On Saturday, Listener Egmont picked us up in his big, comfy vehicle and we drove to Brooklyn to see “Angels and Accordions” at Green-Wood Cemetery. First, though, we drove into Sunset Park, just a little ways from where I used to live in Bush Terminal (under the Gowanus Expressway, near all those once-abandoned industrial buildings). It’s been a long tim since I was out there, and I couldn’t get over how much it’s changed. Not that it’s gentrified or anything, but it doesn’t look completely bombed out anymore—there are actual stores there now, and restaurants. We ate in one, but I don’t have the name because it was in Vietnamese.
It was a very rudimentary storefront-type place, with a counter along the back wall, a few plastic chairs and tables around the perimeter in front, and a big empty space in the middle. The menu was limited to just a few items, six or seven sandwiches, with their numbered pictures hanging above the counter and a list of drinks that included a durian milkshake—durian being that fruit that reportedly smells like rotting meat. Normally I am all about trying new things, but the idea of a rotting-meat milkshake in a storefront in my old neighborhood was a bit much, even for me.
Listener Egmont and Sluggo had lychee milkshakes, which they raved about, and I had a milk bubble tea with more big, black tapioca pearls than I could finish. The sandwiches were killer, too. We’re trying to think of other reasons to go back to that neighborhood now, just so we can eat those banh mi again. Maybe if the economy continues on its present course we will all end up living there—you, too!—and then we will have delicious Vietnamese sandwiches every day.
Following our excellent lunch we went down to Green-Wood to see the performance. It began just inside the main arch of the entrance, with Guy Klucevsek playing an accordion piece he’d written especially for “Angels and Accordions.” Dancers from Dance Theatre Etcetera—half dressed all in white (ghosts or spirits, I thought, but maybe angels) and half dressed all in black (mourners) performed to the music. I kind of liked the dance, but Sluggo thought it was sort of corny. Listener Egmont pointed out that all dance is sort of corny, and we all agreed on that.
About halfway through, there was a great squeaking and squawking from above, and I looked up and saw flashes of brilliant green and metallic teal coming in and out of some enormous bird nests built all around the spires of the archway. Even more surprising than the hyphen in Green-Wood is the fact that the famous Feral Parakeets of Brooklyn are welcome at the cemetery because their poop doesn’t wreck the stonework the way pigeon poo does. (Here is a link to some info about the birds, in case you don’t know about them.) Some Web sites call them parakeets and some say they are parrots, but I prefer the former because Feral Parakeets sounds more ridiculous and also because when I lived in Portland, Oregon, we used to visit a place we called the Parakeet Mausoleum. It was a huge building full of dead people filed away in giant drawers, with dozens and dozens of parakeets in cages all over. There was also a stairway to nowhere, a large stained-glass window of Abraham Lincoln, and a statue attributed to some woman who was described as “Iowa’s preeminent sculptress,” although I grew up in Iowa and I’d never heard of her. So—the parakeet, bird of the dead. Of course.
After the short dance piece the rest of Angels and Accordions consisted of a lot of walking around and looking at excessively earnest young people in solemn tableaux vivant. I think it must be extremely difficult to look earnest and solemn while doing trapeze tricks in a tree in a cemetery, but they managed. There was a bit of accordion music here and there, but no more Guy Klucevsek. I gather from reading reviews of past performances that Angels and Accordions has changed a good deal from when it was first presented four years ago. Alas.
On the way home in the big, comfy vehicle we started discussing politics. I said how odd it seemed that the big front-page breaking-news headline in every newspaper after the vice-presidential debate was that the candidate of a major political party actually spoke in complete sentences. (Now, of course, Candidate Palin is going around claiming she meant to sound like an idiot in the Couric interviews.) Listener Egmont said that when he watched the presidential debate (the first one) he was surprised that McCain sounded so old—not old as in his age, but old in his ideas, with his 20th-Century Cold-War point of view about everything. You know how some people get stuck at whatever music was popular when they were young? They really liked the Rolling Stones or something, and now that music, and music from that era, and bands who sound like bands from that era, and tribute bands who play that kind of music are all they’ll listen to? And they don’t know anything about any music that’s happened in the last 40 or 30 or 20 years? I think maybe the same thing happens with people’s political ideas sometimes. It explains why some people are still fretting about things that have become punch lines in real life. So I guess it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the debate tonight.
