First off, when we got out of the subway at Herald Square I felt something fall on me - not a raindrop, not bird shit - something small and light and solid. I brushed it away, whatever it was. "Shit is falling from the sky," I muttered.
"What?" Amanda didn't believe me at first, but she said something similar a few moments later. As we walked toward the Hammerstein Ballroom, through the throngs of tourists and natives and highschoolers (a different species altogether), we found the proverbial "shit" increasing in volume.
"God, what the fuck," Amanda muttered, and I started laughing hysterically.
"It's in my shoes!" I said - I was wearing open-toed platforms without a heel strap - the strange substance was sweeping inside, under the soles of my feet. I tried to discern what it was by catching it in my palms, but the particles were blowing so quickly that it was impossible. It wasn't hail. And we weren't hallucinating - we could see it blow around in the sky.
"It's like paper punches!" Amanda suddenly said, and I realized she was right - we were walking alongside a huge building housing hundreds of businesses when we saw that the strange particles swirling in the air did look exactly like the byproducts of a paper puncher, small, white, circular, flat. Where was it coming from? It was swirling tempest-like all over Herald Square, but it seemed to have no origin. I thought immediately of the jokes about Enron's Christmas - they shred documents and dump the confetti out like snow.
Shit drops from the sky in New YorkJust as we entered the Hammerstein it started to rain, of course, just like Amelia had predicted. The skies would be relatively shitty all through Thursday and Friday. Although it did not help the general demeanor of the city I found it strangely ironic... strangely funny. I also found it strangely, painfully funny that we were surrounded by highschoolers at the concert. In striking contrast to the Coldplay outing, there were very few adults there older than us (at eighteen and nineteen), but plenty of highschoolers and middleschoolers with their half-choppy, half-shaggy indie haircuts, smoky makeup, cellphones, digital cameras, and sodas. Ugh. One of them had even brought along (or was weighed down by) her mother, who in her long beaded hippie skirt and pseudo-tribal necklaces that remind me of my own mother's was clearly trying to look as cool as possible.
"They think that going to see Franz Ferdinand and Death Cab for Cutie on a Thursday night is the coolest thing in the world," said Amanda. "They don't know any better."
"Do we?" I asked.
She gave me an odd look. "Of course!" But I could tell that I had struck some doubt in her, as well. I must admit that I've never felt so adult and truly cool as I did during that concert, when I was sure that most of these nymphs had very little understanding of some of Death Cab's deeper songs. All they knew was Death Cab as the reigning patriarch of Emo in America - not really emo in themselves because they have earned nods from critics and are so broad and high musically that they really shouldn't be locked down with such a terrible title as emo - but still, yeah, admittedly emo.
And although Franz Ferdinand was jumpy and optimistic and generally hyper, they ended on the song "This Fire", the song that I've used on a playlist to juxtapose riots racing through a city: "This fire is out of control/we're gonna burn this city, burn this city". It's a very simple chorus, but when you have a thousand teenagers screaming it at the top of their lungs in what feels like an underground catacombs the song is more nerve-wrecking - a feeling I could only experience out of context, looking back on it. While I was screaming as part of the crowd it was only exhilarating with undertones of destruction. Rather like "The Destructers", that post-WWII short story that I read under lamplight while Amanda and Mir watched for the second time Donnie Darko. That capacity for destruction in youth is an interesting thing - I'm sure most adults are frightened of it, and I'm pretty sure that most teenagers aren't even aware of it. But it comes out, in spurts, in protests that arise sometimes out of intellectual qualms, as in the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, and sometimes out of "primordial" qualms, as in Paris last November. And when it does it looks very scary. Maybe it's the hormones thing.
It was also a strange theme to be chanting in New York City. Maybe it's just me, but it felt a little sacrilegious, a little treasonous, or maybe just a little tempting-fate-ous to be chanting such a violent chorus toward a city that withstood 9/11.
"baby alligators in New York sewers grow up fast"Death Cab didn't play their "New York" song - "Marching Bands of Manhattan". That was alright. It isn't my favorite song anyway. I listened to all their pieces, many of them ones I had never heard because they're an old band with a lot of albums, and I'm willing to admit that I was not one of those intelligent pundits that foresaw their rise to glory - I was one of the mainstream masses that heard them after they were famous. I was blown away by the melancholy sorrow that runs through their songs. If I listen to "Transatlanticism" while reading the latter parts of book 7, "The Peace Chronicles", I'm almost moved to tears. I just need to hear "The Atlantic was born today, and I'll tell you how" and I feel my heart strings break. Death Cab pulls at your soul, makes you weak in the knees and in the heart, then wrenches everything in its grip to squeezing point. They're named after a song called "Death Cab for Cutie" about a girl who goes for a ride in a taxi from hell... and dies. So many of their songs are about death - and they are songs about young death, probably the reason so many young adults listen obsessively and plaintively to Death Cab late at night while trying not to write their papers and mulling the dark existentialism outside their windows.
My two favorites that were played were "What Sarah Said" and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark". I only recently discovered "What Sarah Said" because over winter break Lindsey told me it was even sadder than "I Will Follow You Into the Dark". I think in many ways she's right, because here the young couple is separated by death: "as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me, away from me" whereas they are allowed the possibility of unity in death in "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" (his encore song, by the way): "Love of mine, someday you will die, but I'll be close behind, I'll follow you into the dark". Both are devastatingly sad and being one of those hypersensitive, dramatic types frequently afflicted by the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, they are almost too painful for me to listen to. If only they weren't such beautiful songs.
I think elders may ask what we have to mourn. I'm not sure. Maybe it's that death for us is also destruction of all future, all hope, all dreams. Death is a waste, more for youth than anyone else. We're old enough to know what it means but not old enough to have done anything to protect the memories of our selves of our actions from it, should it come. And chanting "So who's gonna watch you die?" in a crowded ballroom is about as angsty as us teenagers can get. And we lap up the angst, trying to find meaning in our lives that could be cut short any second.
