Reflektion on Arcade Fire

Win Butler temporarily forgot the words to “We Used to Wait,” but fans helped the Arcade Fire frontman fill in the blanks Wednesday during the band’s Mountain View show.

“Too much email,” Butler joked, a nod to the song’s lyrics about the lost art of letter writing.

It was the first time Matt and I had seen Arcade Fire in concert, and we arrived at the Shoreline Amphitheatre super-early (4:30 p.m.!) to eat a quick dinner of turkey sandwiches in the parking lot and then ensure primo seating on the lawn.

We claimed a spot behind the entrance to sections 203 and 204 because the walkway allowed for a clear view of the stage and the barrier between the cheapo (grass) seats and the chairs offered something to lean against when the crowd took to its feet. This was also an excellent vantage point to gape at the attire worn by those who had noticed the “formal attire / costumes” invitation on the tickets and took it to heart. The pre-concert parade included a bride, a prom queen, a mariachi band, a pig dressed in a bloody apron, an ape, a giant banana and several Guy Fawkes enthusiasts. My favorite get-ups, however, were those bravely worn by two middle-aged women dressed as paper dolls: two-dimensional cardboard “dresses” complete with fold-over tabs in the front and ruffled undergarments in the back.

Devo of “Whip It” fame was scheduled to perform but didn’t show. Instead, we were treated to the strangest opening act Matt and I have ever seen: electronic musician Dan Deacon of Baltimore. Imagine the overweight Dungeon and Dragons enthusiast from your high school. It’s 20 years later and he’s grown a gnarly red beard and obscured his wide face with oversized hipster eyeglasses. He’s kind of slovenly, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and he begins his set with a rambling and nonsensical but hilarious monologue.

“If you haven’t started a tech start-up, please don’t,” Deacon sputtered from behind his keyboard. “It drives me insane.”

Matt and I are not big electronic music fans, but we enjoyed observing Deacon cajole the audience into performing oddball dance moves including an impressively long human tunnel that undulated across the amphitheater.

And then, as quietly as he took to the stage, Deacon ambled away, replaced by the 30 or so members of Arcade Fire. Wearing a reflective suit and a reflective bag over his head, Butler led the group into Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge”(which, to my ears, has a similar sound to Arcade Fire’s “Month of May”) and then segued into “Reflektor,” title track of Arcade Fire’s 2013 album.

Both Butler and frontwoman Régine Chassagne, who unexpectedly appeared in the middle of the amphitheater with a bizarre, Grim Reaper-like form behind her during “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus),” were entertaining to watch, but William Butler, Win’s brother, gyrated all over the stage with an infectious and crazed energy.

Scenes from Spike Jonze’s haunting music video flashed on the projector as Arcade Fire played their hit single, “The Suburbs,” the crowd-pleasure of the evening. My favorite part of that song is the lyrics about desiring to introduce a daughter to beauty.

“So can you understand / Why I want a daughter while I’m still young? /  I wanna hold her hand / And show her some beauty / Before this damage is done / But if it’s too much to ask, it’s too much to ask / Then send me a son.”

Husband and wife Butler and Chassagne welcomed a baby boy in 2013, and he sweetly inserted “perfect” before “son” during the live performance.

Some critics have recently lambasted Arcade Fire for what they claim is exploitation of Haitian culture during a sloppy marketing campaign for the Reflektor Tour. But the band scores points in my book for donating $1 from the sale of every ticket to Haitian relief charities. Chassagne’s family is from Haiti, and her parents fled the country in the 1960s during the Duvalier reign.

It's a dirty job

Lucy, Ashley & Gene the Birdman

As a regular volunteer for the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA Wildlife Department, I’ve been blessed with the rare opportunity to perform hands-on care for a variety of species. This work has the ability to be both exceptionally rewarding and, at times, gag-inducing.

During the first of two squirrel “seasons” expected this year, I worked with orphaned and injured Eastern Gray Squirrels, which, interestingly enough, can be black in color if they carry a mutant pigment gene. My duties generally consisted of preparing and then administering formula via syringes outfitted with rubber nipples. The sickly sweet scent of Similac Formula reminds me an awful lot of vanilla Carnation Instant Breakfast – and not in a good way – but the squirrels don’t seem to mind. Watching them grasp the sides of the syringes with their pink little squirrel hands is pretty darn cute.

When squirrels are so young they can’t yet open their eyes (generally under 4 weeks old), feeding is straightforward because it’s permissible to hold them. It’s when they become rowdy juveniles and graduate to sharing a cage with several other rowdy juveniles that the task becomes tricky. By this point, your patients usually fall into one of two possibly categories: (1) they are nearly self-feeding and no longer desire formula, meaning you must chase them around the cage with the syringe or, (2) they are ravenous and steal each other’s food or suck on the syringe with such force that they can aspirate if you don’t hold back the plunger. Alas, the juvenile stage is also when they begin to bite, as I learned during a recent shift (Coincidentally, this happened to be the same shift I managed to squirt Similac into my eye).

With the PHS squirrel patient numbers dwindling, I’ve recently been assigned to the baby bird nursery. Between the nine incubators, handful of reptariums and countless mesh-covered laundry baskets, the nursery can accommodate between 20 and 30 birds at a time with each enclosure operating on a feeding schedule depending on the resident’s age, species and diet. Most of the birds are on the 30-minute timer, which means every staff member, volunteer and intern in the room abandons what they’re doing to feed them every 30 minutes when the timer sounds. With the exception of hummingbirds, which sip nectar from syringes, the feathery patients gobble songbird formula (administered by syringe), fruit and seed (in a dish) and defrosted crickets and live mealworms (administered with forceps). I sometimes feel sorry for the worms, especially when I have to snip them in half to accommodate a small beak. On the bright side, the birds are generally appreciative, gaping wide, flapping their wings and wiggling with excitement when they anticipate a morsel.  During my shift, nursery patients have included robins, starlings, mockingbirds, blackbirds, juncos, towhees, crows, jays and hummingbirds. Starlings, it should be noted, are incredibly messy birds that relish flicking formula across their enclosure. Otherwise, they’re good eaters and tend to shriek until their crops are full.

I’ve worked in the wildlife department courtyard a handful of times, a shift that generally includes scrubbing bird poop off wooden perches and raccoon mess from kennels. A few weeks ago, I had the great fortune of working the courtyard shift just before I was due to meet friends for dinner. On this particular day, the skunk kennel required cleaning with blasts of water and disinfectant from a high-powered hose, so I found a hooded white suit similar to the “bunny suit” John Kerry wore during his tour of the space shuttle Discovery – and I looked just as ridiculous, topping off the ensemble with giant rubber boots, surgical gloves and a face mask. But I remained clean!

Twice I’ve been assigned to Recovery, the section of the Wildlife Department that handles the intake of new patients and cares for raccoons, raptors, pelagic birds and opossums that for one reason or another cannot be placed in outside enclosures. On Wednesday, I prepared a kennel for a Northern Fulmar, a gull-like bird, observed the examination of a juvenile red-tailed hawk, cleaned up after a group of messy raccoons, defrosted 13 mice for the raptors’ dinner and learned how to use the centrifuge and read the results. It was also, unfortunately, a heavy day for euthanasia, with staff having to put down an injured coyote, an enormous skunk with a broken spine and a bat that interacted with a dog and must now be tested for rabies. Also of note, a local man found a baby opossum in his backyard and brought it in. The tiny opossum with his bug-eyed expression was cute, but Lucy, the 16-year-old cockatoo “Gene the Birdman” carried on his shoulder, fascinated me. Lucy is just one of 46 birds residing in Gene’s home, and he has trained her and many of her roommates to perform tricks for children’s shows and the like. He demonstrated how he flips her upside down to pick up items he drops and how he can cradle her in his arms like a baby.

Meeting remarkable Lucy marked the near-end of my shift, and, thankfully, I could “escape” before those frozen mice thawed and Gary, a colleague, could demonstrate his technique for skinning the rodents. Until next week!

Learning to "Peck" and "Mess Around"

On Wednesday, the hubby and I drove down to Mountain View and engaged in our first formal swing dancing lesson in years. Our teachers were Lori and Elliot from Cheryl Burke Studio, and although the price was a bit steep ($16 for a one-hour group lesson followed by a three-hour dance “party”), we enjoyed the experience.

Matt and I met one another in college as members of the University of Florida’s Swing Dancing Club, and although we’ve continued to dance together at weddings and events, we haven’t really progressed beyond East Coast Swing or learned any new moves since taking lessons at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Jupiter, Fla., in preparation for our March 2012 wedding. Earlier this year, we attended a free Lindy in the Park session within Golden Gate Park, and the instructor informed us of a regular, Wednesday-night Lindy Hop lesson at Cheryl Burke Dance off Shoreline Boulevard near Google’s headquarters. So we went.

The beginner session began at 8:15 p.m., and we were amazed by how many people attended – at least 100 – and surprised to discover men outnumbered women. As a “follow,” I rotated around the massive circle, while Matt, a “lead,” stayed put, both of us switching partners every five minutes or so during the lesson. As awkward as it is grasping a stranger’s sweaty palm, we did meet some friendly people, observed a room full of talented dancers and perfected our Lindy “hopping” with some passes, turns and, our favorites, the “Mess Around” and “Peckin” moves.  Lori and Elliott proved exceedingly jovial — and energetic.

Although men generally dance as leads and women dance as follows, this particular lesson featured quite a few participants willing to “gender bend” into the opposite role. At one point, I swung and swayed with Rachel, a 20-something who knows how to follow but is learning how to lead. I gravitated between pity and hysteria, however, when I peered across the lopsided circle to discover Matt was in the process of twirling a big, burly man. I hope I can convince him to return!