Rachid Taha @ SummerStage

So few posts, I know...but perhaps by mid-July or later I'll be back at least half-speed. These days it's all I can do to hammer out a sentence here (let alone a paragraph) before I can the entry and say, maybe tomorrow....

But since I've started, let's see how far I can get.

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First, two recent brilliant students I worked with have launched a blog, The Unplanned Adventures of Mir Mir and Bess. (I know them by their given names, which I imagining the rest of the world will soon enough, given their talent, inventiveness, and vision as young authors.) They're on a post-graduate, unplanned cross-country tour that so far has taken them through various cities and towns in the midwest and west, and to attractions both well known, like Four Corners (where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona meet), and thankfully less so, like the "Garden of Eden" in Kansas that features a barbed wire collection (!), and a creepy stuffed two-headed calf. That is, when they're not speeding down deer-laden, pine tree-lined mountain roads to catch sunrise at the Grand Canyon's north rim. I'm looking forward to the rest of their adventures, particularly in California and the deep South, though I imagine their distinctive takes on every place they visit--like trash cans in Las Vegas resembling "daleks" proving that the city is "evil"--will continue. Be safe and have a great time, M & E!

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It's been years since I went to a Summerstage concert (the last one I really remembered paired Mos Def and De La Soul--was that before 2001?), but Tisa suggested we catch raï-rock superstar Rachid Taha yesterday, and so we tromped through the rain over to Central Park's Rumsey Fairground and caught what I thought was a sizzler. Yes, Taha appeared unsteady on his feet and teetered at the edge of the stage shortly after he finished his first song. Yes, someone we ran into at the event told us that he had had to be revived, with several hearty splashes of water, for a performance. Yes, he had trouble holding the microphone at one point and expelled several streams of spit in various directions. Yes, the rain showers came and go But when it came to the songs, he was on it. But I'll get to Taha in a minute.

The two intro bands, especially the first, were well worth the trip. Apollo Heights, a group that's been around for two decades, opened first, and I though I'd heard of them during the first Afropunk festival a few years ago, catching them live was a revelation. (Why don't I attend more live concerts?) Playing new pieces as well as songs from their CD, White Songs for Black People, the band, which comprises Danny Chavis (lead guitar), Marvin Levy (drums), Hayato Nakao (bass/programming), Monk (Brother Earth) (3rd guitar), Honeychild Coleman (rhythm guitar), Daniel Chavis (lead vocals), Micah Gaugh (backing vocals, keyboard), and Damali Young (guest drums), set the afternoon off like a round of firecrackers. I was too busy taking photos and trying not to sink into the muddy turf to take notes, but song after song, and especially "Christine," with its drawn out cadences and heavy drone, made an impression, and by the end of their moody, melodious set, I really wanted to hear a lot more. (iTunes or Lavamus!) The second band, Dengue Fever, from Los Angeles, mixes Cambodian pop and lyrics with rock, and while interesting enough, they went on a bit long. I loved lead singer Chhom Nimol's voice and the band's grooves for the first few songs, but after about 6 or so of the songs featuring jumpy B-52-style beats, I was ready for M. Taha.

And then there he was! Bearing a cigarette like a talisman, shambling across the stage as if unsure of where he was, and belting out song after song like a true pro, with breaks from the singing, dancing and posing taken up by his slurping down some sort of yellow-greenish liquid and fiddling with his pants at the back of the stage. He had the entire crowd hopping in short order, so much so that by the time we left, it looked like I'd crossed a mudpatch. But it was great hearing "Habina," "Kelma," "Ecoute-Moi Camarade," and many other hits, as well as one of his most famous and beloved songs, his cover of the Clash's "Rock the Casbah"--"Rock el Casbah," which he ended the concert with, on the best note. My lower body is still sore from all the dancing. Below are some photos from the day. When I post some videos of YouTube, I link one here.


The crowd at SummerStage yesterday

Some of Taha's fans, with Algerian flag

The crowd

Taha performing

Taha crooning

Dengue Fever performing, with lead singer Chhom Nimol at left

Apollo Heights' lead vocalist Daniel Chavis

Honeychild Coleman, Apollo Heights

Apollo Heights

Emerging from the Canyons

More than a week has passed since I've last posted, so I thought I'd try a short entry here so that half of May didn't disappear before I returned to this page. Mostly it's been work--so much to read that I can't really focus on anything else, reading for all sorts of university-related student theses and final projects, programs, deadlines, etc., on top of which there's the lecture course, which, thankfully, spares me the necessity of reading the primary works (though rereading's required), but secondary critical texts are a necessity for those works (like Willa Cather's stories or Robert Lowell's poems, for example) for which I have not previously focused in my teaching or own critical work. Right now, I'm sitting at my mother's kitchen table, with nearly 20 stories to read through carefully for another required responsibility, and will get 20 more when I return to campus on Monday. I wish I could muster the mental agility to slip between these cordilleras of required reading and things like blogging, but I've found, at least of this past fall, when the mountains of work just kept rising like a volcanic cloud, that I couldn't. Well, summer will be here soon--my own work, and this blog, will see a bit more of me as a result.

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One of the students who recently found the blog asked me if I was in New Jersey last week because of my post about the Princeton concert. I wasn't--I've been in Chicago (and this weekend, St. Louis) almost continuously for over a month now--but I did have the opportunity to hear the concert online, and here's what I wrote to Audiologo, whose pieces were superlative. (From my judging, and I'm not just being enthusiastic and celebratory.) I wrote about them:

I listened to the concert via streaming audio! It was so much fun to do so. I was trying to figure out whose pieces were which, since I must have missed the introduction, but the first piece sounded like a dance track [Timbaland Symphony, a mash up of various Timbaland produced cuts with Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which was a response to DJ Dangermouse]; the second a fairly straightforward performance of a classical instrumental score or a new score written in that format [Ravel's Sonatine (which was played marvelously by Francine Kay, also was the pianist on my piece) and you just got Andrea Mazzariello's fall down five times, get up six]; the third a duet (or were there more instruments?) involving a piano and cello (?), again fairly traditional [Shostakovich's Op. 20 piano trio and you only heard Anne Hege's Bedridden Fantasies]; and then I heard the final series of pieces Schubert's Der Doppelgänger], one of which included a performance of "Mary Mac," and then Aurora Micu singing "You are most beautiful," over the piano accompaniment and some electronic background material! Did I get this order correct? I also heard lots of talking between the first two main pieces and the latter two, so I kept hoping that someone would announce the pieces, but I really guessed I missed the intro. It was altogether really exciting, and your piece--and I'm not just saying this because I know you--struck me as the most inventive, daring and beautiful, especially when I considered what you took as your starting point. With the earlier instrumental pieces, I guess I was hoping to hear something more...complex? Something that synthesized some of the many 20th and 21st century strands of composition, non-electronic and electronic/digital. The first one did do this, of course, but yours felt especially fresh and engaging.

(Clarifications courtesy of Audiologo.) So I wasn't there in body, but virtually....

Dreaming on the transverse
              retinas of our discourse
we transcribe through signs towards
              the echoes of their singing...