U2, Gogol Bordello and more

Earlier I posted my memory of the Dire Straits concert I’d gone to with Chip and Gil in 1992.

Then what arose in consciousness was a series of memories of other performances. A trip down Google Photos memory lane produced this album.

There are other photos that I want to recover, but this will have to do for now.

The images at the top are from the U2 concert I went to with Dana and Mira in 2009

Most of the photos are from Gogol Bordello.

Gogol Bordello

I’ve been a Gogol Bordello fanboy since 2007.

I first read about them in Rolling Stone. The first song I heard them do was this YouTube rendition of “Not a Crime.”

I fell in love.

And then, “Start wearing purple.”

I listened to YouTube videos of concerts. And fell in love with their finale at Coachella 2017: “Undestructable” and “Baro Foro.”

Performances

I went to see them on October 11, at the Roxy in Boston. The rest of the family went with me.

Flashbulb moment: I’m hanging around, outside the mosh pit and Mira gets me to step in and crowd surf. I do. It’s a rush. I spend most of the rest of the concert getting moshed around.

Flashbulb moment: in the MTA station on the way back. Konrad’s wearing a purple shirt, soaked with sweat.

The shirt survives. The sweat is gone.

Eugene Hutz

Eugene Hütz, the frontman for the band, is the incarnation of human energy. He comes out wearing layers of clothing. As the group gets going and he gets going, he pulls off layer after layer. He ends the set shirtless.

Two days later they’re playing in Lewiston, and I get my buddy Jim to drive down with me.

Flashbulb: I can see where they park.

Flashbulb: The cops stop us on the way back, and Jim tells them about GB. The cops have a laugh.

A year or two later we drive to Burlington Vermont to see them. We check into a hotel. The desk clerk is a Russian immigrant woman, tall and thin—one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. We head into town, rock with GB, then back to the hotel. The next morning we drive back, listening to a GB mix I’ve put on my iPod.

A couple of years later they’re at the House of Blues, and I see them with Konrad.

Then we skip forward to 2016, and Jim and I see them in Portland again, We drive down and overnight with our friends Rita and Peter, then back the next day.

And then they played.

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Flashbulb: Dire straits

Yesterday, unbidden, a memory appeared in consciousness.

It was a Dire Straits concert that I’d gone to in 1992.

I hadn’t been much of a fan up to that point. They’d had a couple of hits, so I knew some of their music. But I hadn’t been marked on the name. But hey, it sounded like fun.

Chip was the guy who found out they were playing, and he and I and Gil went to see them. Memory said they were either playing in Worcester or Providence. Wikipedia which has a better memory than me, says Worcester.

Dire Straits

Dire Straits discography - Wikipedia

I remember the start of the concert. A sense of anticipation. I remember that there was a kind of scrim at the front of the stage and when the show started it suddenly disappeared, and there was the band.

I found a video of the concert in another city, and I remembered what built the sense of anticipation a 2-minute background riff with lights playing on the scrim. This video doesn’t do a good job of showing the scrim disappearing. And the other ones don’t show it the way I remember it, so I’ll settle for a blended version.

I came away from the concert a Dire Straits fan for life. I bought most of their albums and played them endlessly.

I used to practice the drum part from “Money for Nothing.” There’s a steady backbeat with occasional riffs, and I’d practice the rhythm and the backbeat while driving.

The other thing I remember from that night was a girl, a row in front of us, who got up on her seat and danced for most of the concert. She was a pretty nice dancer. She had a pretty cute butt. I couldn’t decide what was more fun watching: Mark Knopfler and the band, or the dancing girl on the chair.

I also particularly remember the sweet saxophone intro to “On every street.”

It’s hard to pick a favorite Dire Straits song, but if I had to pick one, right now, I’d pick “Telegraph Road.” It’s 14 minutes long on the album, 12 and change on this 2015 video that lets you see Mark Knopfler’s guitar work.

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Things I learned from Scientology, Part I

I got a lot from my multi-decade involvement in Scientology. I met my wife and best friend (same person), and she gestated the three zygotes who became our daughters. So lots of what’s right in my life comes from there.

This post is the first chapter in the story of how I encountered Scientology, got involved, and eventually moved on. Maybe there will be other chapters. Who can tell the future?

The starting point

Airborne Instruments Laboratory was my first job out of college. Ed Anderson, one of the guys I worked with, told me that he’d taken a summer course from a strange organization called “The Church of Scientology.” He said the course had substantially raised his IQ. I was skeptical. “How do you know that they didn’t rig the test,” I asked. They’d tested him before the course and after and the difference was significant. “I didn’t,” Ed said. “But I was a bit of a grind in school. I’d always had to work hard to get my grades. When I went back, everything just came to me, with no effort. I was just smarter. Better grades for less work.”

The possibility of a higher IQ and being smarter got me interested.

I dropped by the Scientology headquarters in New York, shabby offices in a building on 14th street. I checked out the bookstore, bought a book, and listened to an introductory lecture. Communication is the most fundamental skill in life, they said. The first step in improving my life is to take their communication course. Satisfaction guaranteed — only $25.00. I signed up. Why not?

If you’re going to teach someone the skills of communication, what would you teach them? And how would you teach it? I wouldn’t have thought of doing it the way they did it. I would have been much more conventional.

I thought their course was brilliant.

The course was a set of drills each designed to teach a single skill. Students are paired up and take turns with one coaching the other. And the first skill, the most fundamental skill needed to communicate? It is being there. Specifically: to be there, comfortably and confront—face—another person.

I mean seriously, you can’t get more fundamental than that.

You’ve got to be there to deliver communication, and you’ve got to be there to receive it. If you can’t do that comfortably, you’ll be a poor listener and a poor communicator. That seemed obvious to me.

How do you teach someone to be there? The course’s method I thought was also brilliant. You and your coach take turns. You sit there. Your coach sits opposite and says “Start” and watches you. If you react in a way that shows that you are doing anything other than being there comfortably, the coach stops the session, tells you what you’ve done, (“You laughed” is a common one for nervous beginners) and starts you again.

You might learn the same thing by meditating, but I think it will take a lot longer. And happen less consistently.

Once you’re able to be there comfortably with the coach doing nothing after starting you off, you proceed to the next drill. Your coach says “Start,” and they can do say or do anything (but not tough you) to make you react. Once you do, it’s stop and start again. In pretty short order people learn to sit, comfortably, with mayhem or comedy around them.

You learn pretty quickly because coaches are instructed to push you just hard enough that you’re uncomfortable but not so hard that you’re overwhelmed. And once a coach finds something that makes you react, the coach repeats it—perhaps less intensely—until you can deal with it, until you can “have a win.” You move from win to win, building confidence as you go.

Then you learn the other parts of communication: how to deliver communication accurately. How to acknowledge. How to ask a question repeatedly, until you get an answer. All simple stuff. It takes a couple of weeks to complete the course.

I was extremely shy in those days. I remember realizing that I’d been making small talk with strangers as I walked home. That doesn’t happen in New York, my mind told me. That isn’t something you do. And yet, there I was doing it, communicating—comfortably.

I attributed the change to the communication course.

After the course, I remember suggesting a better way to do something to my manager. “That’s an excellent idea!” he said, enthusiastically. And he put my suggestion into practice. “It was also an excellent idea the first three times I told you,” I thought to myself. Something had made my communication more effective. Again I attributed it to what I had learned.

There were other differences. The $25 00 course was making an outsized difference in my life. In the future was the possibility of a higher IQ. And more: the promises of Scientology went far beyond better communication and higher IQ. And the initial sample had exceeded my expectation. So I signed up for the next course. And for auditing, the other Scientology path to improvement.

That led to more courses and more auditing. That led to me quitting my job and becoming a staff member at the New York Org. That led to me going to England to get trained as a professional auditor. That led to me meeting Bobbi and us returning to the US and living together and moving to Los Angeles to do more Scientology stuff. And then more courses at the center in Florida. But eventually expectations were not met, and bureaucracy became burdensome. And science won the ongoing conflict with Scientology.

I ended up finding other ways to move toward what I had set out to achieve. Or to believe I was moving in that direction. And in the meanwhile, zygotes, and life.

To be continued.

Written with the help of StackEdit, Grammarly, Markdown Here,Blogger, and Google voice typing on Android and Chromebook, plus other stuff.

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