Brooklyn

I went to "Nuit Brooklyn" last night -- 4 bands from Brooklyn who came specially to Lyon to perform for me, since I won't be back until the end of August. Thanks to Artem for bringing me. They were all pretty good -- we missed some of St. Vincent, but Dirty Projectors were great, The National was too, and Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, while kind of a stylized genre thing, were as active as one can be without exploding. The trumpet player's shirt was translucent halfway through.

The National's singer left the stage at one point. Not to crowd-surf -- he just climbed halfway up the Roman amphitheatre that the performance was in, and sat on a step, singing, while a crowd of people held his mic cable aloft. Not to be outdone, Sharon Jones brought up a nattily-dressed young Frenchman out of the audience to sing a love song to, and to dance with (rather well, I must say). Must have made his month. Exemplary quotes:

From The National frontman: This next song is called Ohio, which is a nice place, a lot like this area. Lyon is a lot like this town in the song, this town Cincinnati.

If more of the audience had spoken English, it's possible he would have been lynched. As it was, the crowd was unnaturally silent. He probably didn't know there's a song called "Ohio" which starts "Je suis dans un État proche de l'Ohio//J'ai le moral à zéro". Or that the Lyonnais don't realize how provincial they are, although to be fair, I think that Boston is a better comparison.

From Sharon Jones, during a strange, somewhat racially charged discourse on how dancing was in her blood, speaking as a Native American: The white man has killed all our buffalo. The buffalo is our main source of protein!