I have been going to see a lot of live music, after deciding that in buttoned-up DC, where each part of life is siloed, concerts are the one place where I can get that connection with others that I crave. Just a bunch of people who came together for a common purpose: To listen to and to watch and to react to artists performing their music, live. I generally check out what’s playing at the handful of intimate and excellent live music venues in DC and if something looks moderately interesting, I go. Sometimes I even go alone. Which is how I came to be at an experimental music concert back in December that was the strangest concert experience I’ve ever had. (Stranger than the concert at the Black Cat 15 years ago with Colby where we met some fascists and one showed Colby his tattoo of FDR being shot through the head. Stranger than seeing American rappers and a beat-boxing flutist in the Sahara Desert of Algeria at a concert I helped organize, with two of my best friends from high school standing next to me. Best friends who I’ve glow-sticked raved with at Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival in the early 2000s).
William Basinski is an avant-garde Brooklyn-based composer who gained fame for making “The Disintegration Tapes” after 9/11. He recorded sounds onto tapes and then recorded the tapes playing for so long that you can hear the tapes disintegrating. I was intrigued. I was also curious at who in DC would show up to see a “sound sculptor” and just how high on mushrooms they would be. I convinced my friend Drew to go with me to the concert, because he’s been known to like some avant-garde music, or at least non-mainstream music. After picklebacks at American Ice, we headed into the Atlantis. I got us a few whisky gingers and then William Basinski took the stage, started by saying how much he didn’t like DC, something about “fucking Republicans.” I thought that was a weird way to start a show in a town like DC which actually contains very few Republicans, at least when a Democrat is in the White House. The crowd didn’t react much. He told some anecdote about sharing a cigarette with Bianca Jagger and then he seemed to fumble around to find his files on his Macbook. He started playing sad industrial sounds of whooshing and thumping and then looping more sounds over those. The crowd was rapt. And also completely still and completely silent. I was dying to know what was going on. I had my reporter’s hat on, wanting to figure out the story. I asked some concertgoers nearby what was happening. Are they all fans? Why’d they come here? I was sshhed. A guy in front of me said “I will maybe tell you after the show, but SSSHHH!” The feel was religious, sacred, Catholic. I thought of going with friends to church as a kid and of all the rituals others seemed to understand. Stand up, sit down, kneel. “And also to you.” The more worked up I got trying to understand what I was witnessing, the more I whispered to Drew “Is this for real?”, the madder everyone seemed to get at me. The guy in front of me turned, looked at me furiously and relocated to a point on the floor not by me. A girl in front of me was one of the only people moving her body, and I leaned in, asked if I could ask her a question. She looked me dead in the eye and said: “You’re being selfish. I think everyone is trying to experience in their own way and you’re getting in the way of that.”
I had come to this concert because I thought the people who would go to such a thing might be interesting, thoughtful, talkative. Maybe a bit like me. But here I was not understanding what the hell was happening, trying to understand, and being rebuffed. Also, I come to concerts for a collective experience and at the particular concert, people were seemingly having individual experiences.
I went to the bathroom and when I returned, William Basinski was no longer on the stage and if it had looked ridiculous that 200 people stood motionless and silent in front of an older man at his computer, it looked even more ridiculous that 200 people stood motionless and silent in front of single open Macbook. “Where’d he go?” I asked Drew. “He left the stage,” he said, “And this,” he motioned around, “is bullshit.” I said yes it felt like bullshit, but then again, how could two people be right, but 200 people be wrong? We stood on the floor a while longer and then all of a sudden – although maybe not so all of a sudden considering my emotional state at this time in mid-December – I started crying. Fat tears. Honestly, this wasn’t the first time I’d cried that week. We streamed out of the show, Drew, who’s seen me cry quite a bit this year, headed home, and I ended up walking alone in the street of DC, no longer crying, but certainly not feeling great, mind racing with thoughts of “Why am I in DC?” (Answer: My best friends are here and it’s a city I once truly loved). Shouldn’t I follow my heart and move to Paris, a city, that fills me and inspires me?
My feet took me to St. Ex, a bar named after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the author of The Little Prince. Other than it’s name, St. Ex the bar is not French in any way. I used to dance at this bar all the time, and I’ve been going back a lot since I moved back. I find dancing in the especially low-ceiling and claustrophobic fire hazard that is the St. Ex basement both nostalgic fun and present-day fun. That night, I just sat at the nearly empty upstairs bar, ordered a whiskey and ginger ale. A guy next to me was doing work on his computer and turns out he was a comedian who just finished a stand-up set at St. Ex. I told him about my experience. “That sounds like the whitest thing I’ve ever heard” he said. I confirmed it was a all-white audience and also probably a show that would have been more appropriate at a museum than at a fun music hall. I continued to process my night to this stranger, who then told me, “I’ll tell you what happened. You went out tonight and wanted your night to be one way and when it wasn’t that way, you blamed everyone else and got angry.” Ouch, again. He wasn’t wrong, but his words also seemed to fit into one theme of the night, which was perhaps people being rude to Emily? Or people responding to me in a way that I was not expecting. As a new friend recently said “Sounds like an expectations verses reality mismatch.”
It was a bad night. And it dampened my enthusiasm for going to concerts. But recently I went back to The Atlantis for a very different show: Mayer Hawthorne, who’s from Michigan like me and his sound is very Motown inspired, which means it’s funky, happy, and you can dance to it. I went with Brandi, a longtime bestie with whom I’ve basically maintained a rapid-fire conversation of topics both erudite and significantly less so for the past 16 years. We do like to talk, she and I. We also like to see live music together (I’ll forever cherish the memories of seeing Florence and the Machine and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros in small DC venues with Brandi). Before the show, we had a drink on The Atlantis rooftop, which is made to look like early 1990s DC, with facades of store fronts that existed in the District in those days. There’s also an old parking meter plastered with a D.A.R.E. bumper sticker, which led me to vocalizing a theory I’ve had for a while: All of my best friends won the D.A.R.E. essay contest. (This was a police-sponsored contest in which especially precocious 11-year-olds read sanctimonious essays on the perils of drugs at an assembly and then try drugs a few years later).
At the Mayer Hawthorne show, Brandi and I picked a dynamite spot next to an older gentleman who was having a great time dancing to hits like “Backseat Lover” and “Henny and Ginger Ale” And so did we, me sipping a whisky but contemplating changing my standard concert order to Hennessy and ginger so I could sing order it if so compelled. We tried to get our party vibe to spread across the room, or at least to the unsmiling girl next to us who kept her arms crossed for the duration and I’d like to report by the end of the concert she had a little smile and sway. “Joy is contagious,” Brandi said. “So is misery.”
To not letting one bad experience get in the way of what brings you joy,
Emily
thenextdinnerparty.com 
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