I went down to Sonar and, as I suspected, the voyeurs were swarming. Most were dressed to blend in and dancing like horny zombies, all of them animated by expectations drawn from the images and video and sound they found with their computers: digital glimpses of Deacon's show made accessible by today's efficient compression algorithms.
At the end of the first song Deacon tried to convince everybody to spread out and use more of the space in the room, but most people appeared to assume he was talking to somebody else, and the mob pretty much stayed concentrated around him. As the set continued, he alternated songs with more surrealist calisthenics and two rather complex group activities: an unfortunately short-lived two-man dance circle and a much more successful dance "gauntlet." He shouted out the rules for the complicated games clearly and concisely, but with the kind of urgency often encountered with instructions about how to exit a flaming aircraft.
It built gradually in the tone of his entreaties, and then halfway through the set Deacon confirmed the scent of tension I detected when he announced that he felt "like a second-grade teacher." He was putting it all down, but those voyeurs, they weren't picking it all up. In that great big sweaty great time, there was a dramatic struggle happening just under the surface.
We've watched the condos follow us around long enough now to know that we are the unwitting pawns of opportunistic entrepreneurs. We go to "undesirable" places, places the bourgeoisie fear and avoid, because that is where rent is affordable on an artist's wages. If we do not thrive there, we are ignored, but if we do, developers and speculators quickly buy up the neighborhood, erect prohibitively expensive luxury housing, and whine to the police and politicians about the crowds at our shows and the noise made by our bands. Deacon is easily one of the most famous one-man bands in the country right now, but so far he's been powerless to settle the score with the inhumane elements that mercilessly reshape our city around their materialistic ambitions--and so Deacon knows that conventional success is not enough. He knows he's still approaching the climax of his own story, that his destiny lies at a higher altitude. I honestly believe that this man, whom some might call "wacky," aspires to the kind of heroism that far exceeds what it requires to get over with Pitchfork.