I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAN DEACON-Tiny Desk Concert #422 (February 25, 2015).

Dan Deacon is a trip and a half.  I only know him from NPR (and they love him).  He is a weird dude, that’s for sure.  He plays some super weird electronic music.  But more importantly, he really really gets the crowd into his show.  Indeed, this is one of the few Tiny Desk Concerts where the audience features more than the performer.

His opening mantra is that you will close your eyes and enter the consciousness of Martin Lawrence’s character in Bad Boys II.  This is apropos of nothing of course.

“Feel the Lightning” is amazing.  He has his synth set up to control an acoustic piano (you can see the keys playing).  Deacon plays some really catchy music (an amazing amount of noise and layers) but with a beautiful piano melody over the top.  And he sings.  But his voice is utterly and utterly processed.  There are high harmonies added to it and frankly I have no idea what he’s singing most of the time.  It’s catchy and alienating at the same time.  It’s amazing to watch the piano playing by itself–wailing–at the end.

Deacon himself is a pretty weird dude as well, as I said. He starts talking about filing down solenoids and other technical details about what he did and then he shifts gears and tells them to form a circle for a dance contest.  He prattles on and on (and is quite funny).  The contest rules: be sassy, after 5 seconds, pick the next person to go in, imagine you’re a T-Rex in Jurassic Park.

“Sheathed Wings” opens with the wrong song and then when the song proper starts the dance contest begins.  And how fun to watch the NPR staff dancing along (and to see how big their office is).

The final song “Learning to Relax” is nearly 7 minutes and it also features a group interpretive dance (with captains).  As with the previous dance off, everyone is brought out one at a time (including Bob and Robin!) for a dance off.  Always maintain eye contact with your team otherwise you won’t know if your dance moves sucks.

And while all this is going on, he’s singing along, pressing all kinds of weird (homemade) gadgets.  I love watching him “conduct” the piano during the slow part.

As the show ends, you hear Bob say it’s heart-healthy NPR (and Dan asks if there’s a shower in the building).

I don’t even have all that much to say about the music–which is hyper and dancey, but man, I’d like to see him live sometime.  It’s a show one won’t soon forget.

This is a must see.

[READ: January 6, 2015] An Elephant in the Garden

I didn’t realize until after I read this that this play was an adaptation from a novel (I’m curious to read the novel now).  Or that the novel was actually a children’s novel ( I just saw on amazon).

This is a simple story of a girl, her mother and an elephant.

As the play opens, it is 1989 and Lizzie is visiting the recently torn down Berlin Wall.  Then it flashes back to her life in Dresden.  She as born in 1929.

Set in 1945 in Dresden, Germany (yes, you know what is going to happen), Lizzie and her family are a Christian family who do not approve of Hitler or his plans.  They have relatives who support Hitler (and who blame the Jews for their losing World War I) and who call Lizzie’s father a Jew-loving pacifist (!).

When the war starts, Lizzie’s father is sent to France and they never see him again.  So it is just Lizzie and her mother.  Her mother loves Marlene Dietrich songs and sings them all the time–Lizzie doesn’t understand how her mom can sing these happy songs during such a sad time.

Lizzie’s mother gets a job working in a zoo.  She cares for the animals and worries what will happen to them in case of a bombing.  In fact she speaks of the animals (especially an elephant she has named Marlene) so much that Lizzie is sick of the whole thing.

On Lizzie’s 16th birthday, the allies bombed Dresden (this must be stunning in a small theater).  When the chaos settles down, Lizzie sees an elephant in their garden–her mother has saved Marlene.  And then the three of them flee from their home.

After walking for miles (and causing quite a bit of confusion wherever they go), the get to a relative’s house in the country. No one is there except fora soldier–who is Canadian.  They are ready to bash his head in for destroying their city, until he says he is genuinely sorry and can’t understand why it was done.

They form a weird kind of alliance, especially when German soldiers come looking for the solider who parachuted out of the plane that crashed.  He becomes Lizzie’s “brother.”

The soldiers tell them not to walk in the direction that they are going because the Russians are coming that way.  They would be better off going it the other direction towards where the Americans are coming.  And so they do.  The three of them march with an elephant across Germany.  They are able to hide out most of the time without raising too much suspicion.  When they finally do arrive in a house that welcomes them, the elephant becomes something a distraction for the fleeing refugees.

The end of the story is full of some coincidences that I’m not entirely certain I believe (perhaps the novel makes them more believable with more details), but despite that I was incredibly moved by it.

I was also really interested to read this story which was about Hitler but was not about Jews fleeing.  In this case it was about Christian Germans who opposed Hitler–not an often told story.  It was a short story but a really effective one.