Rated PDX for Sax and Violins

Here's a little something you don't see every day.

Reality-based street fighting with musical accompaniment.

I crossed paths (though not, I'm relieved to say, guandao) with the Bruce Lee-wannabe at a 24-hour concert, or really 24 consecutive 1-hour concerts, commemorating the 7 years our nation has now been at war.

Classical music seems to me to be the perfect way to mark the senseless violence of war, given that my earliest (and let's face, about my ONLY) exposure to classical music was when it accompanied the senseless violence of Tom and Jerry cartoons.

I didn't stay for all 24 hours, I'll admit. But I did learn a lot from the many hours I was there.

1. A well-equipped travel bar sure comes in handy.

2. Lots of those fancy-pants musical instruments are really nothing more than one bunch of strings getting all up against another bunch of strings. String-on-string violins, if you will.

3. After the first 7 hours or so, it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish between the highly cultured and the homeless based on smell alone.

4. The opening phrase of Franz Biebl's Ave Maria, when arranged for 8 trombones and a tuba, sounds disturbingly similar to the opening phrase of Alex Chilton's Kanga-roo, when covered by This Mortal Coil. Makes you wonder if the tuba is itself a mortal coil.*

(Note to macaronimaniac fans: that makes two blog entries in a row mentioning the tuba! How exciting is that? Now if I can just find a reason to blog about that I Love Lucy episode where Ricky's band goes on tour to Europe and Lucky sneaks back some undeclared cheese inside a certain brass instrument - Tuba Trifecta!!!)

5. Charlie Daniels totally ripped off the plot of The Devil Went Down to Georgia from Histoire du Soldat by Igor Stravinsky.