Olympic drumming, new Honk! posters, life in Northampton...

After hearing so much about it, my TV-less self has spent the morning searching for a full video of the Olympics opening ceremony, with its 2,008-member (the ceremony was heavy on numerology) drum battery.
I found a video here:


Olympics 2008 Opening Ceremony - video powered by Metacafe
It's the apotheosis of the marching band halftime show! Instead of making the links to Leni Rienfenstahl's "Olympia," or asking Anthony Lane's hypothetical question, "what kind of society is it that can afford to make patterns out of its people?" (well, A.L., let's remember those selfsame halftime shows—while this ceremony explodes the scale of any American halftime spectacle, we at Mystery Parade often ask similar questions about our own regimented ceremonies), or (on the logistical side) ask how such a large group of drummers was conducted (earpieces? a conductor in the crowd? disciplined intuition?) I just want to comment on the type of drum that those 2008 drummers were playing. According to this blog, the instruments, called fou drums, were not originally drums at all but vessels for wine. Well! How and why were these vessels transformed into drums? Our blogger solves the puzzle: "Very simple. When you are drinking high and you want to sing, what will you do? Grab anything you can reach and make beat." Right on! But could the drinking party that this blogger invokes be any further from the spirit of that tightly controlled Olympics opening ceremony, as impressive as it was?

So, more in the spirit of the original kind of fou drumming (in the sense of collective music-making fueled by spontaneous joy and, often, wine), I here report that Titubanda - Rome's 30+ renegade banda di strada - will be attending this year's Honk! Fest in October in Somerville, MA. Titubanda hosted the first brass band fest I ever attended, the 2004 Sbandata Romana, where my band was kept constantly surrounded by other bands, and constantly supplied with local red and white wine siphoned from huge glass wine casks (like these). Titubanda probably won't be able to fit such casks in their carry-ons, but I'm sure they will bring with them all that old-fou-spirit, and lots of horns and drums. Stay tuned to their website for their show dates after Honk! in Providence and New York...

And speaking of Honk!, I just saw some wonderful new Honk! posters online, designed by the Groundswell Collective:

Of course, here in the streets of America the wine does not flow so freely as it does in Rome. And in Northampton, MA, where I've just relocated, the beats don't flow so freely in the streets. Somehow I've managed to move to a city that, while seemingly so similar in spirit to Somerville, the home of Honk!, is cracking down on street music instead of celebrating it. According to what Dave DelloRusso of the local street-music-hero band, the Primate Fiasco, has told me, you must have a $20 permit to play on the sidewalks of downtown Northampton, and if you're a drummer or a member of a group numbering more than three, you're out of luck, permit or no.

Well, clearly I have grown spoiled by that small collection of legal rights enjoyed by musicians in New York. It's too early in my residence here to make any declarations of what should be done about the crackdown, (for that, check out Dave's take on the situation here, and read Tommy Devine's blog about the linked crackdown on panhandlers here [As Devine quips, "some people want a bohemian atmosphere without having to put up with any bohemians. "]), but expect more from me in the months to come...