Le Banane!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 November 2015.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins performs in Switzerland

I haven't been to Paris since the early 90's, but my one trip there had quite an impact on me.

I saw Screamin' Jay Hawkins with my parents at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Club, which was simultaneously glorious and awkward. My parents were trying to take me out for a cultural evening because they knew how much I loved jazz, and instead we got Screamin' Jay Hawkins in a tie-dyed tuxedo belting Constipation Blues. He put a bone in his nose and sang, "It's hard being a man/Being all alone/I ain't got a woman/But I got a bone!" Then he did an extended version of "I Love Paris" that included unflattering impersonations of every ethnicity in the world. One of his kids was on drums. The French treated him like a hero.

I loved the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre. Outside of the Pompidou Centre, I saw a guy play a surrealist drum set made out of a back rack, a bunch of junk, and a banana hanging from a string. He'd hit the banana like a crash cymbal and yell, "Le Banane!" That guy was a huge influence on me. Paris is a city of international creativity, and the idea of terrorists going after the fans of soccer, a game that creates international goodwill through mostly friendly rivalry, and the fans of American music, which has always been valued in Paris, frequently when America itself has dismissed it, just intensifies the death toll in my heart.

The terrorists aren't just killing people—they aiming for some of the best parts of Western Culture.