Since Their Wings Have Gotten Rusted

A.I takes over the world

For as long as I can remember, the first Saturday in May has always seen a parade coming down the main street of my town, and last Saturday was no exception. I generally skip it – or use it as an excuse to make fun of my town for not even realizing they are unwittingly celebrating their natural enemy, the Workers  - but this year I made an exception. I saw in the newspaper that it started at 10 AM, and it was 10:15 when I decided to go look at it, but when I got to its finish line, just a few minutes later, it was already over. I could just see the high school marching band disappearing down the street, followed by a fire truck making a super sad sacky siren sound as it limped down the boulevard. Womp womp womp.

Photos by Vivian Cromwell, from the local paper, the Daily Post.

It was pathetic. But I might have guessed it would be, based on its theme, which according to the Daily Post was “Managing Wellness Through Community.” In my day, the themes were like, “Fairy Tales” or, “U.S. History,” and every single grade schooler had to dress up like something thematic and march in order down the street.  You didn’t get to pick your costume either, it was all arranged for you. One year I had to be a fur trapper, and the previous year my brother had been forced to be a dwarf, and boy was he mad. I remember May Fete Parades as lasting for hours, and ending in Rinconada Park where the big girls got to dance around an actual May Pole in very pretty dresses, that had sashes which I coveted.  

Clearly those days are over. Of course they are, since Managing Community Wellness does not exactly lend itself to charming children’s costumes. But I didn’t have to mourn May Fete Parade for long, because that very night the nearby municipality held a drone display at its waterfront, and there were also food trucks and a rock concert. In short, Redwood City has taken over Palo Alto’s role as the keeper of the May, and they did a fine job of it.

The band was called the E Ticket Band, which I confused with E Street, so I thought it was going to be all Springsteen covers. Instead, it was just covers, but the citizens of Redwood City were loving it, dancing up a storm, and I enjoyed it myself as well. There is a certain type of band, and the E Ticket Band is one of them, where you know without looking at them that at least one if not more of its members will be wearing red tennis shoes. I don’t know the significance of this – are they referencing Elvis Costello? – but this has been the case for at least forty years, at least since my best friend Megan and I first started going to concerts. One time I remember Megan looking at the opening act and, after noting the inevitable red shoes added, “Plus, the bassist is wearing the vest of the guitarist’s 3-piece suit.” Megan meant it nastily but nowadays I think that’s sort of funny and cute.

I used to be disgusted. But now I’m just amused.

The E Ticket band was just that kind of band, i.e. six men sharing three suits and a lady playing a tambourine. I eagerly await the day when such bands play bangers by my personal favorite bands – why not something by the Pixies or the Afghan Whigs?  – but that day is not nigh. Despite the miracles that have come of streaming technology, if a song wasn’t a genuine radio hit 40 years ago, it has no chance in a venue like this, so we were treated to wedding band stuff like “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and “Sweet Caroline,” and I’m not going to lie, every man jack of us sang along.

Presently the band stopped playing because it was dark enough for the drones to arrive, and when they did, they were very spectacular, creating beautiful shapes in the air and reflecting on the water. The drones made Bay-themed shapes like a man fishing, a person surfing, a shark, a crab, and the state of California, and it finished up with the American flag (although happily with a few stars missing. possibly to represent those states we all wish would just go away). The drones were amazing. I personally would have liked to see them move around in silence, but that was not to be, and I give you three guesses what songs were chosen to accompany them. (Here’s a hint to make it easy for you: we were sittin’ on the dock of the San Francisco Bay watching electric lights go down on the City. So if you said Journey, Otis Redding, and E.L.O. you would be 100% correct.)

The drone show was only fifteen minutes long, and extremely riveting, but among the many things it made me think about was that it was a benign and beautiful use of a technology whose main purpose is to kill. Doubtless the drones are run by A.I., another technology that’s come to change our reality forever. But as I watched them dance and twinkle and reflect upon the water, I tamped that thought down. You have to, don’t you, just to stay sane? I imagine a day will come when drone displays don’t look magical, but this was the first one I’ve ever seen in person, and it was impossible not to think it enchanting. So cool, so modern, so much the opposite of a parade. I preferred it even to fireworks, which are both noisy and environmentally terrible. It made me feel like I was in The Jetsons, and like the future wasn’t quite as scary as it manifestly is.

The drone display may well just be a sop to reconcile us to our new masters, but at least it still needs to use Classic Rock songs to get the future to go down easy. I bet you that as the living world expires by folding itself into one big algorithm, the last human-made thing to go will be be the song “Don’t Stop Believing.” It will fade out  on a groove matrix, a sonic version of the Cheshire Cat.

So pretty!