Albanian wedding

My band played at Seattle biggest Albanian wedding of the year over the weekend. OK, Albanian-American, really ... but the bride was Albanian, so they were in charge.

I love playing at weddings. They're always a logistical mess -- everything runs late, dinner takes too long to serve, nerves are too fraught -- but people's emotions are close to the surface, and when musicians connect with the audience, the connection runs deep.

Which it did Saturday night. We learned half a dozen Albanian songs for the gig, which astonished them, and between those and our standard lineup of Balkan hits, we kept the dance floor jammed for five hours. The bride called us two days later, saying all her relatives were still talking about the music, amazed that Americans could play it that well. Her unofficial MC told us that while it's easy to bring in an Albanian band from out of town, "they play for money, and you play from the heart." The relatives from New York, we hear, will be heading back with stories about what they heard in Seattle.

That's still what does it for us: the look on emigres' faces when they hear their music played with the right fire in the belly. They know it when they hear it. It's all about raw emotion, not intellect. It's not music under glass, the way too many American academic preservationists play it. It's as alive as the Delta blues, and it comes from much the same place, somewhere deep in the solar plexus.

Holla!

Daddy dearest

Unlike the O.J. case, I'm mildly pleased that MJ beat the rap.

My guess is that he may have been, in fact, guilty of at least some of the charges. But the jury rightly stuck to standard of reasonable doubt, and when you're half convinced the alleged victims' families are less interested in justice than in cash, doubt is reasonable.

I have little interest in celebrity foibles, and to the extent I care about this case at all, I wonder why Michael did what he may have done. It's hard to avoid wondering whether whatever happened to those kids in Neverland was an echo of what happened, a generation earlier, to a twisted little Peter Pan who also happened to be a gifted performer.

Child abuse, as a rule, doesn't occur in a vacuum. It occurs in an environment in which one generation's victims become the next generation's perpetrators. I don't say that Michael was either. I don't say that the sins of the father were visited on the son. I say nothing. Neither does Michael.

Deep Who?

So Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt after all? That's interesting to know after all these years, but by now, it's not much more than a historical footnote. A 20-inch story, tops.

The Seattle Times, though, played it like the Second Coming this morning: lead headline and two stories on the front page; a full page of analysis, complete with an obligatory Watergate timeline, on page 3; and two and a half more pages of navel-gazing inside. Call it four pages of newsprint, all told. I lament the trees that died in vain.

I mean, who cares about Watergate, let alone, Deep Throat, today? Except for fueling a generation of journalistic hubris, it had no lasting political impact. My college-age sons might dimly remember a mention of "Watergate" in some American history class, but if they even bothered to look at today's paper, I'm sure they would have been as baffled by the flood-the-zone coverage as everyone else under the age of 50.

And editors wonder why their readers are disappearing...