Brighton Beach

Stumbling upon stumbling stones

I stayed up late last night in Manchester watching the livestream of the weekend-long memorial for Steve Albini. My dad and Sammy sang “Both Sides Now” and “Androgynous” together. They made me weep. Well, they got me started. Heather, my mom, and other people leaping up from their seats to hold each other and sway during those songs put it over the edge.

It’s eery seeing Steve’s iconic Shellac rig on stage in the memorial site’s gazebo. And I was hit by a new wave of shock, as you are with death, when the Breeders were setting up and I automatically expected to see him on the livestream, laying cables and putting guitars in their place, like he used to at Letters to Santa 24 Hour benefits every year (and every day of his life).

I was comforted by the din of conversation you could hear after last night’s program ended but before the video cut out. A bunch of people are there together, remembering Steve, still making art and uplifting each other thanks to his life and now his death. Check Electrical Audio’s Instagram for livestream links for Sunday and Monday.

Also, how fitting is it that the interstitial house music introduced me to five good records—by Dog Faced Hermans, Downy Mildew, Cabaret Voltaire, Big Stick, and Destroy All Monsters.

You know that song “Brighton Beach” by Bill Fay? Haunting, delay-laden strummy guitar. I’m listening to it again now and realized that I’ve totally copied it in at least three of my songs. Two released, one unreleased.

Anyway, we played Brighton on Wednesday. We arrived the day before the show and wandered around town. It’s graduation time for some students in England, so the waterfront hotels were overrun by capped-and-gowned young people and their happy sweaty relatives, getting ready to drink boots of beer together in the crowded downtown restaurants. I thought of Bill Fay’s “Brighton Beach” all day while I dodged these families on the sidewalk, examined the dilapidated pavilion on the pier and practiced Arabic by the beach’s fish-and-chip shops.

A huge British military helicopter passed over the beach in the afternoon, the kind with a rotor in the front and a rotor in the back (all business, no party). Now imagine a little boy speaking with the most exaggerated, precocious British accent you can muster. That little boy said to his mom, holding his hand: “Mummy, are we going to war?”

Two days later we were at a festival in Suffolk where I saw four people wearing Hawaiian-style shirts with those helicopters on them. What gives? Military helicopter fan club? Were they wearing them ironically like some Americans wear Desert Storm commemorative merch?

War is always on my mind here, frankly. At home, too, in at least two ways, but that’s for another time. Here, every day, we are on a street that was once tank-trodden. Looking for shrapnel holes in cafe walls.

In Berlin, I saw some of the Stumbling Stones, or Stolpersteine, that German artists have been placing, since 1996, in front of former residences of people who were murdered by Nazis. They’re small brass bricks embedded in the sidewalk, engraved with the name, birth year, and death place of someone who once lived in the apartment or house nearby.

I had read about Stolpersteine in Clint Smith’s landmark “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” but before last Monday, they only existed in Smith’s essay, not on a street where I could walk. Being surprised made them even more impactful. You truly stumble upon them.

Then, you’re there. You’re standing where they once lived. You’re feet away from their bedroom, their kitchen, the living room where they read books and lived a life as a normal non-demonic person, until a door knock, a frog walk, a cattle car, a tile room.

These are incredible monuments, more striking to me than anything grand, central, or phallic.

Smith pointed out (and my brother reminded me) that Gunter Demnig and Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer (the former having a dad who fought for Nazi Germany) sculpt each Stolpersteine by hand, a belated defiance of the mechanization of the Holocaust. They want to give each subject individual attention. They’re succeeding.