The National at The State Theater in Ithaca

The National opened their world tour at the State Theater in Ithaca Thursday night.  I was not sure what to expect.  I saw their last show when they closed out their High Violet tour in New York and by then they had worked the set into perfection.  As I sat down for Thursday's show I could practically still hear Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks as it closed that last tour--it was sublime.

The setlist for this first show of the new tour included 10 of the songs they played at that last show in New York in December, 2011.  But it also had 10 songs from their new release Trouble Will Find Me.  The mix of old and new worked well.  I love how aggressively The National include new songs in their shows.  The new disc is not even out yet, but they are confident enough about the material to have it comprise half the show.  It did not disappoint. 

They began with the new Don't Swallow the Cap, (which would have fit right into High Violet), then went into Bloodbuzz, Ohio and another new one called Sea of Love.  The three songs together got the show off to an intense start, driven relentlessly by the amazing drumming of Bryan Devendorf.  The venue did not lend itself to people to being up and able to move to the music, so the energy in the crowd felt a bit restrained, but the audience certainly responded enthusiastically to the new songs right away.

Matt Berninger did not include much banter from the stage between songs, but he seemed relaxed and in good spirits.  He joked a few times with audience members who shouted out requests.  At one point he gestured out at three specific places and said in his barritone, "No. No. And No."  He went on to explain that The National are not the sort of band to accept requests--they plan their setlist carefully and stick to it.  He was not being an asshole, just explaining that calling out requests was pointless.

For someone who talks about being uncomfortable in the role of frontman, Berninger seemed totally at ease on the stage.  Maybe it's just the wine, but I don't think so.  He, and the rest of the band, seem like people who have put in their 10,000 hours and now just kick ass at what they do.  And what they do is write complex music with deceptively simple, repetitive lyrics that are more like supercharged poems and then deliver these songs live with stellar musicianship and Matt Berninger's wine-soaked baritone.  

Speaking of The Voice, there are a few songs on the list that are delivered in a higher range and really stand out for the vulnerability the change introduces--Pink Rabbits and parts of Demons, specifically.  These songs make Berninger seem less The Observer (that he usually strikes me as) and more as a participant in the emotions he is singing about.  Somehow his baritone makes him seem like he is commenting on his own thoughts and feeling from a distance.  The higher voice makes things feel more immediate for me as a listener and I like how it changed things up a bit during the concert.

Highlights of the show for me were Bloodbuzz, Ohio, a haunting Daughters of the SoHo Riots, the new I Need My Girl, and all three encore songs--I Should Live in Salt, Mr. November, and Terrible Love.  This was a great start to the new tour.  Dwight Eisenhower once said "Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before."  These new songs and this show by The National made me feel the same thing about them as a band:  they are a band who is it the height of its powers as both song writers and performers.  They are more The National now than they have ever been before.

THE NATIONAL SETLIST

STATE THEATER - ITHACA, NY - MARCH 16, 2013

1. Don't Swallow the Cap*
2. Bloodbuzz Ohio
3. Sea of Love*
4. Afraid of Everyone
5. Conversation 16
6. Demons*
7. Heavenfaced*
8. This is the Last Time*
9. Mistaken for Strangers
10. Daughters of the Soho Riots
11. Apartment Story
12. Pink Rabbits*
13. Humiliation*
14. I Need My Girl*
15. England
16. Graceless*
17. About Today
18. Fake Empire
    Encore:
19. I Should Live In Salt*
20. Mr. November
21. Terrible Love

* From Trouble Will Find Me

Where Are The Dads?

The preschool where I work is run as a co-op.  As such, parents are expected to stay in the classroom and help the two paid teachers each day.  There is a schedule printed far in advance and just one parent stays each day.  As you might imagine, some days having the extra adult in the room is a real boon; other days, not so much.  It depends on two things:  the skill of the parent in working with three year-olds (other than their own child), and the ability of the child to share her/his parent with the other kids.  There are several parents who, when I see their names on the schedule for the day, I get excited because I know they will really bring some skills and excitement to the room and be a true help.  Others, …

Ithaca, where my preschool is located, is a very progressive town.  Yet the diversity of the place is not very evident in my classroom.  I have a total of 15 children and none have anything other than a mom and a dad as their parents.  This is not a complaint.  I am not saying, “Shit, why don’t I have any same-sex couples in my class?”  I only bring it up because it is relevant to my point.

So far this school year there have been approximately 120 days when a parent has stayed to help in my classroom.  Of those 120 days, a father has been the one to stay no more than 15 times.   Rounding up, this means a father has been the one to stay just 13% of the time and a mother has been the one to stay 87% of the time.  In the other classroom where a parent is expected to stay, the days when a father has stayed are even fewer and farther between.  In general, the parents in my school are highly educated with some sort of advanced or professional degrees.  I would certainly say they are modern, open-minded, and aware of gender stereotypes.

Yet, when the rubber hits the road, it is the moms who clear their morning schedules and come in.  Not the dads.  Why is this?  It is 2013 and, as a society we have decided, in theory, that if a child has two parents, those parents should share the parenting duties equally.  If one of the parents is a male and the other a female, there is no reason for the female parent to be the one who comes to the preschool to help with childcare all the time, is there?

Running Up That Road, Running Up That Hill

I have been running for about eleven years now, (and boy are my legs tired—ba-dum-bum.)  In that time I have found running to be a great metaphor for many things.  It gives me a way to wrap my head around the difficulties of marriage and parenting, the process of developing a good habit, and the work and commitment required to tackle any large undertaking.  I often find that my running life gives me a way to make sense of my non-running life.

Lately I have found that sometimes the opposite can be true, too.  Sometimes my non-running life can give me a unique way to think about my running.  This has happened twice in the past few months here in the hills around Ithaca.  

When life gives you lemons you are supposed to make lemonade (and maybe add a bit of ice and gin).  When life gives you hills, as it does so abundantly here in the Finger Lakes, you just need to build them right into your runs on purpose.  Make them useful.  So that is what I have been doing with a particular beast-of-a-hill called Besemer Hill Road.

After living and running in New Haven, CT for nine years, (elevation 43 feet above sea level), Besemer Hill looks like a mountain.  If I get to the end of the driveway and turn left, then climbing Besemer will not be a part of my run.  If instead I turn right, I know that 1.7 miles down the road comes The Hill.  It is a decision I make in the driveway, without the terrible image of the Hill before me.  Once I turn right, it is already a done deal.  All told, the Hill is 1.5 miles long and gains more than 500 feet of altitude.  The worst section gains more than 300 feet in a half-mile.  It is a killer.

To get myself up and over Besemer without stopping to walk I sometimes have to play tricks on myself.  (Being human, this is very easy to do.)  And this is where I have noticed my non-running life coming in useful to my runs.  One trick I play is to remember a scene from Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel Animal Dreams.  One of the characters in the book is a train engineer in the mountain West.  In one scene he describes the difficulties involved in getting a long train up and over a big hill.  Once the front of the train crests the hill and begins its descent, the train experiences gravity pulling it apart from the center.  Both the front cars and the rear cars are being pulled back down their respective sides of the hill and an unskilled engineer can lose the entire train if it uncouples.

To prevent this from happening, there are engines at the rear of the train to provide a push up the hill, but they must be in synch with the front engines providing pull so the cars in the middle are not accordioned.  It is a hard process to get right and requires much skill.  So when I am trudging up Besemer Hill I sometimes take part of my brain and send it on ahead up and over the top.  I imagine it coming down the other side of the hill and back toward the driveway.  And then I trick myself into believing that that part of me that has already made it to the top is providing some pull as my legs provide some push and, together, they get me over the top and back home.  And in that way Barbara Kingsolver gets me over Besemer Hill.

This past weekend I listened to a Radiolab episode called Emergence while driving back from New Haven.  There was a segment explaining how ants seek, find, and collect food to bring back to the nest.  It has to do with order emerging from chaos, and the way this happens in ants is through the pheromone trails each individual lays as it walks.  As individual ants search for and then find a food source, they are constantly secreting chemical trails.  At first these trails are random but over time, as more ants discover the food, the trails in the vicinity have more and more pheromone laid down on top and become stronger and easier to follow.  If five ants have walked the same trail, the scent is stronger than if just one or two have gone that way, making it more likely that successive ants will follow that particular path and in doing so, they will add their scent to the trail as well, making it even stronger.

I had this image in mind two days ago as I got to the end of the driveway and had to decide—left or right?  It was a very long and snowy winter here and I had not run up Besemer Hill since November.  In ant terms, there were no pheromone trails going off to the right and therefore nothing for me to follow that way.  But I knew that I wanted to start building the Hill back into some of my regular runs.  In the end, what helped me decide to go right was thinking about future-me getting to the end of the driveway and sniffing around for a direction.  I wanted today’s me to get there and be able to tell that the freshest, most recent trail goes to the right and that I should follow that runner who took that trail on Tuesday.  And when I again choose that trail today, I will be helping Saturday’s me make the same decision, but it will be less of a decision and more of a built-in instinct.  The trail will just get stronger and stronger and the decision will just get easier and easier.

Sometimes I love how simultaneously stupid and complex our minds can be.  It is like we are both: the dumb individual ants out in the world basing every move and action on blind instinct, and the larger colony benefiting from the results of all those unplanned, unexamined actions.  In the end, whatever gets me up and over Besemer Hill can only be good.

It Just Doesn't Matter

So the nine Supreme Court Justices have heard the cases for and against DOMA and for and against California’s Prop 8.  Now they are in their chambers, trying to decide how to decide.  From all of the media coverage a person could think that the decisions in these cases matter a lot.  I have to take a different view.  It is becoming clear that the gay marriage train has already left the station for most Americans.  No matter what the Supreme Court Justices rule, society has already passed them by.  Even if they decide to uphold DOMA and Prop 8, these laws won’t stand for long.

I in no way want to diminish the importance of marriage equality and I know that there are real people who will suffer real harm if DOMA is allowed to stand and if Prop 8 remains the law in California, even if just for another year (or two or three).  For them, the decisions of Chief Justice Roberts and his cohort matter very much.  But as for the long-term American project of expanding just who is actually covered by the protections of the Constitution, this particular court cannot throw it into reverse. 

Under our system, people who are part of an officially sanctioned marriage accrue many rights and protections not offered to people who are not part of an officially sanctioned marriage.  This is a fact.  In fact, it is the only relevant fact to consider.  Some of the Justices seem to be asking, “wouldn’t it be moving too fast to allow for gay marriage?”  This is the wrong question and it is not the one most Americans are asking.  Most of us are asking: “Is it unconstitutional to exclude some people from some rights because of who they prefer to kiss?”

The people defending DOMA and Prop. 8 are left spouting platitudes about the sanctity of marriage and the procreative imperative.  They are arguing from the religious point of view, which, in this case, runs counter to the ethical and constitutional point of view.  This is a nation of laws not a nation of religious teachings, and therefore it should be clear even to Antonin Scalia that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution.

Some opposed to gay marriage are employing the slippery slope argument: “If it is okay for two men to marry, then what is to stop people from bigamy or even bestiality?”  As far as bestiality goes, the animal cannot give consent to have sex with the human, so that would be rape, plain and simple.  Marriage without consent has never been protected by the Constitution. 

Bigamy is a different story.  There have been times and places where religious leaders have preached the necessity of plural marriage.  There are countries today that allow men (mostly) to have more than one spouse.  However, this has never been the case in most of the United States.  If, someday, cultural norms change drastically, (possibly in response to some catastrophic event that kills off large numbers of men), then maybe American states will begin to consider allowing plural marriages.  This seems highly unlikely to me, but you never know.  If that happens and there is growing consensus for the approval of plural marriage, then the Supreme Court can take that case and make that decision when the time comes.

This “slippery slope” argument holds no water.  It is the same strategy used by the NRA in their fight against any and all regulations on firearms and ammunition.  I find it entirely insulting because it says that we are incapable of making distinctions.  It says we are too dumb to see the difference between a shotgun and a machine gun. It implies we can’t see the difference between two women committing to spending their lives together and a man fucking his goat.  (Maybe the advocates of the slippery slope argument are really just telling us how they see these sorts of equivalencies…)

In any case, as important as the outcomes of these two cases seem, in the court of public opinion they are already decided and what the nine Supreme Court Justices have to say just doesn't matter. 

Steubenville

I just watched a twelve-and-a-half minute video from YouTube and it made me angrier than I have been in a long time.  It was of a high school boy making tasteless jokes about the girl who was raped repeatedly at a party he was at in Steubenville, Ohio.  The case made the news and has started a national dialogue about teenagers and alcohol and rape.  The boy in the video clearly does not understand how horrific the experience was and will be for the victim.  He is a teenage boy callous in the way that many teenage boys are—in the way that I probably was as a teenage boy at an all-boy school, playing on the football team.  His main refrain, “She is so dead,” is delivered each time with a laugh and something approaching admiration, (though for who or what I cannot say.)

My high school days are long past and I no longer make rape jokes or call people “faggot,” but I certainly used to when I was 16.  This is not something I am proud of.  I am sure my parents and teachers would have characterized me as a good kid, and I WAS a good kid.  But I also laughed at jokes about rape.  At sixteen I did not have enough experience of the world to understand just how awful a thing rape is. 

And there were not enough adults in my life helping me to understand. 

Now I am 47 and I am the father of a 13-year old daughter.  She is not yet drinking alcohol or going to parties where boys are drunk and adult supervision is lax or non-existent.  But she will be at some point in the not-too-distant future.  And watching that video just now has scared the shit out of me.  It made me commit to opening a discussion with my daughter, no matter how uncomfortable it might make us both.  I need her to know just how shitty boys can be sometimes.  A little bit of naiveté can, in this domain, wreak lifelong damage.

Much of the national reaction to this case has tacitly apportioned some of the blame to the victim for getting so very drunk at a party with football players.  Of course I don’t want my daughter to get that drunk as a teenager (or ever, really).  But I also don’t want her to feel like any girl or woman EVER has the blame for getting raped.  I want her to see the “What was she wearing? Why was she so drunk?  Why was she at that bar at 2 am?” line of questioning for the bullshit it is.  Blaming the victim of a rape in any way serves only to relieve men and boys of the responsibility to control their own actions.

Just as the massacre of 26 children and teachers in Newtown has pushed the discussions of gun control and mental illness to a new, harder-to-ignore, level I hope this case in Steubenville will push the discussion of rape out into the open and get us as a nation to look more closely at how we talk (or don’t talk) about dignity and respect and rape with our middle school and high schools sons and daughters.

Excellent commentary on the reaction to the Steubenville case by blogger Lauren Nelson

Good article by Kim Simon on teaching our boys to be kind.