Diasporic Dining XXI: Lichtman's Brain Cloud

Go down to Banjo Jim’s on Avenue C on a Monday night and listen to a group named Lichtman’s Brain Cloud. They call what they play Western Swing and have one or two fiddles, a bass, a single drum and an electric guitar, amongst other instruments, including the electric mandolin. The group is presided over by a lead singer named Tamar Korn, a petit, dark haired young woman with a charismatic, startling voice. She can dance in a country music kind of way, but the voice is mesmerizing. It sounds like Billie Holiday as heard through an old-time radio, only turned up loud and clear. It’s distant yet creates vibrations that could make a string ring. It ignites your inner harmonics. Tamar can also use her voice to mimic the sounds of instruments. When she takes a breather, Brain Cloud plays instrumental numbers all on its own. The group has a small following, but some day they are going to make it to the big time. Garrison Keillor’s talent scouts should head down to Banjo Jim’s to hear Tamar and Brain Cloud one Monday. They’d be wonderful guests on A Prairie Home Companion.

Drama Queen

Last Saturday’s Prairie Home Companion, which was broadcast live from Town Hall, presented a skit that was all too close to home, presented courtesy of POEM (Professional Organization of English Majors). A Yale undergrad decides to switch her major from English to drama so as to be more in touch with her body, which she parenthetically likes to exhibit. After graduation, she lands a job with the Queens Shakespeare Company, located in Queens, where she plays Juliet. A few years later, when the theater runs into financial trouble, she is brought in and told that while her talents are appreciated, they are looking for someone younger. Despite her protests that she is only 32, she is let go. Her next job is with a soap opera called Blazing Pajamas, where she earns $10,000 a week until she’s told that her character is being discontinued and that she should show up for her last performance in a sweat suit so she can be shown falling down an elevator shaft. Next is a bit part on C.S.I., where she has only one line (actually one word) as a drug dealer who stands on the north side of Washington Square saying, “Smoke, Smoke, Smoke.” For this gig she brings in a cool $400. If she had been an English major, she could have avoided this tumble to the bottom of the social ladder, which culminates in her dressing up in a chicken costume and handing out fliers for fryers. But the skit ends by projecting the impossible. The drama major with the credentials of an English major is being interviewed about her memoir, Failure, which has been on the bestseller list for 41 weeks.

Wireless Camp

During last Saturday evening’s broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor presented a skit called “Wireless Camp.” This latter-day Erewhon for luddites proposed an end to the Internet, Facebook, and all forms of electronic networking. During the course of a stay at the camp, which is essentially a rehab clinic, those in recovery learn to write and spell and read books again, and actually participate in conversations with real people instead of avatars on Second Life or cybernetic faces created in digital fantasy land. The only problem with the skit, whose humor was too true to be good, is the title. “Wireless” sounds a little too close to “Wi-Fi,” syllables tantamount to “Bar” for an alcoholic. But when will people really start to go to islands where the Internet is embargoed, and those who wish to can be freed from the obligation to be Linked In?  If alcoholics go to detox to dry out, will there be places where the frazzled Internet surfer retires to be freed from the prison of connectivity? If "Macbeth does murder sleep," then MySpace murders solitude, giving the illusion that there’s no point in being alone. Keillor should find a more apt name for his “Wireless Camp” and advertise it as an actual event on Facebook.  Ironically, he might be able to fill enough beds in his camp to let him drop the Ketchup Advisory Board as a sponsor of A Prairie Home Companion, a latter day Grand Ole Opry, which is nothing short of revelation.

The Road More Traveled

Truth be told, most people in our day and age take the road more traveled—even those millions who have read the M. Scott Peck bestseller named after the Robert Frost poem. It’s a pleasant enough poem. It implies that the less obvious ways of doing things and seeing the world, the unconventional ways, yield unexpected rewards. But it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes our modern Interstate highway system.

For instance, a traveler recently endeavored to go from Burlington, Vermont to Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The road less traveled was Route 7, which passed through many interesting towns the traveler might not have had a chance to see had he chosen a shorter route involving an Interstate highway. Unfortunately, the road less traveled added an extra hour and a half to the trip. Yes, it enabled the traveler to see Middlebury and Bennington, but it was totally dark by the time he arrived in Great Barrington. If he had taken the road more traveled, he would have missed Bennington and Middlebury, but seen Great Barrington.

   

Even though Shirley Jackson and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, lived out their troubled lives in Bennington, Great Barrington is more of a crossroads, situated as it is in the Berkshires, in close proximity to both Tanglewood and Lenox, where Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, is still preserved.  Middlebury sports a typical New England college campus, with wholesome stone buildings and a strong whiff of winter sport. It’s also the home of a famed A&W Root Beer stand, where waitresses still roller skate up to your car to take your order. But let’s face it, if you you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

   

What would Rogers E. M. Whitaker, the famed New Yorker writer, who wrote his famous train column under the pseudonym E.M. Frimbo, have said about the road less traveled?  No idea. Just a thought.

    

Times have changed. The fact is that the road more traveled is usually the shortest distance between two points, and often leads to greater spiritual insights. For instance, had the traveler reached Great Barrington on the earlier side, he might have had time to attend a seven o’clock meditation at the Congregational Church, or to browse the famous Book Barn, one of the greatest used bookstores in New England, located on an otherwise deserted back road deep in the woods near the town.

    

On the other hand, if the traveler is tuned in to NPR, it hardly matters whether he takes the road less traveled or the road more traveled. It might make sense to take the road less traveled if it’s Saturday night at six and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion is on the radio. On the other hand, if it’s a Sunday afternoon, an ambitious driver on the road more traveled might squeeze in Ira Glass’s This American Life, followed by All Things Considered, and still arrive in time to unpack before dinner. In the twenty-first century, the decision to take the road less traveled isn’t about nonconformity. It’s about scheduling. There is a reason why the road more traveled is more traveled. Like modern love for David Bowie, it gets you to the church on time.