'Spread the word around.' -- Lynott

For my first appearance here in 2011, I'm offering a bit of an aside. It's a pretty minor story, and one that I remember now but am probably in danger of forgetting if I don't recall it here and type it out and explore a little about why it's stayed with me so far.

In Boston, during my first semester of grad school in the winter of 2003, I lived in the Allston/Brighton neighborhood, just south of the Charles River and between the campuses of Boston College and Boston University. Allston housed plenty of students and plenty of cultural mixing, and seemed to me a unique and fulfilling example of city resources together with a collegial and ethnically diverse community. Lots of my BC friends and colleagues lived close by, and we spent weekends on foot and on the T around the neighborhood.

During one late Saturday night in particular, a group of us stalled on the steps outside a friend's apartment building. We talked about our respective courses and profs, and probably what our semesters would look like in the new year. At one point, apparently, our conversation expanded to include a group of guys on the stoop next door, who were, we learned, visiting from Ireland for work or school or vacation or something else. We talked to them about a couple of things, but wound up very quickly discussing some of the Irish poets I was studying that semester and moved even quicker to the Irish rock music on which I'd focused much of my study during my final college semester a few months before.

We talked about U2 and Van Morrison, who are almost surely the most successful and popular Irish artists of the last 40 years here in the U.S. and around the world. Rather than aesthetics, though, it was far more interesting to hear from these guys about the cultural connotations such major global figures hold for their closer and more local communities. It's clear the Irish should feel a strong sense of pride for U2's generic and wide-ranging impact as well as the crushing and sophisticated art of Morrison (in my mind, one of rock music's two or three greatest singer/songwriters). And they do. But these guys also felt a pretty strong sense of malaise and resentment at the notion that 'Irish music' is reduced, on a large scale, to either these global stars or the scrubbed and disposable folk sing-alongs heard in theme pubs around the world.

I think it's a sentiment I understand. It's pretty unsatisfying to consider that, though awesome, Elvis and the Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen might represent to the world the entirety of America's rock music over the last 50 years. So I was glad I could dig a little further with these guys, even if it meant losing the interest and immediate participation of my BC friends that night, about Rory Gallagher, the phenomenal Irish blues guitarist. And Thin Lizzy, Dublin's familiar and still vastly underrated 70s arena rock band that gave the amazing and brilliant and awesome Phil Lynott his stage. And while these examples still fail to fully capture the country's long and rich popular music culture, they certainly provoked a more genuine concern and investment from its young citizens and workers.

Finally, even more interesting to me is how and why our conversation that night has stuck in my mind since then, and why it might still be relevant. I'm sure part of it has to do with a misplaced satisfaction about specialized knowledge, and me being sort of weirdly proud about being able to have an intoxicated conversation with these guys pretty purely on their conceptual turf, and all of us feeling (hopefully) enriched by it. Another part, though, has a bit to say (I think) about open and public and inclusive conversation, a subject perhaps on all our minds this week. To enter a public space, with the assumption that safe and satisfying and enriching connections can happen, is a daily and natural activity for most of us, to the extent that we forget how much happens beyond our control. This week I'm reminded how limited and focused our individual scope and knowledge and political loyalties normally are, and at the same time, how big and broad we can cast our impact, in both positive and negative ways. In Alaska, in the winter, these concerns--exiting private spaces and interacting with a community--seem all the more relevant. For all the potential our natural and open and necessary public patterns offer, I fear we lose quite a bit by taking our public spaces and systems for granted. It's a week to consider what it means to go out in space with each other and listen. It's pretty sad to me that some people got punished for doing that.