"Shine A Light"

Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones movie Shine a Light is the best concert I've ever been to. It was only playing at one place here in DC, so I biked up to the Uptown on the 3400 block of Connecticut Avenue -- way outside my usual range -- for an 8:00 show on Wednesday night. The Uptown is a one-screen movie palace in upper Northwest that's been continuously operating since 1936. It's more than a little frayed around the edges, but the threadbare Art-Deco opulence only heightens the sense of stepping out of time and reality as you enter. Ensconced in my seat, fifteen rows back from the largest screen in town, I was ready to be carried off by this movie. And boy was I ever.

Shine a Light is a concert movie of the Rolling Stones at New York's Beacon Theater in 2006. The first ten minutes of the movie show grainy hand-held footage of both the Stones and Scorsese preparing for the show, and the contrast gets some laughs. Scorsese, playing the caricature that is himself, is about as un-rock-and-roll as they come in his minute and obsessive preparation. The band, in the meantime, are touring and generally having a good time, not showing the least amount of interest in the high-stress logistical machinations going on around them. By the time the lights go down and the audience surges in anticipation, the feeling is that the whole thing could go off the rails at any moment.

But it doesn't. Far from it: it's sheer joy to watch. First there is the unbelievable energy of the band, in particular Mick Jagger, who nearly never stands still, literally running around the stage, dancing, hopping, shimmying, shouting, and exhorting the crowd to do the same. The deep lines on his face tell his age, but in spite of them he looks for all the world like a willowy, androgynous 18 year-old. Rock and roll must be the elixir of life. Or so this movie allows us believe. Scorsese's cameras are everywhere at all times, capturing every nuance of what's happening on the stage: the small shared glances, the unguarded expressions, the shows of affection between the band-members, and in a rock-god moment backlit by the klieg lights, Keith Richards expelling a cigarette from his mouth in a bright corona of ash and spittle. The cameras swoop around the stage, creep in front of it, impinge on its boundaries, and find dynamic, engaging shots that make every other concert movie I've ever seen look like home movies shot from a tripod at the back of a school auditorium. These cameras are alive and they rove around the stage the way we wish we could.

Another refreshing difference from standard fare concert movies is the lack of slavish close-ups of guitar players' fingers during signature hot licks. As one kind of music fan, I can appreciate those shots: they allow us to revel in our rock star's virtuosity as players. But most of the people in the audience at a Rolling Stones show aren't there to get a firsthand look at Ronnie Wood's technique: they're there to be transported by the alchemy that occurs when you stir together charisma, sweat, righteousness, and deep bass beats. Scorsese and his fleet of hot-rod cinematographers get this, and give us the mythic characters, not the geeky details.

Shine a Light is about the Rolling Stones, and it's about rock and roll, but it's also about the movies. The show is framed on either end by the "making-of" meta-narrative. And throughout the footage of the concert, the cameras constantly find one another, so that among the thronging audience is the bright eye of a camera lens, spectating, helping to ignite the alchemy. But movies have alchemical properties of their own: the close-up on-stage nuances Scorsese captures -- the half-smiles, the grimaces, the pause to light a cigarette -- those shots become iconic on a forty-foot tall screen. In turning his cameras on themselves, Scorsese ends up making a movie about not one but two of the great cultural myth-makers of our times: rock and roll and moving pictures. And by hitching the movie-making story to a high-energy rock show, Scorses can also borrow some of rock and roll's performativity, literally performing his feat of movie-making for us on the stage of the Beacon Theater. The two genres bleed into one another and augment one another's powers, and it's magical to watch.

Survived!

I survived. And I didn't embarrass myself. Neither of which I was at all confident would be the case...

I posted earlier about my dreadful lack of preparation for this race. I basically had six weeks to go from complete and utter un-fitness, with a nice winter layer of about 6-8 extra pounds, to being ready to run a 10-mile race at some kind of respectable pace. Pride dictated that a "respectable pace" meant "not slower than the 10-miler I ran last year". Before which I had worked my keister off for 18 weeks. Bad idea. I overdid it so badly in the first two weeks of my training this time that I had to cut back to two or three days a week only. I did one ten mile run a few weeks ago, and then only a handful of three mile runs before race-day. I had no idea what to expect from myself...

This weekend was a busy one. On Friday Kati and I trekked down to Fredericksburg for Crown Vic's CD release party (my friend Tim's band). We had a delicious meal at Bistro Bethem, and I generally enjoyed wandering through downtown Fburg. I miss living in a small, walkable town. We got home after 1 AM and crashed into bed. The next morning, I had to be up at 7:30 to get out the door and get down to Southeast to volunteer for a financial literacy fair put on by DCSaves, a coalition of government agencies and nonprofits dedicated to helping individuals and families save and build wealth. It was a lot of fun, and the nonprofit putting it on, Capital Area Asset Builders, seems great. But I was on my feet all day, and already tired.

At around 3:00 I metro-ed down to Crystal City to pick up my race packet. The Marriot where they were holding the race expo was absolutely buzzing with energy. Fit looking runners everywhere -- thousands of them -- were rifling through racks of discounted running clothes and swapping race stories. People were speculating about the race-day weather forecast, and soliciting one another's opinions about layering strategies. The actual content of these conversations is incredibly repetitive: all runners tell the same race stories over and over, fret about the same sore knee, and talk incessantly about their pre- and post- race meals (the former strategized to optimize stored energy without sitting in your gut like a brick, and the latter remembered with excessive gusto in proportion to the excessive energy expended to earn it). But I never get tired of these conversations. Banal as they are, they are a way of dialing into the heightened sense of being--the sense of being more fully human--that I get from running.

Paradoxically, running makes me feel more fully human by reducing me to an elemental reptile-brain self. Running hurts; running is grinding my joints to powder; running requires pushing beyond logical limits; no one should run. Except that it's so much fun. Or maybe more accurately sometimes, it's so much fun to have done it. At mile 16 of the relay I did last year, I was not having fun. At all. But I survived it: I won. I won against the heat; the the lack of sleep over a 25-hour race; the distance; my own uncooperative body. So maybe it's not quite right to say that it reduces me to a reptile-brain self: maybe it's more accurate to say that it reduces each of my two thinking halves -- the reptile brain and the human, reasoning brain -- to their barest elements. Pain reflexes are hard-wired in the reptile brain. And will belongs to the reasoning brain. Running at the limits of your ability brings the reptile brain thrillingly close to the surface, but pushing to those limits is an act of sheer will whose victory is in the mere doing of it.

Today's victory was one of these. I almost didn't go to the race at all: my legs were sore, I was not remotely prepared to run as fast as I wanted to; I was (am) still carrying around 6 extra pounds; I was dead tired from a few days of too much to do with too little sleep; I hadn't hydrated well; and my stomach was a little upset. But when the alarm went off at 6:15, when I told myself I would decide whether or not I was going, I knew immediately that I had to. If I didn't, I'd just lay awake, hating myself for being afraid of pain and failure. So I ate half a granola bar, drank a few swallows of tea, and headed out into the dark drizzle to go join 12,000 other people at the start. I met my friends Alan and Michael and we queued up in the "red bin", where runners who were projecting between a 7:30 to 8:30 pace were grouped, and we set off together at 7:52. Alan and Michael left me in the dust immediately (which they would no matter how fit I was). Against my better judgment, I ran hard for the first few miles, a little slower than an 8:00 pace (8 min/mile, that is). At the five mile mark, I was still trucking along like this, but with five more to go, I had virtually nothing left in the gas tank. I was breathing hard, an old injury in my foot was hurting in a new and scary way, and my arms were cramping (which they do when I'm running way too hard). I backed off for the next mile or so, during which I started thinking about dropping out: pushing myself into a new injury would not be worth it. And it had started raining again. But when I slowed down, the pain in my foot subsided somewhat. I decided it couldn't be that serious, and around the same time finished mile 7. I cheered up considerably then: I can run 3 miles in my sleep. I was almost home. I was considerably slower now than in the first five miles, but I roused myself into a sort of labored race pace for a few hundred yards at a time. And when I finally rounded the last corner I managed a feeble hundred yard sprint to the finish. My final time: 1:23:30. Only one minute slower than my pace last year. Victory.