The Ballad of Anna and Renars

Lots of people walk into the store every day. The majority have crushingly dull things to say by way of explaining their helpless low-grade consumerist lives ("no, Music Hall of Williamsburg is my favorite club"; "do you have Ratatat/Bon Iver/spoon-fed dog-puke-du-jour on vinyl," &c.), but a few have interesting stories, and they're usually the ones who don't volunteer them. I had to dig a bit with Anna and Renars, and the rabbit hole got kinda hysterically, awesomely deep.

Be nice to these two, for the Norns watch over them.

They walked in at peak-boil of the record-melting afternoon today, and in accented but very good, crisply enunciated English, Anna asked to buy Sonic Youth tickets. She also asked if I had any information about the opening acts, but before I could say, her gentleman associate Renars asked, "Is it Magik Markers"? Which would be a good guess under any circumstances but too weird to let slide here, because no they were not on that bill in August but they are playing tonight at Shea Stadium (and last night at Cameo), and they are the best band on earth right now, so hey. Ask why he asked that and then tell them the deal. Cause maybe they half knew it already -- you know the way people get part of something right these days, Internet and all that mess.

Well they were shocked at this news in the best way, so I was happy to show them a map of where Shea is, tell them openers &c. I asked where they were visiting from. Latvia! Cool. Anna proceeded to explain that they knew the band, and what a great surprise that they would get to see them. How do they know the band, oh from some festival over there. And I'm not quite sure what flicked the gates open, but I think Anna dropped an arcane comment like, the only reason she was in the store was because of a Twix bar. Which I couldn't let alone, and so she proceeded to tell an increasingly bizarre story about their trip to NYC, which this was the first day of. She had been grocery shopping one day in Riga when a man rushed past her and knocked her into a display of discounted vodka bottles (I think she said they were flavored, which explains the discount). She stood in horror as one bottle knocked over the next, and her English is good enough for her to say "like dominoes," and suddenly she was standing among several (hundred?) smashed bottles and I guess a lot of liquor. One of those situations, you've had them.

A store employee told her to go to the register and it would be okay, or something -- you can imagine her state of mind at the time -- and she completely forgot her groceries and rushed to the counter. On the way, impulse told her to grab something to buy. Twix bar got grabbed. Fuzzy about the rest of the encounter at the register, but inside was a form for a contest, win a bunch of Twix bars she thought it was. I presume she entered. Some months later she said she was on Friendster -- and this was the only hint Anna and Renars might not be from, like, the west West -- and a bunch of people she didn't know were asking her on Friendster how much chocolate she had needed to buy/eat in order to win. Win what? Wow, a bunch of candy bars, right? No, there was a bigger prize: a trip to Tokyo. Her shame-Twix was the winner; her name had been announced before Twix of Latvia, Corp. could inform her.

This trip to Tokyo was apparently all booked and ready when the massive earthquake and tsunami hit. Anna didn't mention this as if it were an inconvenience or anything callous like that, for the record.

As any sane people would, when told they weren't going to Tokyo they tried to get whatever cash-value instead. Nope, they had to pick a trip somewhere, okay United States. Anna called the random discovery of a Magik Markers show -- her and Renars haven't seen them play in a few years so I'm bringing a bag for them to carry their brains home in -- the latest little chapter in the trail of Fate-moves, and she doesn't think it's done with them yet. I'm going to buy them cheap beers at the show tonight (doesn't qualify as Fate, I'm pretty sure), and you should do the same if you see them at the Sonic Youth show on the Waterfront.

What's doing in Sierra Leone?

Freetown, Sierra Leone, is pretty heavy with history in two directions, having once been a primary departure point for African slaves (via the Portuguese) and later, in 1787, being settled by 400 freed slaves and African-Americans, under the guidance of British abolitionists. After that community collapsed in violence two years later (a "misunderstanding" between Europeans and Africans? The devil you say), it was tried again in 1792, and — well, that's about all I know really, and anyway, this isn't meant to be a history lesson. Let's just say it's still there, despite the French, the British, the diamonds, and Charles Taylor.

Freetown, hanging in there

Why am I telling you this? Because a good friend is in Sierra Leone for a spell as a doctor with a volunteer organization that shall remain nameless, and she passed along a rough story a couple of days ago that I thought I'd share. If you're squeamish you might not want to read on, though it's not all that graphic. The upshot is I won't be complaining about healthcare here for a while.

Would probably win a duel with a motorcycle

Anyway, her first couple of weeks there were uneventful (other than the Harmattan), but then...

"One of my volunteers was mowed down by a motorcycle in a remote part of the country! My worst nightmare! It was night, when we're not allowed to be on the road (for safety reasons — driving is not good during the day, but impossible at night). Fortunately, two other volunteers were in the same town as the injured volunteer, though he didn't know that at the time.

As I've told you, there's a large Lebanese community here — especially Lebanese/Sierra Leoneans, who although never having been to Lebanon retain many of their terrific qualities of hospitality and caring. The Salones (Sierra Leoneans) are naturally the same way, being very friendly and caring people. So the combination of the two peoples can be very interesting, and certainly proved helpful that day. A Leb/Salone picked up the volunteer (who was profusely bleeding) and took him to a gov't hospital, which I'll describe in a minute. Somehow the word spread like wildfire, and the two other vols showed up at the hospital — thank goodness, because they ended up sleeping with the injured one, and providing the necessary care to him...a head injury, he needed neurological check every two hours throughout the night. I was on the phone continuously between them and the doctor treating the vol. To make a long story short, the volunteer, apart from a bad head injury that required two wounds to be sutured (and that neurological checking), had multiple cuts and abrasions all over his body, and probably a broken ankle (or at least some torn ligament).

[note: italics mine. – mw]

But here we go. The wounds were sutured without any anesthesia, and by the light of the volunteers' cell phones, since there's no electricity and no generator there! And the volunteer, with his open wounds, was laid on a bed where there had been blood spilled by a previous patient! Yes, this is Africa. They do the best they can, but it ain't much. When I arrived at the "hospital" the next day I almost fainted...I've seen bad in my life, but absolutely nothing like what I saw there. The volunteer is a great kid, and really sucked it up, and did all that I told him. Got him out of there, to Freetown, cleaned him up and gave him appropriate exam and treatment, which is still ongoing.

But everything here is such an effort that all my time has been taken up by this event. I've looked into helicopter medevacs for him, etc...but nothing yet, although it's very much in the planning stages. And there are several SL doctors in Freetown that are quite good and have been trained in the U.S. It's just that there is so little in the way of equipment. Tomorrow I'm getting him two CT scans (head and ankle) — price is $500 for both! Get that! (note: I think that's cheap? Or, I dunno, expensive?! –mw) And the hospital — also a gov't facility, is absolutely the worst (even worse than the one in Bo [note: Bo is Sierra Leone's second-largest city, pop. about 215,000. –mw]) that I've ever seen in my life...bare beds with 6-7 people lying in each one...and if there are no family members around to help the patients don't eat, they lie in their own filth...I won't go on, you get the picture.

I took a brief nap today and am sure happy to be back in Freetown; took the volunteer and the driver for shawarma and felafel at a Lebanese place, where I had a terrific conversation, all in Arabic mind you, with the old man, the owner. So that's been my time...it's just very dicey when you can't do what you know you have to for injuries."

Ege Bamyeezy

I like Kanye's Dark Beautiful Miasma, but it's his second straight album that won't be on my year-end list. Graduation, from 2007, was on that year's.

I was lucky to be invited to the advance-listening session for press for it (and for the two that came before). For this one, which was at a movie theater in Midtown, he stood onstage and took questions afterward. I was totally floored when this song had come on, to hear the booted melody line (from Can's "Sing Swan Song"). Against form, I strenuously raised my hand in an effort to get his attention in a theater of possibly a thousand people. He pointed to me and I realized I didn't really have a question; it was more that I somehow had to acknowledge that he used a Can song. I blurted out, "Where did you first hear the Can song you used as a basis for 'Drunk and Hot Girls'? People sitting around me turned to look (and afterward, a bunch of them descended on me, notebooks and pens in hand, to ask who Can was), but Kanye either didn't fully hear me or he was just rolling so hard on his cocktail of adrenaline and pride that he heard only what he wanted. "Yeah, that was a Can song," was all he said, before launching into a long and weird and somewhat caddish explanation of what the song is about. Which is summarized well by its title.