Air Raid Siren Sound

George Jonas: The bombardier's folly

The newscast shows a town in Libya after a NATO air raid. Rescue crews carry someone from the rubble in a bedsheet. In the background we hear a woman wailing.

My friend’s 10-year-old has come into the TV room during this. “Hey, Uncle George,” he says to me, “why are we bombing them?”

“To improve their lives,” I answer. My friend says: “To help them get rid of their crazy Colonel.”

I say nothing, but the truth is that Libyans are fighting a civil war in which we’re taking sides. At best, we hope we’re taking the better side. We hope, because we don’t know, and we don’t know because we’ve leapt before we’ve looked. As I wrote five months ago, we’ve lent some people NATO’s air force, without even asking for their address.

My friend’s son has a technical question. “Hey, Uncle George, have you been in an air raid?”

“Not lately. Why?”

“What do you hear first, the planes or the bombs?”

“The announcer.”

Bombing raids over Budapest in 1942 start with a broadcast, usually about half an hour before the first explosions. Like a muezzin calling the faithful to evening prayer, the announcer interrupts regular programming to call everyone to seek shelter. The liturgy consists of a string of place-names, followed by a code for the aerial activity expected: “Crocodile” for a possible air raid, or “bumblebee” for a reconnaissance flight. The quadrant from which raiders approach indicates the likely target.

If it sounds as though Bomber Command is headed for Budapest that night — the British Royal Air Force always comes at night — mother shoves an item or two in the small suitcase that stands ready by the door, adjusts the blackout curtains and starts herding the dachshunds, Dolly and Blackie, toward the shelter at the far end of the courtyard.

“Are you scared, Uncle George?”

I don’t know enough to be scared. At seven, I just tag along. We live at the far end of a distillery my father manages. We’re usually halfway to the shelter by the time the sirens begin to wail, waking up Hissy, the senior distillery dog, who blinks at us malevolently. “It isn’t our fault,” mother says to her, in case Hissy thinks we woke up the siren.

You think junkyard dogs are mean? Hissy is so mean she just hisses, like a snake.

Animals don’t get to go to the air raid shelter, except the dachshunds. This has been established in a brief conversation between my mother and the designated air raid warden, the yard boss, Uncle Lou, during the first practice drill, for which mother appears with a dachshund under each arm.

Lollapalooza 2011, Friday: Muse « Random Musings of a Curious Mind

“Songs such as “Resistance” and “United States of Eurasia,” along with all the “1984”-meets-”Tron” visuals on stage, are as shallow as most primetime TV (and by hour two, most Muse sounds the same) but the crowd at Hutchinson Field cheered religiously for every hollow agit-pop couplet (“Rise up and take the power back / It’s time that the fat cats had a heart attack”) and punishing riff all the way to the encore.” “How many tiffs may have resulted between Lolla-going couples from the Brit pop scheduling dilemma tonight? No one knows, but my money was always on the baroque, glam, futurists (and, yes, 2011 Grammy winners) Muse to put on the kind of big, brilliant, laser-beam-laden show that Lollapalooza dreams and memories are made of. Maybe that’s because I saw Coldplay on its first tour, or maybe I’m just continually stunned by my own high toleration for an overly ambitious band like Muse. The only band playing this weekend that taps into the majesty of rock goliaths like Queen—albeit in a sleek modern update and comes away with something that’s true to 2011, Lolla was Muse’s fest to lose going in. Muse are the overachievers, the star pupils, the smart guys that aren’t conflicted by fame and fortune—but they can also rock some complexity that’s not a metal rehash or plodding, dullwitted prog. Yet, Muse are total muzos—guys that own new pieces of music technology we can’t conceive of, but can also rattle off classical obscurities on a ukulele without batting an eye. But Muse are muzos, that in concert, and in what I think is a generous, epic, but also populist kind of rock music, can completely make you forget what muzos they are because they’re just a dazzling good time. They’ve got no compulsion to make their music too difficult to understand—which isn’t to say its simple or without high concept, just that its grandiosity makes no apologies. Radiohead may be critical darlings and deeply intriguing, but Muse are the guys with the LED lights on their guitars. Which band really gets it? Hard to say, but Muse, far from tortured with their recent massive success in the States, were the ones on stage tonight. Opening, after air-raid sirens and sound clips about “a riot in progress,” with “Uprising,” a kind of anthem from 2009′s The Resistance, might seem bold—but Muse exuded nothing but mastery of rock and fest-level rock dynamics tonight amid a Tronish set and video backdrop. If the band’s album the Resistance, and its revolutionary themes aren’t prescient in light of the last year in politics, I don’t know what is. Sci-fi rebels have informed rock for decades but few have stuck with the conspiracy/assassination/revolution theme as Muse has over the course of its career. The ambitious “United States of Eurasia” might not have a clear meaning to a festival crowd of tens of thousands, or anyone really, but lines about “ancients heroes turning to dust” teased against a video screen of Churchill make the point as clear as an Economist article—the global axis of power has shifted. Brainy stuff? In Muse’s hands, its elemental. But tonight, as serious and ominously political as a Muse album can be, the band (technically presented as a trio, but featuring a shadowy keyboardist throughout most of the set tonight) also had a way of injecting a looseness in their hour and half plus encore set. Matthew Bellamy would launch into mini jams of rock riffs we all know and love—”Back in Black,” Nirvana’s “Negative Creep,” “The Star Spangled Banner” and even a “House of the Rising Sun” with audience singalong and his band would follow along. Those feel-good vibes were a bonus, really, because Muse’s anthems such as “Touch the Other Side” or “Starlight” from Black Holes and Revelations were simply made to be played in a massive field with fireworks exploding above—as they did. Sure, if Muse were a T-shirt it might say “Freddie, Thom, Brian and Yngwie”—this is a band that can be picked apart quite easily by naysayers. And when every tune has a very big finish, it can be hard to muster a very big finish that doesn’t seem like just another song. But those issues hardly mattered tonight—it was Muse’s night as far as I could tell. For those looking for Grand Canyon–size epic moments, intergalactic guitar squall and the glories of revolutionary rock, Muse had all that and more. Oh poor, poor Morgan!

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