“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like – and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix…. Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Douglas Adams was strangely prescient on that front, wasn’t he? Social media, by removing the onus of face-to-face confrontation from mass communication, by removing the social mores of caring what others may think about what we’re going to say – we cease to worry about it – and then are shocked to find that everyone we thought KIND OF thought just like us – actually there’s all these little nuances and huge gaps. Linguistic wounds that allow us to tear one another apart over quibbling semantics and prideful moments where no-one’s willing to admit to being wrong, and no-one will ever accept an apology, so none will ever be given.
Is this crow okay? This crow is okay. (Corvid. NOT covid.)
This Fourth of July was mad. My Life is strangely familiar to me and yet utterly alien in so many ways, certainly compared to where I was a year ago. The constant barrage of explosions outside every night for months add to the surreal feel of it all. The heat, the people that I meet that are solely eyes and hair, faces masked, social cues erradicated, voices muffled. The protests, the anger, the culture war, the president extorting violence and rage and the news cherry picking facts both on right AND on the left.
The Christopher Columbus statue down the street from Teavolve somehow toppled, people dancing and laughing as they drag it down and haul it in shards to the Harbor and throw it in. It continues to feel like the end of the world. But I wonder – during times of social revolution and earlier upheavals – I ask my friends of the hippie generation – did it feel like a revolution? Did it feel like the end of the world? Or did it feel like a party your parents didn’t want you to go to? Are we inherently incapable of remembering what it was like to be young and angry as we grow old and bitter? Are we inherently unable to truly understand one another – and in our shock at discovering this – are we unable to reconcile our alieness, doomed to hate one another for not being as homogeneous as we thought we were?
Strangely, in the midst of all this, I think I might’ve had my favourite 4th of July ever. I’ve been exploring independence recently. Independent of time and independent of gig schedules. I’ve been arbitrarily making things up as I’ve gone along and mostly am meeting with success. A good deal of me knows that this can’t remain stable this way and something’s going to break, something will change, but … if there’s one thing Covid and maybe even #blacklivesmatter has shown this year it’s that everything changes and even stable things topple.
Less than a week ago Rowan mentioned that he was playing with our mutual friend Mark Rooney for a “Porch of July” festival in College Park, MD. And maybe I telescoped sadness at not being invited, I don’t remember how the conversation went – but then Kristen and I were invited, and then Heather was invited – and then it was an ilyAIMY and taiko show with a whole set from Rowan Corbett and Rowan was trying out his Behringer X-Air and I’d bring the Mackies and we’ll webcast and we’ll play Kashmir and… well it all kinda ballooned rather quickly.
I worried that the City of College Park, with its strange wordings of the event that implied porch owners had better be prepared to enforce social distancing and be ready to ask people to leave if numbers hit fifty (statewide limit for gatherings), I worried that the organizers hadn’t really thought things through. After seeing how bar re-openings and Live music openings have been MOBBED by people so fed up with being pent up Kristen and I were definitely having misgivings the night before – we didn’t advertise location, we invited literally three people (College Park advertised online but it was so last-minute and frankly half-assed it didn’t gain much traction) – but we were still worried that people, so excited that SOMETHING was happening, would mob the scene. I was worried that people would cluster in the shade. I was worried that with all the stories of masks and non-masks fighting in supermarkets there was going to be some sort of conflict. I was worried that people would cluster and photos would be taken and people would point to us and say “look at those fucking irresponsible idiots – all those words about ‘community’ n shit – dropped the moment they got a gig”.
Well – we worried about all those things and – it was hot. Brutally hot. And I did NOT want to wear a mask and I’m sure no-one else wanted to wear a mask. But I did. They did. We did. People didn’t cluster, people maintained distance. People were respectful. People hung out. We probably had about 25 – 30 people scattered on the lawn and out into the street and none of us had played together in three months and you could tell. I should’ve washed my hands before playing – after 4+ hours in the heat and the sun my nails didn’t make it through the first verse of Glom of Nit and we had a very rocky start – but once we were going it was awesome. We relaxed with pizza after the show and it was the best pizza. No legal fireworks displays meant EVERYONE was launching ILLEGAL fireworks displays, and there’s something to be said for geographically non-centrallized fireworks. The whole drive home, lights and explosions and rockets and flares shooting up all through the I-95 corridor, following us home to Baltimore. The Beltway was wreathed in multi-coloured explosions and we came home to maybe a half dozen neighbours firing rockets and lighting sparklers and lighting off Roman candles. We came home to find our next door neighbour’s whole family on the porch watching as a can on the sidewalk launched purple sparks high into the sky. Watching the dad (?) step forward and pour water on the expended shell, seeing the fire extinguisher on the porch – it was like – here’s a family doing it RIGHT. Absolutely illegal as Hell, but it was a cool thing to come home to.
And as we loaded gear back home for the first time since the beginning of March, I stopped to listen to one kid explaining to his mom about another kid they got into a fight with. “I mean, she was just calling people racist racist and that the 4th of July was racist and I mean – they WERE racist but she didn’t teach them nothing and if you’re just going to call people names and you don’t educate them then you’re as bad as them!!!”
The kid’s probably in sixth grade.
From the mouths of babes.
Maybe we CAN have nice things.
