Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-la-la band, at the Scala.

They're possibly the loveliest band ever.

These terrible, achingbeautiful racking rises of chord upon chord upon blizzard, these
awful hushes, steady and building to nothing.

These voices: falling upon and over upon one another, the crow caw-caw of Efrim saddened above them.

The still.

Wilderness music: and the wilderness is our cities that we love, and the wilderness is ourselves that we shall have to trust in because nothing remains to us but the rest of us.

How absurd they are: elegies for a dead cat, for a railroad track, for a weed in the pavement cracks. Seven people and an explosion of love in a building, an applause that hangs itself in the air like a hat, a collapse in-between songs into laughter and shouts and an srgument that takes three frazzlings before it can be stated: our leaders will lead us into darkness, all that we have is- but you know this part.

Did the people of Babylon mourn, when Babylon that was a great city fell? The people of Babylon, who had no merchandise either of gold or of silver, no precious stones, pearls, fine linen, gold, silk, nor scarlet; no chariots, no horses, no slaves; nor any souls of men beyond their own- did they huddle in the streets in the rags of their love, lighting petroleum barrels to warm themselves, and did they sing to the burning of the sky?