The Monks Looked Cool at Least

Words lie. Diet cola won’t make you thin. And a "band festival" has no obligation to feature bands, feel like a festival, or be any good.

St. Ottilien is a small monastery village in Bavaria. The event: a handful of genuinely unhinged eighth-graders seized guitars and a microphone and spent the evening hammering the same three-chord noise through a barn—an actual barn—on loop, while the twelve-year-olds in yellow wristbands had what was probably the greatest night of their young lives so far.

We spent most of the evening posted at what everyone was calling the dangerous curve, watching monks drift past with their hoods thrown casually back, looking improbably cool about the whole situation. The under-age kids, capped at two drinks each, were conducting themselves as if they’d just drained a vodka pipeline. I fully respect the commitment. There’s something admirable about that age—the ability to manufacture significance out of essentially nothing, through pure shameless conviction.

One act was worth watching: Blurrd Minds, fronted by a singer named Kareem Weth, who had actual presence—the kind that makes you stop talking mid-sentence and just look at the stage. They closed the night and rescued whatever dignity the evening still had. The day before, the world had Live Earth—worldwide concerts, stadium stages, all of it. We had a barn in Bavaria. Kareem Weth made it feel like enough.