Kraftwerk

Two of the four — the bald ones — looked like villains from a Bruce Willis movie.  The other two looked like late-career managers after seven years of Arbeitslosigkeit, laid off by Lufthansa due to insufficient downward real wage flexibility.

They didn’t play instruments, nor did they sing.  Well, one of them would, every few  minutes or so, bark something into a kind of mike.  He ejaculated phrases like "Carbohydrat" [sic] and "Tour de France" [at least his country supported the EU Constitution].

All four stood at laptop computers, with, well, "that look."  You know, the look you have when you just blogged something that you took just a little too seriously.  Hey, maybe they were blogging.  [What did you expect Tyler, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf? a ten-minute accordion solo?]

Nor am I the one to call them stiff.  I arrived at the 9:30 club – one of DC’s coolest venues — at 7:30, armed with my copy of Oscar Edward Anderson’s 1953 Refrigeration in America: A History of a Technology and its Impact, just in case the proceedings at hand should prove too slow for my tastes.

But I was not to read the book.  As a matter of pure accident, I ran into Henry Farrell, of CrookedTimber fame.  Here is his excellent recent post on Turkey and the EU.

The bottom line: The music was great, and the show started exactly on time.