As they carted him off to the asylum from his mother’s house, Nietzsche was muttering. “Everything has a secret meaning!” “Everything has a secret meaning!” He was 53, just my age, and he was tied to a chair, I’ve been told, alternately shaking and nodding his head. Apocryphal or otherwise, it’s hard to remain unmoved by this image because it seems to sit squarely on the line where smarts meets craziness…ok, maybe a tad over the line. Whether or not Nietzsche knew the content of the secret is another question and I of course wonder if he could have shared it if he did. Fortunately, most of us are stupid enough just to shuffle through our mindless day-to-day experience like shambling zombies in search of brains.

6:00am, New York City
Early this morning I wheeled my suitcase across the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan. In a cold misting rain I needed a cab to Penn Station. I’d slept for a couple hours at a friend’s fancy Battery Park apartment after a downtown concert by Tanya Donelly, a client of mine for two decades and a friend for nearly three. In case you don’t know her, Tanya started several important bands: Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly, and then went on to a more reserved solo career. In fact she made her last record, This Hungry Life, right in Bellows Falls at the Windham Hotel. Though she hadn’t played a show of her own in almost seven years, last night every seat was sold at Joe’s Pub, a swanky venue on Lafayette. There were no tee shirts for sale, no CDs to hawk, no media to meet, no record company ass to kiss, just songs and an audience, just as it should be (but rarely is.)

Tanya’s friend Rick Moody convinced her to play some shows. He’s the author who wrote The Ice Storm and a musician himself and seems a swell guy. Rick became Tanya’s guitar player and sometime co-writer. At Joe’s Pub last night he hopped up and down with jubilation as their seven-piece band of luminaries paraded through a dozen songs from the early works of Tanya’s long career to the new ones they’d recently written together. With only one rehearsal you couldn’t say that the show was stitched up tightly but there was a casual camaraderie between the players that seemed almost familial and ultimately supportive of Tanya who shone through the middle of it all with the same brightness she always does. Some people have a light inside of them; she’s one of them and it renders everything else almost immaterial. That’s what I noticed, anyhow: when all the poppycock was stripped away, all the salesmanship and celebrity, all the vanity and careerism, all the becoming and longing to become, there was just Tanya and her friends and at the center was the simple, clear, singular sound of her voice. I could search for a secret meaning all day but it was right there in front of me, irreducibly. And it was fun. Tanya doesn’t pretend to be something, she IS something.

Crossing the West Side Highway, the memory of this was fresh in my mind and helped me cope with today, which promised the miserable procession of cabs and trains and roads and snow that stood between the West Side Highway in Manhattan and Bridge Street in Vermont, my distant destination. Between the tall buildings I spied the Statue of Liberty with her torch held high. As it happens, yesterday was the 125th anniversary of her dedication and I reflected on that for a minute, too, as I schlepped up the hill toward Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza, and now home to Occupy Wall Street. Yesterday afternoon I stood in that park amid flapping blue tarps, scratching my head, trying to figure out how so few people could make so much noise in the media. I’m not exactly sure what the point of it all is and, clearly, not many others are either. I suppose it’s the unusual utterance of Moral Outrage without any clear agenda except an undiluted expression of a simple feeling. Perhaps that’s as it should be. In French they say “Je refuse,” which means exactly what you’d think it does, no secret there. But rather than a statement of negation, it connotes a positive act: something we DO, not something we do not. “I refuse,” that’s all: like Descartes, only less heady.

Zuccotti Park is no bigger than a dime and probably looks more like five cents from the million windowed offices that rise high above it. This morning, with protestors still asleep in their bags, the place appeared unpopulated except for a silent sentry in a Guy Fawkes mask, seated at the western entrance. Guy Fawkes, the conspirator who 500 years ago tried to explode the House of Lords, has become an unwitting symbol for resistance to the venal status quo. Fawkes comes to us via a comic book turned movie, 2006’s cult classic, V for Vendetta, whose mad, disfigured superhero carries out his disestablishmentarian antics in a creepy black cloak and a quirky,

smirky, Guy Fawkes mask. He’s famous for uttering the line, “People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.” Good line. If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend you do. If you haven’t been to Occupy Wall Street, I recommend you do. If you haven’t heard Tanya Donelly, I recommend you do.

I rolled my black suitcase past the sentry, past a tourist snapping an iPhone photo of blue tarps, past a phalanx of grouchy uniformed officers, past the NYPD communications bus bristling with antennae, and up to the first spot where taxis might stop. I extended one finger toward the street and a yellow cab with an “I’m a Mormon!” advertisement on its roof pulled over to collect me and off we went. Obviously, Mormonism has a secret meaning but I have only so much time to play detective.

Penn Station was bustling this morning. People hurried to get away before the snow came to terrorize Autumn. While I stood in the long line to exchange my ticket for an earlier train to New Haven, the anxiety looked like the fall of Saigon. I bought a rubbery egg sandwich at Taco Bell and struggled to swallow it; maybe I could convince my body that the world is more than Jamesons and nicotine and stress. Under the big black whirring train schedule, a fan of Tanya Donelly’s approached me. He was on his way to see Tanya’s Boston concert, the second in this two-concert tour. We chatted for a minute and I drank some weak burnt coffee from a hot paper cup. My track was called and I rolled my black bag towards the escalator, got in the herd holding our tickets for the attendant, slid down to Platform Ten and said goodbye to New York.

Amtrak dumped me off in New Haven a half mile from the parking lot. Apparently, the shuttles don’t run on Saturday. Wet and indignant I drove away, relieved of the burden of the $40 it cost to park for two days. In case you hadn’t heard, driving makes you stupider and this was surely true today. Boston drivers take a lot of heat but, as far as I can tell, the people they let onto highways in Connecticut make Bostonians look like French nobility dancing a prissy minuet.  Old ladies veered into my lane doing 85 as though the speed limit had been kept secret from them. I’m a fan of personal expression but there’s a time and a place for everything.

6:00pm Bellows Falls
One thing not a secret: tonight was the unholy and costumed resurrection of Radioke. We put up a slew of posters and were expecting a crowd until the Winter Storm Advisory struck fear into the public heart. Wait…it’s not winter, is it? By now the storm was in full force. People often confuse prudence with cowardice and I was dead set against letting that happen tonight. I braced for the trip to Bridge Street and typed an exhorting memo to our mailing list. It turned out my internet went down in the storm but, emboldened by my experience in New York, it went like this:

Greetings, Friends of WOOL,

In case you were wondering, NO, we will not cancel Radioke. It’s a bit snowy outside; we know that other people are anxious to cancel their events. But at WOOL we promote the heroism of everyday life and we urge you to drive slowly in the snow to our door at 33 Bridge Street in Bellows Falls. The inclement weather will only strengthen the memorability of the occasion and the intimacy of our event. The precipitation will undoubtedly increase your chances of winning. Let’s face it: you have your costume, you had made a plan, and now we’re asked by Mother Nature to crumble. But we don’t! We stand up, check our tires, and head to Black Sheep Radio in defiance of the forces of doom. Fun will prevail! Occupy Black Sheep Radio! Tonight!

Not much agenda, I know, but that’s OK because no one got the memo anyhow.

I put my Frankenstein Mask into the car and at the last minute brought my Guy Fawkes mask, too. When trying to determine just what sort of monster one might become, there is no reason to make a rash decision.

A minute from home I narrowly avoided being in a horrible accident and I felt a little ashamed to have advised our supporters to resist the tug of caution. Whatever. Finally through the white I saw the lights at 33 Bridge Street. A skeleton crew on Halloween is cute and that’s what we had. From their secluded hamlets of Alstead and Acworth the karaoke jocks had placed a Mayday call and weren’t coming. But the Woolites are a mighty bunch and the place looked fantastic, tricked out with cobwebs, coffins, and a bunch of other creepy stuff too scary to mention.

All three Radioke judges showed up in costume, altering the gender-compass headings of Bellows Falls. Judge Jayson Munn hewed close to home in a natty cherry red Beefeater costume with top-hat, full bloomered regalia, and a probing ceremonial spear. Judge Dickie Colo danced madly in a tiny cotton shift and heels and a bedraggled streetwalker’s wig. “Admit it,” he said to me in a voice that made me wince inside my mask, “I’m really cute.” Judge Sharon Boccelli offered a presentable but off-kilter appearance as Cindy Price, “a straight girl from Westminster.” The whole thing was a tad confusing but I reckon that’s the point of Halloween, a holiday invented to scare the devil back to hell.

The Juice, our unfaltering tour-guide through the wilds of on-air karaoke showed up as a paisley-period Jimi Hendrix though, to many, he seemed a cross between Cat Stevens and a regular Vermonter headed to a Phish concert. And John Blare, the fabled and underserved singer of earlier Radioke nights – and tonight’s glamorous co-host – was the spitting image of young Sir Elton John in a pair of towering gold platforms and a bilious feather boa. “He looks like that guy from the Buggles,” someone said. There were angels and zombies and things I didn’t understand. Taken all together, it was a long and beautiful scene from a Fellini Film: forty-five geniuses trapped like Gilligan’s castaways at the dark end of Bridge Street, on a night when Halloween arrived dressed as Christmas. I muttered to myself, “Everything has a secret meaning.”

The competition was thin but brisk and saw newcomers go head to bewigged head with veterans. The judges have a little trouble establishing a standard right out of the gate and to make matters worse, tonight they were busy shape-shifting. First up was Julie who did a belting version of Total Eclipse of the Heart. I thought she’d done a fine job but leading is always difficult. When I hear that song I can only think of the literal video. For those who were distracted during 2009, “Literal Videos” are generally rock videos whose lyrics have been modified to describe the preposterous conceits of rock videos. Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart is the best of the bunch and since I’m doling out recommendations like glasses of Bud Light at Nick’s, I might as well have you dial in to YouTube and see this one. It’s a snarky low-brow pleasure, I admit, but well worth the three minutes. Of course it has nothing to do with Julie who does her job, and leaves smiling.

Next up is Deb who has seen more of the Radioke stage than any other three singers put together. Deb likes to sing but this is the first time she’s entered the competition and she takes the stage in a costume with more cleavage than a busload of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. She careens through When Will I Be Loved right up to that long note at the end which she sings as though to stop the snow from falling. Sadly, it doesn’t.

Gina does a striking and apt version of Madonna’s Frozen, a challenge if ever there was one. People were raving later but apparently the hearts of the judges weren’t melting. Elizabeth came up for the Fugees version of Killing Me Softly that was followed by an aggro rendition of Aerosmith’s Walk This Way by Andrew who was costumed more as a car accident on the way to Woodstock than the Steven Tyler he purported to be. He picked a fight with the judges over the categories of judgment and they pretended to know nothing about the rules. Finally someone made him sing the song and, remarkably, he managed to find all the words that are fortunately indistinct in the original. His performance was aided by some faux guitar playing by the supposed Jimi Hendrix who leaned into the solo with knowing aplomb. People cheered Andrew and he asked me to collect his award for him as he and his witchy wife left early.

A couple calling themselves Jason and Renee [it’s hard to know who’s real and who’s not nowadays] climbed onto the stage. He was wearing a hockey mask so you can see why I wouldn’t trust him. They did a bizarre version of Another One Bites the Dust that started out great but with each subsequent verse became a sequel to itself until the thrill was gone and the song went all Corey Feldman. Pity. I like a duo. She was a bit absent on the important parts but she was at least dutifully up there and he didn’t kill her, as I might have.

And finally the day was saved by our hero Jeff who dressed as a fifties greaser a la Fonzerelli sometime around the time he jumped the proverbial shark. After a long on-air conversation about the horrible things he put in his hair to achieve his authentic look he went into a growling version of Dixie Chicken. In what the judges heralded as his best performance yet, Jeff reaffirmed the value of being yourself…or not, it’s hard to tell sometimes. I fully expected him to arrive dressed in a cape and tights but obviously my expectations are like Kryptonite to a plumber of his caliber.

Despite a short list of competitors the deliberation was long. The judges spent forever, smoking cigarettes while trying to choose the winner. When all was said and done it was Deb who took the prize and got what she asked for in song. The assembled masses eventually took the stage and everyone joined in a collective version of the B-52s Love Shack, led by the duo of Jimi Hendrix and Elton John. It was a love fest, indeed, and in a better world would have melted the white stuff collected outside the door. The singing continued late into the night until someone finally realized the mic was still going on air even as the tone of the lyrics became marginally objectionable to the FCC.

So what’s my secret? The fact is that I’m not quite sure myself but it has something to do with the power created by individual actors who curse the darkness and get on with it. Whether we take on Wall Street, or a long career hiatus, or an unseasonable blizzard – these are all petty examples of the big picture against which we try to make our way. I don’t really think courage has that much to do with it, in fact it appears real superheroes do this stuff because there simply is no other choice. It’s not a statement so much as a compulsion and through all of it, the tiny costumed renditions of something bigger, it’s only by doing that we can squeeze some meaning out of the nonsense.

Poor Nietzsche, he also was the fellow who first said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but he lived his last few years round the twist, as it were, and, as far as I know, never made another attempt to share the content of the secret meaning he was muttering about. Meaning, perhaps, is not so much a secret as something that’s impossible for you to tell.

I’m just guessing after this very long day: maybe meaning is something you do.

 

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 10:33 am and is filed under Philosophizin', Radioke, WOOL-FM Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.