I’m presently spending the evening at the Holiday Inn in Portland. I spent four hours at the airport waiting for my flight to get cancelled sometime after midnight. Absurdly, Continental would not pay for my $20 cab fare to get back downtown, so I took them up on their $77 hotel room voucher instead. I have never spent a night in a hotel as nice as the Holiday Inn, and certainly never slept alone in a room with two full-size beds. The room was so calculated and sterile that it seemed the appropriate conclusion to a day that I spent stripping my apartment of all its personality.
Earlier, at the airport, I stood in an unmoving line with over a hundred other groggy red-eye travelers. We had been told the plane would take three hours to fix. I love these moments, when formerly silent strangers have a common problem and we suddenly form a makeshift community. We took care of each other, passing on helpful information and telling of our best stories of travel woes. I find it so invigorating when we deconstruct the bland anonymity of air travel.
For a solid twenty minutes a teenage girl wearing headphones sang country songs at an outrageously loud volume. At first it struck me as a silly attention-getting stunt and I found it somewhat irritating. But then someone near me in line said, “I love that this girl is singing so loud. That never happens in the airport.” And he was right. More than any other place I know, the airport culture is scripted with the heavy burden of travel fears. We have all been reminded that the security level is orange (yikes!), and none of us want to do anything that will set us apart from the mob. As we all know, anyone who doesn’t follow the script here is suspicious…and dangerous.
All of this reminded me to highly recommend checking out the work of two great advocates of individuality within the scripted environment. The first is Timothy “Speed” Levitch, whose ideas are on display in the awesome documentary, “The Cruise”. The other is Reverend Billy, an incredible political street performer. His many antics and those of his followers (The Church of Stop Shopping) can be found at RevBilly.com.
Oh yeah. I’m playing a bunch of shows. Tons of updates on the shows page.