tyler. Looking for the multi after the task. 

I think it's one fuck of a great time to look around and listen. I can't remember when I've simply opened my ears--or turned on my computer--and heard so many great sounds.  My uncle, a Romanian-Jewish gypsy who achieved quite a measure of international fame and fortune in the classical music world of the last century, told me when I was barely into double digits in this world, that if he didn't make it to the absolute top, it would be because of his lack of education. I'm sure he meant this as advice, (I didn't take), to finish school, but I took it more as his regret at not having been more universally curious at a time when he could still afford the time. Before life got in the way. Now everything's moving so fast. I heard Mos Def--(he had to make it in here somehow)!--casually refer to two generations as "ten years." Two generations!

Besides the hook, my favorite part of "Dreams Money Can Buy," is when Drake all of a sudden grabs his lead pipe of a lyric and with superhuman strength bends it back and down with an effortless twist. You have to hear him do it; hear what happens to the phrase, but I can tell you it's about a fat ass in the middle of summer. A hard road down leads to a high moment of beauty and laughter. And of course: "Don't Fuck With Me." 

That  sample from the Drake jam, came off Jai Paul's BTSTU where it doesn't have nearly the same impact. I'm thinking--how can I fuck this up further? 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #13

"It's time, to put god away," sings Bill Callahan on my terrace. "damning the children/making the ill a little more sick…"

For days now, the sun has fixed itself in the cloudless, blue German sky. The last time I felt the rain was almost two weeks ago, sitting on the back of a camel in the Sahara. We drive straight south from Fez, over the middle Atlas, then the High Atlas; with the Enablers album "Tundra" looping on the car stereo as we cross endless miles of tundra. Closing in on the impassable Algerian border. Raindrops in the desert seem as big as dung beetles on the dunes.  Where 25 years ago, the truck I shared with the goats and the chickens bounced across desert tracks, we're now afforded the comforts of a compact Kia cruising a new asphalt highway worthy of almost anything in America's Badlands, except with way better cell-phone coverage. Radio towers compete with cacti in the desert skyscape. A pre-dinner doumbek jam with our guide is suddenly interrupted when he drops his drum and jumps off the mat shouting "Afriika!" He's got a phone call. When I take the train from Dortmund to Hamburg, there are long stretches with zero reception, but 550 kilometers south of Fez, a 10 kilometer camel ride from the nearest hotel, in a tent with a single hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, my phone has 3 bars. 

Soon after dinner, the wind kicks up and the power goes out. The blackness is utter. Sometime during the night, the wind wakes us with whipping waves of sound that snap the tent flaps like towels in junior-high gym class showers. Then it begins to rain. I fear our tent will be transformed into a Hammam, the giant masseur in the sky emptying gargantuan buckets on our fragile shelter. The camel pelts are stronger, of course. The tent holds. Having made it back to sleep, we're awakened at dawn by the sweetest of voices repeating "Good Mooorning" in a lilting, high tone until I manage a response. I don't know how many times Idriss has to repeat his call to rise, but it's the gentlest wake-up call I've ever had.  

Out here in the dunes, there is no call to prayer. We are left without an anthropomorphic interpretation of command from the morning light, but just the light itself to inspire our ambition, humility and love. I scramble out of bed and through the multi-layered tent flaps. The air is perfectly still. Narrow, high clouds trail across the horizon, but save for the somewhat firmer consistency of the sand beneath my bare feet, it would be impossible to say a storm had just passed. The "oued"--riverbed--is dry. I walk a hundred meters to the top of of a small dune, the closest promontory. To the west is a rainbow. I have to repeat this sentence: To the west I see a rainbow. I squinted a couple times. I don't think I rubbed my eyes, but my character in the movie moment would have. A fat rainbow hangs over the dunes as the sun emerges across the horizon. To one side of our camp, the camels rest. I can't say that I feel total isolation. I'm well aware of the ATVs lurking behind nearby dunes and the other tourist encampments just a few hundred meters away, but the the desert is still large enough to conceal these intrusions and encroachments. Even the possibility of true solitude is enough for me at this moment. I could just start walking in the direction of the sun and soon enough, I'd be truly lost. The ability to lose oneself is the saving grace of the country whose passport I carry. While not quite the Sahara, the seemingly endless expanse of open land in the North American west contributes to a genuinely freer sensibility in the homeland of our fading empire than in most other places on our tiny planet. 

Soon it's time to mount our rides and make the short, stately trek back to the hotel. Camel butt stays with us for days! At our hotel, a painting of a camel caravan says "Timbuktu 52 days." In the 80's I tried reaching Timbuktu from the south, through Mali, but was forced to stop in Mopti, it being rainy season and the riverbed not suitable for travel. Camels, if I recall correctly, weren't an option along that route. But in any case, my ass would have to be anatomically reconfigured to enable 52 days of nonstop travel on a dromedary. (That's what they actually are in West Africa, two-humped Camelidae not being native to the region.)

I'm often sadder leaving places, rather than people, behind. A friend is yours. A place is only for the moment that coincides with experience and perception. We head north, driving the Kia with "Tundra" in the CD slot and the dunes behind us, crossing the Atlas again, the Valley of the Roses, gorges terraced with ageless mud villages and town squares resembling Albuquerque--save for the predominance of the veil. Dropping off the rental car, I forget "Tundra" in the player. Maybe it 'll make another ride across the mountains and into the Sahara. 

In Marrakesh, at the Djema El Fnaa, I share a bowl of snails with my son on his 14th birthday and have his "fortune" read by a tiny, 80 year-old Berber woman, her face and hands embroidered with Henna. Though swarming with foreign  tourists, the Djema El Fnaa is still a magnet for Moroccan and other Maghrebian travelers and truthseekers. The malarkey and spiritual moonshine flows thick amongst the locals as well. Hard-bargains driven, tall tales told. No lacking in Viagra of all kinds. Though the exoticism of the Djema El Fnaa is perhaps more genuinely representative of Moroccan life, in a way, than a camel trek organized for short-term interlopers, the sheltering sky of the desert affords us the purity we need if we are to put god away and make the ill a little less sick.

About twelve hours after we leave the Djema El Fnaa and about two hours after our plane takes off from  Marrakesh, headed back across the Meditterranean, a suicide bomber explodes his payload of nails in the marketplace of the Maghreb, killing 17 people.

ON & OFF THE ROAD #12

Frank Zappa--someone I admire--even though, (and I know I'm  generating some serious hate here), he made some of the worst music I've ever heard, famously said that music writing was people who can't write, writing about people who can't speak for people who can't read. After one year of filling this space, readers will know that On & Off the Road is not a music column. But everything has rhythm and lyricism isn't only expressed through melody. I just read Keith Richard's book, "Life," and picked up Patti Smith's tales of discovering Robert Mapplethorpe and New York City, "Just Kids." It turns out that two of the people most responsible for deploying the transformative power of loud, simple music are among the best prose writers on the planet. (Zappa, smart and entertaining as he was in TV interviews defending individual freedoms or praising Varese, was as snide and irrelevant a writer as he was a composer). While Richards' book gives a co-authorship credit to his friend, journalist James Fox, it's pretty clear that Fox didn't have to do much more than hit play on the dictaphone and faithfully transcribe 600 pages of Keith's storytelling. Everyone marvels at Keith's survival. The man survives because he truly loves what he does and is ecstatically aware of the privileged position he's enjoyed--not just since the first million records sold, but since the first day he picked up a guitar. 

Similarly, Patti's book is illuminated with a gratitude and humility worthy of religious devotion, but so rarely evinced by the theistically faithful, encumbered as they are by the weight of morality, guilt and fear of God. The difference between art and entertainment rests on morality served or not. Religious services and stadium events from rock concerts to mass market sports are the epitome of answers offered up and desires pandered to. Presentations of a more confrontational sort, allowing audience and performer alike more room for curiosity, exploration and doubt are what advance the species. The moments of wonder inherent in the virtuoso feats of star athletes and musicians certainly mitigate the glibness of the enormodome experience, but generally by the time the creative fire spreads to Madison Square Garden or Wembley Stadium, it's a gas powered flame no matter how bright it burns.

For Patti Smith in 1968, "the weakness for using the phone booth in the diner was…most problematic…A handful of coins…could mean one less meal." To say nothing of a trip to central New Jersey, then as now, a spiritual world away from New York City, but unimaginably distant as a physical and virtual entity in 1968 compared to the instantaneous concurrence of experience provided by today's miraculously cheap and fast technology. This morning I walked along the Vistula river as the sun came up in Krakow. I got on a Wizz Air flight, (pronounced "Weezer"--I think next time I'll fly Foo Fighter), and got back in Dortmund in time for "Blood Wedding" rehearsal. The Krakow show last night was the first Botanica appearance in Poland and my first time in the country since 1986. Part time Botanican, Miriam Eicher joined us from Vienna. The show's promoter gave us the following low-down on transportation options:  "The roads are terrible. People occasionally die on the busses. On the other hand, the trains are horrible--always breaking down and usually hours late. Even though the busses are dangerous, the chances of dying in a bus accident are still far slimmer than the near certainty that your train will be uncomfortable and late. So take the bus." I figured I'd split the odds for disaster and Miriam took a train to Krakow and a bus going back. The train was exactly one hour late--meaning that she exited the taxi in front of the restaurant where we were meeting--(for the world's best pierogis and a barrel full of Katanka cocktails)--at exactly the same time as the rest of us walked up to the door. As if we'd synchronized our watches on an episode of Get Smart.  Basically, our entire time in Krakow came down to the perfect timing and flow of that first meeting. 

At the Masada Klub the next night, a 1959 Hammond B3 sat on stage, it's varnish a deep and glossy reddish-brown, polished to the point where I could check my hair during the show. Shipped from Fresno, California and lovingly taken apart, cleaned and put back together, this organ and it's accompanying Leslie speaker cabinet is the best sounding and best kept Hammond I've ever seen. It's owner informed us it was the only one in Poland. I don't think there are a dozen like it in the world. The reason this beautiful beast found itself crouching on our stage was because for weeks it seemed as if a Korg CX3 organ was not an object that existed anywhere in the whole country. "No Korgs in poland" became something of a slogan for the promoter. Inquiries were made as far away as Gdansk and Lodz for Korgs--as well Wurlitzers, (eventually represented ably enough by a Nord). Finally, with the help of several bottles of vodka as bribery, a broken instrument case was delivered to the club with what was said to be some kind of organ inside. We snapped off the bungi chords, and miraculously, a vintage Korg CX3 lived inside. Even sporting scratches in exactly the same place as my own. Naturally, though, the B3 would find it's place in the set. Since budgetary considerations didn't allow for the toy piano to fly the WeezAir, Miss Jaymar didn't make the trip, but I ended up trading her in for the Queen of keyboard instruments. There I was sitting--and standing--on that gloriously polished organ bench, surrounded by keyboards. The opening to Truth Fish never sounded so rough, raunchy and just plain fucking huge. Standing center-stage with us Captain Jack, Masada's helmsman, in a French-style, striped sailor shirt and sporting a tall, tapered candle strapped to his head, did our lights by randomly pushing faders up and down and twiddling every button on the panel while dancing through the entire set--eventually stepping on Jason's guitar cable and unplugging his bass. 

Walking around the city reminded me a little of New Orleans before Katrina. Krakow is a town whose residents really love where they live and know they have something special. We weren't aware that May 10th is a national day of mourning in Poland. As it turned out, we were almost certainly the only band performing in the city--if not the entire country on Sunday, a day when art and entertainment aren't really considerations for most Poles. But somehow this worked in our favor and the packed club barely let us leave. 

We ended the night with This Perfect Spot--on the B3--and meant what we sang. 

I don't know if Patti or Keith ever played Krakow--but they definitely had nights like the one we had on Sunday. Or they wouldn't still be around to show us all how it's done. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #11

The garlic I bought at the supermarket last week had a tag on it that said "Made in China." Let me repeat that: I went to the store in Dortmund, Germany and bought a head of garlic that was imported from China. It's been about 25 years since I was in China, but I have this feeling that it's still far away--somewhere on the other side of the world. I remember it took a long time and cost a lot of money to get back to Europe from China. It cost so much, that I had to spend a long time in Paris before I had enough money  for the flight back home to New York. But that's another story. I've been busy lately, but as far as I know, Germany is still part of Europe, as is Italy--(those two countries got along famously a while back)--not to mention Greece, Spain and Portugal, though I do understand the ruffled feathers in those relationships. Wouldn't it make some sense to buy stuff from those countries rather than just give them money? But that's another story too. In any case, if I wanted garlic badly enough, I could practically walk to Italy and pull it out of the ground. Hell, there are parts of Italy where the majority mother tongue is German. So what the hell is that Chinese garlic doing in my local produce rack? How little do those people pulling the garlic out of the ground in Szechuan Province have to get paid for it to be worthwhile for Angela Merkel and Co. to buy their fucking garlic before looking closer to home? So that's the bad news of the month.

The good news is that on the opposite coast of the Mediterranean from where we should be buying garlic, millions are buying into an idea most of us over here have pretty much given up on. From Western Sahara to Bahrain, something unexpected actually started happening. This is probably the first real news since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though I would look even farther back--to the 60s for anything approaching this level of positive surprise and global influence. For the last generation or 2, we've been treading water creatively and politically. Tentativeness--maintaining the status quo--has been the order of the day. The visual arts have languished behind an overarching scrim of decorativeness. Art music has bitten back at atonality and the avante garde in favor of minimalist soundscapes and ultimate tonality. Pop music simpers along with the limp-dick cleverness of the likes of Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists topping the Billboard Charts. (Are you kidding me?) We've all been coasting along, inured to catastrophe or euphoria; trying to figure out what to do next. I think this thing going on south of the border, down Egypt way, might just shake things up enough to wake us all up. Change the whole creative zeitgeist. 

At the end of the month, with my band Botanica, I'll be doing a couple of programs of music, food and scenes from the novels of Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese writer. South of the Border, Down Mexico Way--(West of the Sun)--is on the menu. (We're going for a bit more of the Patsy as opposed to the Frankie…) Murakami is a true post-nuclear age artist. People appear and disappear in his stories. Worlds and levels of perception coexist easily within and without the corporeal frame of body and mind. Though literally surreal, Murakami's stories evince little of the fantastical or fantastically complicated fabrications that so annoy me in so-called magical realism. (Harry Potter for adults). Murakami's tales are informed by the reality of quantum physics and the possibilities of string theory. The basic notion that the place of a thing is based on perception; that things can be in more places that one at the same time--or so it seems; that juggling an existence on more than one plane might be just as natural as eating Chinese garlic in Germany. I don't think Murakami would have been possible without science from Max Planck to Maldacena. 

So let's raise our glasses to interdisciplinary, trans-global, cross-generational movement. And don't let anybody tell you it's all about Facebook. Technology's great, but bullshit in and bullshit out--and humans still shovel the shit. Nobody virtually burns.

Maybe the revolutionaries south of the border will somehow help kick the Decemberists off the charts. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #10

I want to be in Cairo or Alexandria, but the train I'm on is stuck in the middle of a field somewhere near the Dutch border. Instead of embedded with the revolutionaries, I'm embedded in an Anselm Kiefer painting. The details of structure and vegetation along the tracks are not meant to be seen from such close proximity. Untended and unkempt, like a person startled out of bed and forced to answer an unexpected pre-dawn doorbell. Similarly, on the highway, every time I've had to make an unexpected stop--a flat tire, an emergency piss--I've felt something of the intruder; awkward among the detritus and details of dilapidation that are meant to be driven past at 100k or more. 

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is my favorite book of fiction. Molded from the experience of a place that only exists, at least for me, but I suspect also for a world-wide coterie of literary nostalgics, as the emblem of a mythical marketplace of commerce and culture lost to our more fragmented world. America is the archetypical example of such a place, extant on the map as a geographical demarcation, but alive as global code for freedom and opportunity. This despite the fact that Jacques Brel, in one of my favorite songs, "Voir Un Ami Pleurer," wrote that "there is no more America…"(Il n'y a plus d'Amerique) In 1970. The modern metropolis, with its droves of immigrants and travelers contains the same plethora of faiths and tongues, but interaction is avoided. Diversity is to be respected, not exploited. Better safe than sorry. 

I'm on the way to Amsterdam to watch the Super Bowl, America's true national holiday and day of communion.  I'll be watching on a giant screen in Holland, with my Russian friend, in the apartment provided by his Haitian employer, after eating at the Morroccan restaurant where he works and attending the art opening of our Italian painter friend. On the train, I run into the Turkish actor I just worked with. And not for a second do any of us feel at home. Not today and probably not all year. Last night I went to the ballet. "Hamlet: The Birth of Scorn." A Chinese director and lead dancers from Uzbekistan and Italy. The company of twenty features Brazilians, Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Japanese, Australians and various other internationals, but not a single German. This, In the heart of Bundesrepublik. But if the idea that is America doesn't exist, Germany, the nation itself, is barely known to the natives who live here. We work and we shop, but we don't sit and think. In Egypt, they also want to work and shop. They want to be like us. Citizens in a democracy. But though I'm definitely grateful for the happy accident of birth that allows me to carry the passport of a democracy, what I secretly wish for is the tumult and confusion, the hurly burly, to borrow from Shakespeare, of something much less clean. 

I find watching sport, the obvious simplicity of purpose and unity of passion, beautiful and relaxing. The sweat and violence is attractive too. The purity of the goal is unrivaled in society as an expression of communal action devoid of political machination. You just gotta fucking score. Everything else people do together involves politics. Not team sport. At least between the blows of the whistle. In American football, the purity of purpose when the whistle blows, on both sides of the ball, leads to a collision of stupendous violence, followed by a wake of anarchic madness. I imagine the opacity of purpose and violence of opinion brought to Durrell's squares of Alexandria, nurturing a fuzzier human than today's digitally sharp correspondents. All electric music, (as well as the recorded voice of Jacques Brel), lives on the edge of distortion. The pure buzz of humanity demands the dirt of of a thousand disagreements to survive. 

May they all get too drunk to fuck in Cairo.

ON & OFF THE ROAD #9

At midnight on January first 2011, all hell breaks loose right under my living room window. For the next hour, half the people on our block methodically light sparkler after sparkler and launch rocket after rocket, joining with millions of other Germans in an explosion of light and sound as incendiary as any battle--or at least the Hollywood incarnation thereof. The men--these pyros are all male and hundreds of liters of beer past boyhood--methodically walk to the center of our neighborhood crossroads and take turns lighting up. We open our window wide and contribute feebly to the merriment with a couple of inaudible champagne corks, while the rest of the non-arsonist population keep their windows and doors tightly shut. By 1 A.M. it's all over. The surprising hour of anarchy is done The citizenry retreats, leaving a white Christmas newly toasted in reddish brown as the only evidence of sudden chaos. Now, after a few days of rain and decay, I confuse the waterlogged and decaying dynamite for canine land mines as I stroll to the store for a bag of rolls. The Germans--so enamored of silence, cleanliness, punctuality; all the trappings of order--erupt like a woman in labor with a doula and no drugs. But only from midnight to 1 AM on the first of the year. They also profess to clean up after their abundant, beloved dogs--while generally neglecting to remove Prinz's poop as in no other place I've ever lived. This is modern German rebellion.

Germany is a still place. "Still," in the sense the Germans use the word: quiet. I welcome this stillness. I've never heard anything like it. In Italy the people are loud, the cars are loud, the bad disco music plays in every trattoria, when the football isn't turned up to 11, or the opera fans aren't around. France is not quite so loud, but the streets still buzz with the tension of dispute, dismay and even love. In Spain, no bar worth the designation could confine its regulars indoors. London thrums with the 24 hour urban struggle of man and machine, not to mention the sound of a million teenage girls vomiting together every Saturday night. We're not allowed to buy fireworks in New York City, but America, as nowhere else outside Africa and parts of Asia, makes it her business to bring noise into the lives of all her residents. Europe as a whole is a quieter place than the United States, but Germany in particular is another order of magnitude down the scale of sonic peace. This is the only country I know where a bar or restaurant with music playing is the exception rather than the rule. Oh yes--Berlin, Hamburg and all the big cities have their share of djs spinning trendy platters in trendier dives--but more often than not, you can eavesdrop on the domestic drama playing out at the next table, over a soundtrack of cutlery and clinking glasses. Walk down any major artery; hop on a bus or the subway--on a Monday morning or a Saturday night--and the sound you hear is inside your head. My refrigerator just switched to the off portion of it's cycle and it's so completely silent that when I pause momentarily from attacking my laptop, I swear I can hear the blood running through my veins. 

My 13 year-old son is lately enamored of a white ukelele he found and decorated in gold sharpie. The pop appeal of the ukelele is just something in the air. He knows nothing of Beirut or Amanda Palmer, (at least he didn't till I told him all about her). Strumming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the Dortmund U-Bahn on a recent afternoon, a seemingly friendly older woman approaches Roman and tells him that "here one is still." Since he doesn't understand and I don't hear, I ask her to repeat what she said and she explains herself to me. As the sound my son produces from his 4 string axe seems to be the only joyful noise in the entire city, I call her an old Nazi and we go our separate ways. 

I've been wondering about German identity these last few days. I'm looking for something big, loud and provocative to put on stage next year. A production with music to blow the roof off the whole damn country, or at the very least Northrhein-Westfalia. Before beginning its inevitable decline, the American Empire did manage to culturally conquer most of the planet. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, where every other advertisement is in English and hipster magazines are almost as likely to be published in the language of Kerouac as Kafka.  The shopping here puts the U.S. to shame, And at the same big-box stores, no less! Every large nation I can think of has a compendium of clichés we can call up from the collective card catalogue that shouts: this is my dumb-ass fan-fucking-tastic-country!  Germany has Nazis. 65 years from the end of World War II, the cleansing of the German soul has been so nearly complete that an Alex DeLarge style Clockwork Orange relapse most certainly need not be feared. But the first and often only association you get from anybody regarding Germany is: Nazis.

When Germans make things to put on stage, they adapt books and more often films; most commonly American films. A question posed to a room full of hyper-talented and overeducated theatre professionals regarding the question of German identity draws a complete blank. Yes--"Stille."  I suggest the following: Sometime in the future, Europe has really become one land. The uniformity has completely taken over, as Ikea, Starbucks, H & M, TK Maxx and all the rest of them have swallowed the landscape. National languages are withering and everyone speaks a diluted English--enough to retrieve the information they need from the constant flood of meaningless noise. Out of nowhere, a small band of Germans decide to find and defend what has been lost--(whatever it might be!)  A group from another country also materializes and the battle is launched, complete with internecine love affairs etc. I do realize there are only a few basic stories in the world!

It looks like what will happen on that big beautiful stage a year from now features a large cat, naked women, death, sex, the devil and a lot of flying. From Russia with love. I'm happy about this, as I get to write the music for a book that was much too fantastical for me when I was younger--hunting for information. In 1988, Elia Kazan said that "wonder is what we need today, not information." Sometimes I'm afraid that my son will be overwhelmed by the avalanche of facts. I'm hoping there will be enough white ukeleles in his life. I know the "Stille" here can be very conducive to finding the wonder when you need it most. But sometimes blowing the whole place up is a good idea too. And I still don't really know about this German identity thing.