Highlights From Bonnaroo 2011 (Part 1)

It is almost inexplicable that a serious live music fan from Tennessee would miss Bonnaroo (the US answer to Glastonbury Festival) for each of its 9 first years, but that is indeed what I have done. Thankfully though, 2011 was finally my year, and all the stars aligned to get me there with a schedule that allowed me to take a full 4-day dose of Bonnaroo medicine at one pop. Thus, having now survived my first Bonnaroo with new wife Athena as my adventuring companion, I can say that I’m definitely ready to go again, but I’ll undoubtedly be prepare better for the marathon of music and dirt and sleep deprivation than I did this time around.

Athena and Jesse at Bonnaroo 2011

I could write about the dust which transformed the whole area into a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by hippies and half naked college students, or about the mind-boggling logistics of hosting a 90,000 person camping/music festival on a farm (having just hosted a wedding on my own farm), or about the amusing stoner antics of all my camping neighbors, but instead I just want to jot down my notes on the music so someday I can tell my grandkids who I saw and what I thought of them.

Here then forthwith is my personal Bonnaroo 2011 “setlist” of every single act I saw perform in the order I saw them… (click the band names below for videos or info…)

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Uncle Skeleton – A big local band from Nashville that won all the battle of the band contests to earn a slot a Bonnaroo. Great sound with 4 violins, cello, a small horn section, keyboard, drumset, bass, 2 guitars, vocals, and a DJ/turntablist. A bit too heavy on the atmospheric electronica side, but their live gig was better than their studio stuff…

Kopecky Family Band – Another local Nashville band… sort of rootsy alternative rock with some loud stuff mixed in. The best part was that halfwway through their set they suddenly pulled out a hidden trombone and a cello and rocked out on them like there was no tomorrow.

Hayes Carle – The latest singer-songwriter from Austin is as expected: funny, smart, twangy, folk-rocky, good. He didn’t play my favorite song (She Left Me For Jesus) though. He’s good, but one notch down from the likes of Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen, or James McMurtry.

Karen Elson – Mostly slow atmospheric alternative roots rock sound with some harder stuff mixed in. She would be better in a cub venue than a big outdoor stage. She’s pretty (used to be a supermodel) and a haunting but not terribly dynamic singer. I actually like her stuff alot, but got really annoyed that she used the exact same strumming pattern for every single song. Athena says this is good slow-dancing in the kitchen music. I agree as long as you like your slow dances to be mostly about dead people.

Karen Elson looks like her songs sound.

The NBA Finals – Watched the Heat get beat in a raucous but blissfully air-conditioned tent with 1000 other drunken basketball fans.

Mawre and Company – African Drum and Dance ensemble from Ghana (by way of Chatanooga).

Fresh Trix Breakdancing – A few amazing moves, but not the cream of the crop.

Gypsy Hands Tribal Dance – Super sexy. Amazing muscle control and isolation. I tried it myself. It’s really hard. Impossible actually.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Sharon Van Etten – A Brooklyn based folk-rock songwriter with a big, all-electric band (3 guitars, drum, and base). Beautiful, atmospheric, sad songs. Incredibly polite stage banter. Seemed like she was new to being on really big stages, but she held her own well.

Sharon Van Etten said "I had no idea Bonnaroo was such a big deal..."

Ben Solee – Ben Solee is the best show I have seen so far at Bonnaroo. How much can one dude rock out with only a cello? More than you can possibly imagine. More, at least, than I imagined in advance. I love happy musical surprises, and though I new his music from an album I bought, I had no idea how good his live show would be. Really engaged audience was bopping along. His vocals were great, and he brought along a violinist, drummer, and a horn section for added awesomeness. Apparently the last time he came to Bonnaroo he rode his bicycle 330 miles from Kentucky (with the cello attached!) to spread the word about the evils of mountain removal coal mining. Cool guy. Good music. Good show.

Bela Fleck & The (Original) Flecktones – It has been a LONG time since I’ve seen Bela Fleck in full tie-dye jazz jam band mode, and I’d forgotten how good it is. The last four times I’ve seen him have been with Toumani Diabate, or with Zakir Hussein, or with Edgar Meyer, or in “new” Flecktones mode with Paul McCandless. This is the first time since the 90′s that I’ve seen him with the “original” Flecktones including harmonica and piano player extraoridnaire Howard Levy. Where has he been all this time? Howard Levy is the most amazing harmonica player I have ever seen, and his jazz piano chops ain’t bad either. His harmonica sounds can also sound like the funkiest clarinet you have listened to, or like a Curtis Mayfield wah wah guitar on full Superfly setting. Bela is the best banjo player in the world, and Victor Wooten is still my favorite bass player in any genre. I still wish they would replace future man with a someone playing a real drum kit (and I hate it when they let him sing), but I’ll let it slide. Good show, and we got good spots not too far back.

Bela Fleck jamming with Victor Wooten...

...before changing clothes and running over to jam with Abigail Washburn.

Abigail Washburn – Great vocals. Lots more powerful than I would have expected from videos and recordings. Sings in Chinese too! Bela Fleck, having changed from tie-dye into “nice” clothes sat in. Great to see her “clawhammer” old-time banjo style mixed with Bela’s bluegrass style. Plus 2 violinists, including a woman in a very distractingly sexy dress. Athena called it “the naked dress.” Also had bass and drums and guitar. The set was marred by terrible feedback. the first of many sound engineering problems at this same stage… Too bad, but sounded great in fits and spurts.

The Decemberists – The first thing I went to see at one of the two really big stages. Great energy. Songs I already knew. LOTS of people singing along and having a good time. I liked them more than I expected.

Wanda Jackson – Man, I stumbled into this by accident, and only caught the last 4 or 5 songs, but oh what a rockin’ party. This old lady was burning down the house better than most of the acts 50 years younger than her. I love old ladies who kick ass. Wanda is indeed the Queen of Rockabilly. Another good surprise.

The Del McCoury Band with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band – This is more or less musical nirvana for me. I have lots of warm fuzzy memories surrounding the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and youthful trips to New Orleans, and the Del McCoury band is still the best traditional bluegrass band on earth. I would have bought a ticket to Bonnaroo just for this. The talent on display is monumental. I danced and sang along to the whole set. And the encore: of course, When The Saints Go Marching In. Pure musical ecstacy and a match made in heaven. Apparently there is an album out featuring the two bands together, but I can’t imagine it coming close to a live show. Catch them if you can. (only downside was a feedback problem again. same stage as Abigail Washburn earlier in the day. Get a soundman who understands acoustic music damn you!)

We got right up front to hear Del Mcoury and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band

Arcade Fire – I saw Arcade Fire from four feet away in a crumbling hotel lobby in Haiti a couple of months ago with a crowd of 40 people. Then I saw them at Bonnaroo on the big stage with a crowd of 90,000 people. They were great both times, but man what a change in venue. These worlds could not be further apart.

After Arcade Fire, we had to stumble back to our tent and crash. Only two more days to go…

2010 Movies

2010 was not a good year for movies, at least not for me, which is to say 2010 may have been a spectacular year for film, but given how few new movies I actually saw during 2010, I wouldn’t know. Last year (2009), I managed to see 9 out of 10 best picture nominated films prior to the Oscars, and saw a lot of other films to boot. This year, low cash flow, family emergencies, and me being in Haiti conspired to prevent me from seeing as many films as I usually do. I do like to remember the films I see though, and I guess this exercise will just be easier than usual…

So, in 5 minutes from now, the Academy Awards will fire up, and two of the best picture nominees are Inception and Winter’s Bone. These two films could not be more different from one another, and of the two, Winter’s Bone was the one that really hit home for me.

Inception is a good science fiction film, and by good, I mean it makes you think while also being entertaining and spectacular to look at. I like the dream stealing premise mixed with corporate espionage and Neuromancer/Matrix like computer technology. Unfortunately, Inception lacked for me the additional element that makes good science fiction films great, and that’s humanity. The human element in Inception never really pulled me in. I didn’t feel the characters, and in the end didn’t care about them, positively or negatively, and that’s Inception’s major flaw.

Winter’s Bone, on the other hand, engrossed me completely. Perhaps because the southern rural setting and characters hit home for me personally, or maybe just because it’s a really good indie film, deserving of a much wider audience. Winter’s Bone follows a teenage girl whose mother is an invalid, and whose father cooks meth in the extremely poor, rural community where they live. The whole movie is achingly desperate and depressing, frequently tense, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch. I loved it. All the more because I had no idea what I was going to see when I went to the theater in Tucson that day. Two thumbs up for formerly unknown-to-me actress Jennifer Lawrence. Of the few films I saw this year, Winter’s Bone was my Best Picture, and Jennifer Lawrence my Best Actress. I’m looking forward to watching it again on DVD someday.

Another film that made me really uncomfortable this year was the dark comedy Cyrus, starring John C Reilly, and Marisa Tomei. Jonah Hill plays Marisa Tomei’s manipulative and overprotective son. Basically I laughed a lot, but it was nervous laughter and there were lots of subtle undercurrents that rang true and felt familiar in a disconcerting way. In the end, I was happy that the film was over, but I liked it, and I thought about it all the way home. Did it have a happy ending? I’m not really sure, and that’s a good thing. Thumbs up from me on Cyrus.

Werner Herzog makes films that are always interesting to watch, even if they aren’t always good, and I had a so-so reaction to his Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans this year. It’s not that it was bad in any way, it’s just that I expect Herzog films to be great, and this one was just average. It also features Nicholas Cage is is notably uneven as an actor, and frequently over the top, which in the case of this role as a drug addicted policeman with corrupted morals was a good thing. In the end this is a good but fairly run-of-the mill cop movie, made more interesting by it’s post Katrina New Orleans setting, and the weird Herzogian flourishes [lizards, lots of close-up low-angle freaky-ass lizards, with the human characters out of focus in the background]. A lightweight in the Herzog canon, but still worth a look, and maybe a second watching. Nicholas Cage may be crazy, but he will never touch Klaus Kinski crazy.

In the leftover from 2009 list, I managed to catch Crazy Heart at the dollar theater before it left town, and was happily contented by it. I’m not a big country music fan, but growing up in Nashville, I do appreciate song writers, and down-on-their luck Kris Kristofferson types all the more so. Jeff Bridges really has to work hard to be anything but The Dude in my mind with as many times as I’ve seen The Big Lebowski, but in this film he accomplishes that feat nicely. A happy feeling film with a bittersweet undercurrent and an unresolved-love/if-only-circumstances-worked-out-differently ending that’s a lot more realistic than the usual Hollywood happy ending. Been there, done that. Went home from the theater thinking about past relationships. Drank a beer. the end.

In a completely different vein, I went to see my first Disney movie in several years, and found myself pleasantly surprised by The Princess and the Frog. I don’t have much to say about it other than that it was hand drawn in the classic style, had good story and excellent songs [Randy Newman as usual with songs that are catchy to kids ears, and with plenty of entendres for the adults]. Athena and i saw this one together for fun, and fun it was. Disney for all the flack that gets sent its way, still makes good movies. Sometimes I forget.

Iron Man 2 was a guilty pleasure this year. I think I may be the only person who that that this sequel was as good or better than the original. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it, but as good comic book pulp entertainment, this totally fit the bill, and if Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow character ever gets her own movie, I would go see that in 1 second flat. RRRRrrrrr!

Also in the science fiction realm this year was Splice, which was another dollar theater evening special, and well worth a dollar, though not-all that special. With that said, if you’ve ever wanted to see a woman turn into a strikingly scary/beautiful butterfly-insect-thing and try to eat a man during a sex scene, then you should definitely check this movie out. If not, then you’re not missing too much else, though there is a medical ethics subcurrent which held my interest at least through the end credits.

My favorite action/suspense/adventure film of the year came from Europe and involved Nazis, but not Tom Cruise. North Face, about two german climbers attempting to climb Eiger in Switzerland in the lead-up to WWII should have/could have been the Werner Herzog film I was looking for this year. Man versus nature. Nature wins. I was riveted throughout. Two thumbs up. Wish I had seen 127 Hours, but the last movie theater in Haiti was destroyed in the earthquake, and since none of these films star Chuck Norris, it probably wouldn’t have played here anyway. My other favorite suspense film of the year was the spy-ish thriller Ghost Writer from creepy guy but excellent filmmaker Roman Polanski. This one was good but not memorable over the long term. Better than your average summer film, but not likely to win any Oscars tonight.

I went to see the Girl With The Dragon Tatoo knowing absolutely nothing of the storyline, and never having read the book [I subsequently have, here in Haiti]. What a good story! What a good character in Lisbeth Salander, what a good movie. I was rapt the entire time, though the really intense rape scene made me squirm and afterward tell my lady friends they might not like it. In the end, all the women I know who saw it didn’t even mention that scene when talking about the film. Maybe I’m just over sensitive. In any case, I also saw the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and was disapointed by how much less good it was than the first film, which is a bummer, because the second book is just as good or better than the first. This was my only real movie disappointment at the theater this year [but with money tight, I was more choosy than usual, and one bad outing is not at all bad].

The only new documentary I saw in the theater this year was the intensely amazing Restrepo. Basically, Sebastian Junger (the guy who wrote The Perfect Storm – which incidentelly made me never want to go out in a small boat in the ocean ever again…. ok…I’m over it) spent a full year embedded with a forward combat team in Afghanistan, and recorded the results, sans narration. Nothing glorious here, just terrifying, maddening, frustrating, boring, exhilerating, crazy, fucked up, you name it. Maybe some will disagree, but to me this film manages to be an intensely anti-war film without ever making a narrative comment, yet at the same time is respectful to its subjects, the soldiers. As war documentaries go, this one’s a good one (also, incidentally, Afghanistan is beautiful). Best documentary of the year in my book…

And the best bad movie I saw in the theater this year? An oldie, but a goody: Pieces at the Loft Cinema in Tucson. The last film I saw there before I came to Haiti. Thanks Loft, you Baaaaassssstaaaarrrrddddsssss!

Please click the one of the buttons below to share this post…

Things Fall Apart…

More than year after the earthquake in Haiti, I still take a lot of pictures like these…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Many people cannot go home and rebuild until rubble is removed from their site or until their damaged houses have been repaired. Hundreds of bodies remain in thousands of flattened buildings. Some sites have been cleared by machine, and others by hand using buckets and wheelbarrows, but most rubble still sits where it fell or has simply been moved onto the sidewalks and streets. The cost of recycling or removing rubble from a site is for many people more than the cost of building a house, and for people of few means, this is a nearly impossible dilemma.

Thus, in a situation with many priority problems layered one atop another, rubble management is a major bottleneck blocking many other tasks. While there are many reasons why large scale rubble management and building demolition has not progressed further, one major issue is lack of money.

While many billions of dollars were pledged to Haiti in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake, only a portion of that money has actually been released or utilized so far, and much of the initial money focus was on caring for internally displaced people in camps, and on setting up temporary or transitional shelters. While removing debris is not nearly as sexy as rebuilding permanent homes it is one of the necessary precursors to that goal, and in order for that to happen, the powers-that-be are going to have to loosen their purse strings a bit and agree that a large scale, coordinated rubble management effort is the only way this is going to happen in an acceptable time-frame.

So anyway, destruction can make for some cool photographs, but walking and driving through a half destroyed city every day is not exactly uplifting, and living in a tent camp for more than a year is downright miserable. I hope by next year it will be a lot harder for me to take photographs like these, and that a lot more people will be in permanent homes and/or working on rebuilding in their old neighborhoods. Providing the right conditions will better allow people to help themselves.

[To share this post, please click one of the buttons below]

“Winter” in Haiti

Lower 90's in the daytime, Upper 60's at night. Good sunset everyday...

Click on the buttons below to share this post…

At the IHRC today…

This was the big excitement where I work today…

Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive.

I snapped a couple of photos [below]

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(press any button below to share this post)

So, I went to a meeting at the President’s office…

A few weeks ago, I went to a meeting at the President’s office  in Port-au-Prince, or rather I should say that I tried to go to a meeting  at the President’s office with my colleagues (we had been invited), but when we got there to meet with one of President Preval’s advisers, they only let one of us into the office, and it wasn’t me.

So, feeling slightly nonplussed, I realized that I had been left free to roam around the grounds of the destroyed national palace on my own, and decided to test the limits of my freedom. (And yes, amazingly, the President and his team still work in a slightly less damaged wing of this building).

Given my experience with overly protective/paranoid men with guns in other countries, I kept waiting for one of the presidential guards or one of the UN soldiers guarding the perimeter of the compound to either stop me or yell at me or shoot me as I wandered across the lawn inside the perimeter fence… but they didn’t, and I feigned talking on my cell phone and walking purposefully to make them think I had some important business to attend to. Basically though, I just talked loudly and gesticulated vehemently to the air in front of me as I took myself on a surprisingly thorough tour of the grounds, snapping a few surreptitious pictures along the way.

The National Palace is the Haitian correlate of the U.S. White House, but also contains many government offices and is symbolically equivalent to the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

8 months after the earthquake, it still looks like this…

[click on any picture to see a larger version]

Eight months after the earthquake, weeds are growing untended through the paving stones at the national palace...

With it's walls crumbling, the National Palace will have to be completely torn down before being rebuilt.

The door was open, but I did not go in.

From the inside looking out - Hundreds of people who lost their homes have been camped out in the park across the street from the palace since the earthquake on January 12, 2010.

Stairway to nowhere...

Apparently, the only people allowed to roam freely around the grounds of the National Palace are these peacocks and I.

I pass the destroyed palace every day on the way to work, and it is always depressing even though the much more important issues lie with homeless people on the other side of the road. I’ve asked a few Haitian people how they feel about the palace still lying in ruins 8 months after the earthquake, and I usually get one of two responses.

On the one hand, there are the people who say that seeing the palace this way makes them sad for their country and that it is a constant reminder of a shared national tragedy. On the other hand, there are the people who proclaim indifference or even antipathy towards the building, explaining that since the government has never cared for them, they see no reason why they should care about the symbol of government.

In reality, it is perhaps most telling that neither the palace nor the people living in the park have seen many changes since last January.

As I have discovered repeatedly this year, rebuilding after a disaster is a long, complicated process, and anyone who thinks it can happen quickly has never been through it. Despite anything that donors and humanitarian agencies may promise publicly, I expect the palace will stay broke and the people in the park will stay broke too… at least for a long while to come.

[Share this post using one of the buttons below]

Juxtaposition

Dear Friends,

I think that I will have to write many shorter posts, rather than fewer long ones, as the daily thought of writing a long post has kept me from writing for nearly two weeks.

So, what can I say more briefly? Haiti is an overwhelming place at the moment, and taking time out from work to write for posterity seems almost sacrilegious. The last two and half weeks since arrival are nearly a blur already, but I’ve tried to hold onto a few details along the way, and I will make those into shorter posts.

The entirety of my Haiti experience has so far been focused in Port-au-Prince (the capital city), and in several communities along the coast just to the north of Port-au-Prince (everyone abbreviates Port-au-Prince to “PaP” here).

Port-au-Prince is wild, wonderful, and terrible all at once. As with much of Haiti, Port-au-Prince has been largely in decline for the last 20 years, and the January 12 earthquake finally completed the job of bringing Port-au-Prince low that the years of neglect and mismanagement had not been able to fully achieve. As with many cities in the developing world, there is an enormous and visually evident disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor. For example, I live in one of the super fancy houses on top of the hill in the picture below. Spread out below me is one of Port-au-Prince’s hundreds of hillside slums (referred to in development parlance as an “informal settlement”).

I live with the rich people at the top of this photo. The rest is self explanatory...

The house I live in along with other Peace Corps volunteers and various USAID staff and contractors is run down, but in a cleaned up state would easily be nicer than any house I ever entered in Guinea (and that includes the American Ambassador’s Residence). To say that poor people suffered disproportionately as a result of the earthquake in Haiti would be an understatement, as posh neighborhoods of mansions and walled compounds stand literally undamaged while many poorer areas are near universally devastated.

Older and/or historic parts of town also suffered heavily, and the central downtown district looks in places like photos of post war Dresden. Out of 28 Haitian Government ministry buildings, 27 were pancaked, as were the offices of every local mayor, the national cathedral, the presidential palace, most police stations, many schools, several of the largest hotels, and thousands upon thousands of houses and businesses. Most of them remain unchanged since the earthquake, though rubble has been pushed to the margins of roads to allow passage of traffic. The official death toll stands at 230,000 people, but nobody knows for sure because many tens of thousands were expediently buried in mass graves north of Port-au-Prince, and exact counts of bodies were not kept. Unknown hundreds or thousands of other bodies remain buried in the still omni-present rubble of buildings 8 months after the earthquake.

The loss of so many government buildings and employees in the earthquake made a previously weak and ineffectual government even more handicapped, and this has made the humanitarian response to the earthquake largely the purview of international NGOs and official development agencies like USAID and GTZ. The fact of being in an election period further complicates matters, and while the Haitian government is actually working very hard (but invisibly) behind the scenes to make things better, very few Haitian people on the street seem to have much confidence that their government is helping them.

Tent camps are ubiquitous here, housing hundreds of thousands in conditions that vary from merely unpleasant, but well organized, to near chaos, misery and squalor. It is rainy season here, and each time it rains, the camps are flooded with fetid water, trash, and mud. Each hurricane forming in the Atlantic looms large as a possible new disaster in the making, though we have so far dodged each bullet. A tent is no place to be in a hurricane, and a Red Cross official personally confided to me that despite the fact that Haiti is “more prepared than it has ever been” for a hurricane, if a serious storm does hit Haiti this year, there is no place left for people to evacuate to. People are already there.

But, despite all that, life goes on. People make do and find ways to accomplish reasonable things in an unreasonable setting. More details later.

In the meantime…

Here are a couple of blog posts from friends (Peace Corps Guinea folk) who are also working here in Haiti right now:

Good Haiti photos from my friend Julia Maxwell: http://juliasnextadventure.blogspot.com/2010/08/omg.html

Haiti photos and words from my friend Trayle Kulshan: http://www.trayle.org/2010/09/what-was-once.html