i'm gonna sing this song with all of my friends

I am dedicating this post to my friend Shane, the reason I am the violinist in a Norwegian band.

In September of 2006, my dear friend Shane made a post on his Xanga in which he introduced his circle of friends to a band he had just discovered. He had come across a low-budget music video the band had made, which was awkwardly hilarious. For people who don't like clicking on hyperlinks, I have shared the video below for your internet convenience:



The band is called I'm from Barcelona, and they are singing a song called "We're from Barcelona." The band is not, however, from Barcelona. They are from Sweden. According to Wikipedia, the band was born in 2005 when lead singer Emanuel Lundgren wrote some songs, assembled some friends, and gathered them together to record them. I liked the tune of this song, so I listened to some more of their music on YouTube and enjoyed it as well. So I prompty tried to download the album off of Swedish iTunes, which Apple would not allow me to do. Fortunately, a few months later the album was added to American iTunes, so I could use my virtual dollars instead of trying to convert them into virtual kronor.

Let Me Introduce my Friends quickly became one of my favorite albums, and when I got some iTunes gift cards for Christmas at the end of last year one of the first albums I downloaded was the band's new release Who Killed Harry Houdini?


Now, let me interrupt here to remark on how this story exemplifies the power of social media. Were it not for Xanga, YouTube, iTunes and Facebook, none of this would ever have happened. This is a distinctly 21st Century tale, born out of the participatory culture revolution that is shaping our world.


So, another one of the albums I purchased with my Christmas money was Skeletal Lamping by Of Montreal. Of Montreal is not from Montréal, but rather from Athens, Georgia. So one day, when updating my Facebook status, I wrote something along the lines of "Andy appreciates that I'm from Barcelona is from Sweden and Of Montreal is from Georgia." I know, I'm just that witty.

Facebook allows people to comment on one's status, and quickly I received a comment from a young woman named Hanne, an international student from Norway. We were casual acquaintances, being in the same program at Fuller and having several classes together, but I cannot recall a time when we hung out together prior to this status post. That does not matter on Facebook. Hanne posted in reply, "Hey, I love I'm from Barcelona, I have some friends in that band!"

I appreciate personal connections to moderately obscure bands, so thus began a Facebook correspondence about the wonders of I'm from Barcelona. It turns out that Hanne has two friends in the band, which is actually pretty low percentage-wise considering there are twenty-nine members, but it's still pretty cool nonetheless. It was an interesting conversation, and it gave me the opportunity to know a casual friend better, but I expected nothing more to come out of it.


Now, let me interrupt here to explain something. The first track on the album Who Killed Harry Houdini? is entitled "Andy," which, as you are probably aware, happens to be my name. The chorus of the song goes, "We could need someone like you in our band, A-a-a-A-a-a-a-a-and-e-e-e-e..." And I happen to play the violin, something I had happened to do in one class at Fuller where we opened every class meeting with some hymns and praise songs.


It happens that Hanne had heard me play my violin in class, and that she knew the chorus of the song "Andy." It also happened that she and her friend Ruth were putting together a band, and that they needed a violinist who would have some appreciation for Scandinavian music.

So, one day I received a Facebook post from Hanne, quoting that I'm from Barcelona song and asking if I'd be interested in helping them out playing some songs, mostly Norwegian songs. I laughed pretty loudly, then happily agreed. The band is called Dråpe (roughly pronounced TROH-puh, only the first consonant is not exactly a "tr" but not exactly a "dr" either), and it is made up of an eclectic blend of Americans supporting the two Norwegian vocalists. We had our first rehearsal a week ago yesterday, and have our first performance at Zephyr Coffee House tomorrow.

That's not much time to practice, but I think we're all pleased with how it's come along. I am excited for the coffee house show tomorrow, showcasing some covers of Odd Nordstoga and various other artists.


So, Shane, through the wonders of technology you have led to my membership in a Norwegian band playing at one of the best coffee houses in Pasadena, California. I'll remember you one day when we're headlining a major music festival in Oslo. I promise.

bring on the world

Tomorrow morning at 1:30am here on the West Coast, we will see the commencement of the second incarnation of something that history may look back on as a failed experiment, or that may emerge as an institution along the lines of the World Cup.

I am speaking, of course, about the World Baseball Classic.

This tournament, which first took place in 2006, will kick off in Tokyo with a match between China and Japan (the last tournament's champion). It is an intriguing match-up, to be sure: a country that regularly produces major league baseball stars and has a top-tier professional league almost on par with MLB, and a country where the sport has little to no following at present. I love that the tourney features both countries where baseball is a national institution (the USA, the Dominican Republic, etc) and countries where baseball is, at least as far as I understand, a marginal sport (South Africa, Italy, etc).

I am much more invested in this second World Baseball Classic than I was in the first, mostly because my sister and I will be going to the tournament final at Dodger Stadium at the end of this month. I am rooting for the USA to win, not because I have a great deal of patriotic pride, but because the team ace is my current favorite Astro, Roy Oswalt, and I'd like to see him pitch. (My other pick is Korea, because I think they got gypped by beating Japan twice in 2006 yet still not making to the final, they're a country that most people don't realize has a rich baseball heritage, and I probably have more friends from that country than any other in the tourney, sans, of course, the US.)


For some reason, I'm attracted to marginal sporting events. I also attended the 2006 MLS Cup, where I and two of my roommates saw my hometown Houston Dynamo best the New England Revolution on penalty kicks. The only catch is that the vast majority of Americans don't care about soccer, and those who do generally either follow Premier League or Mexican teams. (I saw the Dynamo play Mexican team C.F. Pachuca in Houston, and at least half the crowd was Pachuca supporters.)

And now, I am excited to go to a baseball tournament in which most American major leaguers declined to participate because they didn't deem it worth their time. What gives?


Two things come to mind:

1) A friend of mine once spent his Spring Break on a university campus in central Mexico. During a conversation with one of the students, the Mexican student made the observation that Americans don't play the sports the rest of the world plays, but make up their own. It's completely true: baseball, basketball, and American football all took their contemporary forms on American soil, and hockey has a distinctively Canadian flavor. Baseball and especially basketball may be global sports now, but you still haven't really "made it" in those sports unless you're in MLB or the NBA.

2) In his book Beyond Christendom, my professor Dr. Jehu Hanciles refers to the tendency for Western events to be given greater weight than developments in the Southern world as the "World Series Approach." In his words, "The fact that this is a national tournament (mainly confined to American teams) renders the description 'World' (first used in 1903) a glaring misnomer and evocative of overblown cultural hubris" (p. 38, footnote). Ouch. I can't say it's inaccurate, though.


I suppose one reason I like the WBC and Major League Soccer is because, even though they are still very America-centric, they are both places where the US looks outside of itself and interacts with the rest of the world. I find myself more interested when the Houston Dynamo are playing teams from other countries than when they are playing regulation matches against other MLS teams, and I think that whoever wins the WBC has a much greater right to be called a "world champion" than the Phillies, who won last year's "World" Series. In a world as interconnected and globalized as this, we cannot afford to let our sight stop at our own borders. So, I say let's bring on the world.


Then again, I also just like the sport of baseball, and I am not sure that I'm going to be able to see my Houston Astros play in person this year. Let's go Team USA, I want to see Roy O pitch!