Er, It's Called a Public Parking Lot for a Reason

Update:
Chalk one up for the dirty hippies.

========

Imagine for a moment that you're building a city from scratch. You're given 12.5 sq. mi. of land in which to comfortably fit about 55,000 people. In the US, a large chunk of that space will inevitably be sold off to build private housing and commercial space, but if you want your city to be a place where people actually want to live, you'll have to retain a sizable portion of that land for parks, roads, schools, municipal buildings, hospitals, fire houses, transit infrastructure, and other shared items that benefit everyone. The people who live in your city will pay you taxes so that you can pay other people to maintain these public spaces and services, and that's pretty much just the way things go. Of course, the people who pay these taxes will probably want to use the space you've retained as "public" on the assumption that it is actually accessible to them and will be used for the common good, and when they do, you will probably arrest them and issue them summonses.

Uh-huh.

The Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra and their community have been dealing with this on an escalating basis for at least a few months now. It seems that a weekly drum circle in a public parking lot is, let's say, underappreciated by the city administration. In fact, this drum circle is actually illegal, according to this entry on the Trash Orchestra blog. Quoth Valerijan Ercegovic,

The City of Santa Cruz's parking lot panic law is in effect and being enforced. For those unfamiliar the law restricts the use of downtown parking lots and garages to parking and retrieving of vehicles (the person must be in and out in 15 minutes), and for pedestrians passing directly through from one sidewalk to another or a bordering store. Anything else (waiting in your car for a friend, eating lunch, talking to friends, playing music...) is trespassing, illegal, will get you hassled by Santa Cruz's finest, and, ultimately, fined

It has gotten to the point where drummers are being hauled off to the pokey for it. So let's call this law what it is: a hot, steaming pile of horseshit.

This is not dissimilar to the crackdowns on Critical Mass that are happening or have happened in Atlanta, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York; not unlike the restrictions on street musicians in Northampton, MA that Michele previously wrote about; and it's not a far cry from any effort to systematically harass or arrest homeless people for being, uh, homeless. So why is it that urban administrators seem to almost universally hate the use of public space for just about anything other than driving? A couple of good reasons might be:

• some people who saw Footloose understood the John Lithgow character to be a tragic martyr
  


• the police union demands overtime


• homeless people just don't have much money or political clout
  


• if you are not making or spending money, you are giving aid and comfort to the terrorists
  


• people who ride bicycles are effete and probably even know what "effete" means because they are so into being all Franch and everything
  

Well, regardless of the whys and the wherefores, I cast my lot in this case with the dirty hippies because, as a wise prophet once said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

pop goes the...

What I feel sheepish about, in regards to Joe's reference to this blog, is not having heard of the "first downtown NYC community-based brass band in a century," Tri-Battery Pops. 

Granted, New York is a big place, and Tribeca and Battery Park City are neighborhoods I wander into only once year to have expensive drinks with my former dissertation advisor. I suppose it's a good thing for there to be so many community street bands around that one can't keep up. 

Growndswell Intro to Honk Bands: Part Deux

Bless their little hearts: The good folks of the Groundswell collective have published part II of their Honk rundown.

Related: The context isn't entirely flattering, but someone just compared HMB with the Dorsey Band. What the hell does that mean? Anyways, good on you, HMB.

Unicorns vs. Douchebaggery: Unicorns Win!*

I'm freshly returned to the land of Kotter after spending two weeks riding to the Twin Cities and back in a veggie oil-powered school bus motor home as helper monkey to some 30-odd Rude folks. It's sort of hard to break the whole thing down into a two-dimensional form like this. But a boy can try, can't he?

Hand-crafted magnetic lettering by Turt on the ceiling of the bus.

It originally spelled out "NO MORE WAR," but the N got mangled. And RMO loves cats.

I met the band in Pittsburgh as they were wrapping up some repairs on the lounge area of the bus. The lounge is where the nightly dance parties happen and is lined with the pelts of dead plush toys. It is, of course, available for wedding receptions and bar/bat mitzvahs. The bus itself is capable of transporting up to 342 passengers, each with their own milk crate's-worth of stuff, so small wonder that a concentration of bodies would put an inordinate strain on a few sheets of plywood and some 2x4's. Anyways, they repaired the lounge with no problem and I pretty quickly tested its durability by sleeping on it.

Our bus driver was a really sweet man who, despite his best intentions, seems to be going by the name of Joey Bananafoot these days (yikes!). Though young, Joey has already embarked on his second career as a roller derby referee (his first was as a middle school bus driver, natch) and was graciously taking some time off to chauffeur us halfway across the continent.

From Pittsburgh we moved on to Cleveland where we were greeted by a unicorn and friends bearing food and moist damp, peppermint-scented towels (I kid you not). Unicorn food being the secret to eternal youth, the band was instantly rejuvenated and stomped off to play the local Food Not Bombs support march, followed by a kickball party and a set in the park.

Here I am bouncing on shit in a campground in Wisconsin.
Photo by Phil Not Bombs.

For the next several days it was much the same: hundreds of people on the bus stopping in various Midwestern cities, meeting mythological creatures, and eating very well. Dare I say it was idyllic? I dare. We escorted a class of doe-eyed children to their first day of school in Columbus, stared down a gang in Chicago, and learned that "in Milwaukee, we jump on shit!" Educational. Very educational.

The far end of our pendulum swing was in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where the malignant forces of douchebaggery incarnate were having their quadrennial freak-off. Let me not complete another sentence without first stating the goodwill I feel toward the Twin Cities. They are a source of culture, good ideas, tall bikes and punk rock in a country that is sadly short on all of these things. I would advise anyone reading this to go and spend some time there. That said, the policing in the area was what we common folk describe as batshit crazy. The preemptive searches and detentions, tear gassing of permitted rallies and marches, taser action, and overall climate of fear were not necessarily unexpected, but damn, do we really need that? (No. The answer is no. For the Wingnutteria.)

But at least we're not China.

Luckily, the RMO has secret weapons in the form of delicious snacks and a unicorn-run Llama Homo Spa!

[Make up your own caption. Words escape me.]

Which reminds me: There were llamas along the way too, but somehow I missed them.

We spent four days in Minneapolis with friends who were far more generous than we had a right to expect, after which we closed up shop and headed back east, stopping in Madison, Chicago, and Ann Arbor for food, lodging, hair cuts, and bouncing on shit (definitely not the same thing as jumping on shit, which only really happens in Milwaukee) before a final show in Detroit (which I like to pronounce in its proper Frahnch form so it sounds something like "deh-TWA").

On the last night of tour, we were sadly split in two, as there were parties with things to do the next day and, more importantly, Bananafoot was needed to keep the peace among the wheeled women of the West. So, down to only about 170 people, we made our way back home just in time to get soaked by the fringes of a rare and precious Northeastern tropical storm. In the midst of it, though, a handful of hardy souls were kind of enough to welcome us back with the dulcet (if soggy) tones of Down By the Riverside (adapted for the Gowanus Canal) and A Message To You, Rudy. Suh-weeeeet!

There's more to it, of course. I didn't even get into the bra that was shared by the entire entourage or the night I took a shower with an off-duty bartender and his girlfriend in Minneapolis. Another day, perhaps. Track me down, buy me a beer, and I'll lay one on you.


* Come now. Unicorns always win.

Quick & Dirty

The Groundswell Blog has posted part I of its rundown of the bands that'll be at Honk this year. One that's new to me is the Scene of the Crime Rovers from Durham, NC. Video here:

YouTube also has a video of them doing Zorn's Cobra, but the sound isn't so hot.

If you scroll down a bit on the Groundswell blog, there's also some footage of Rage Against the Machine doing an a cappella performance after the cops shut down their set at the RNC. Never let it be said that we here at Mystery Parade are narrow in our support of free, participatory street music.

I'll have some commentary up shortly on me own experience going to and from the RNC, but you can get the gist of it here.

Banksy in NOLA

Graffiti artist Banksy has been putting up stuff around NOLA, e.g.:

Marching band in inconvenient gas masks. See more here.

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...