I must have some real good ticket karma, as I ended up at BAM last night for the first night of Sufjan Stevens' BQE (thanks, Allison!). Was it great? Sorta.
It was exciting to see Stevens stretch, to think big and fill the Opera House. But something kept nagging at me, especially during the second half of the evening, which featured songs from his pop catalog, amped up to 11 with the same full orchestra, projected semi-abstract animations, plastic wings and disco balls.
Yes, it was cool to see the film projected along the upper half of the stage space image-check all the sights off, and off off, the highway (including the large yellow storage building at the corner of Underhill & Atlantic, my fave neighborhood landmark), and lord knows I was hypnotized by the mixed-gender hula hoop brigade, but the visuals felt like they were filling in the information from the music rather than complementing it.
One big impression was that the piece was Koyaanisqatsi lite, looping around and around without moving. Which, some might argue, is what it feels like to be on the BQE. But while I was prepared to see the utopic side of the highway, I was surprised to see Stevens try to fit it so neatly into his vision of Americana, of a Jack Kerouac romance with the road.
While this is a perfectly valid notion to have even in NYC, because it's here it has to be a little fraught (and not just because of the Robert Moses aspect). Though I've learned late in life to appreciate the joys of being in a car, the world-view of the pedestrian is by necessity incompatible with the POV of the driver. I missed that ambivalence in the piece, that extra little layer that would have made the composition as poignant as "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)," which had a very similar melody to the BQE piece but came off much deeper in the second half of the show.
Still, it takes a brave man to write an orchestrated composition to a butt-ugly un-freeway, and I loved seeing all the young strings and brass and reeds up on that stage. They rocked, as did the man himself.
Here's a shaky video of "Detroit" from a performance last year at Town Hall (with the same wings!)
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