Start Wearing Purple

Being a judge for last year's Spirit Film awards gave me the opportunity to see some pretty cool movies. Ahead of their theater releases I viewed such movies as The Road to Guantanomo, Pan's Labrynth, My Country, My Country, Four-Eyed Monsters and my personal favorite, Wrist-Cutters: A Love Story. Don't let the name scare you away, this dark comedy was actually one of the most acclaimed independent films of the year. The setting is an afterlife which is inhabited by those who have taken their own lives. These people soon discover that it is just a little worse than the world from which they came and so no one wants to make the same mistake twice. The characters are easy to become attached to. There was one character, a Russian-American who had a band in his former life. His salty Slavic presence made him particularly amusing. As he drove the main cast of wayward wanderers across the roads of this afterlife, he music would play. So, after the movie I discovered that this Russian-American was based upon a real guy who fronted the band Gogol Bordello. And Voila! Another grand experience was about to begin.
They gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello is fronted by Eugene Hütz who's family imigrated to New York from Russia after the Chernobyl incident. The band fuses different forms of punk resistance music, much of it coming from eastern and southern Europe. So, when my friend Tim and I saw that they were coming to town, we had to see them.
From the very instant they hit the stage it was impossible not to force ones way into the maelstrom of pushing mosh-pitters and thrust deep into the fray. The music was loud and infused with the eastern tendencies found in Greek, gypsy and music of the Levant. An extremely multi-cultural band whose crew ranged from Jewish fiddler to female Asian percussionists to a black bass player and Hispanic rapper and toaster, the punk-gypsy-ethnic-skaish, upbeat and "piddiup, piddiup" had the crowd in a frenzy. It boiled my Mediterranean blood and my memory fell back to dancing with my relatives in our family's village in the mountains of Macedonia. Eugene Hütz made the observation that he saw "a lot of eastern Europeans" in the crowd which was "much larger than usual...and this includes the Italians." After this statement they thrust into at least 2 Italian tarantellas which encouraged me to elbow the Nordic Minnesotans aside and swim up to the front. In fact, as I wrestled with one individual in particular, I shouted to him, "Are you Italian!?" And he answered me, yes I'm Antonio B____ and we shook hands and frenzied back into the Tarentella! The end of the evening found me gasping for breath and drenched! My ears are still ringing!