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| May 2004 »
Last night in Berlin we were in a proper church deep in the East. I asked them to cover JC, who was suffering right behind Graham on drums. The pastor doesn't like JC to be covered, so we had to wait until he left - the pastor, that is. Apparently, it's the place where Arvo Part loves to have his stuff performed. I suspect the echoey sound would be more appropriate for his music than some of mine, though most folks enjoyed it greatly.
In the afternoon I did go for a run in Tiergarten, but Colin Powell, he of the evil empire, was staying at the Intercontinental, so many Berlin roads were closed and polizei and armed riot police were everywhere - bored and taking the sun and reading newspapers and drinking coffees.
It meant I had to run a very circuitous route, but the weather was perfect.
Apocalypse Now
I have a dream that lower Manhattan has been hit by a nuclear device; it has already happened and Mauro was safe, as we were in midtown or something and now we are heading further uptown, away from the epicenter. From a high rocky point we can see the traffic snarled on the bridges. I see some birds flying round this high rocky area near the northern tip of Manhattan. But as they draw nearer I can see that they're actually Perodactyl's, gliding with very little effort on the updrafts near these rocks. I point them out to Mauro. Somehow the instant revival of prehistoric life seems perfectly natural.
Mauro says he thinks he will go to Egypt, which seems like an odd but interesting choice. I had been thinking only to get away from the spreading radioactive cloud. I am missing my backpack - my identity in a sense - and mull over the possibility of going south to retrieve it - but it might be dangerous to do so.
As we clamber down to the waters edge we run into some of the string section as they emerge from a the greenish fog that envelopes the southern part of the island. Some of them are casually smoking cigarettes as they walk north along the waters edge.
Went gallery hopping with Stefan Sagmeister, who is teaching here for a few months. Everyone in the galleries is super friendly and helpful without being at all pushy or snobby - a real change from the scary, chilly vibe one gets in NY galleries.
One man has opened a permanent installation in a storefront where he encases typical products from a corner shop in bleached beeswax. These then are displayed in white glass cabinets. There are beautiful wax covered newspapers and dishwashing soaps, toilet paper rolls, and a fridge with some waxed juices and milk.
We talked about the fate of the CD and recorded music in general. Stefan had just been to South Korea, which he describes as being a few years ahead of us. He said no one there buys CDs anymore. In fact, when he requested to hear something on CD they had to make a special trip to a specialty shop to obtain it, as one would in Europe or North or South America to buy something on vinyl.
He also said that they could use mobile phones to see, via surveillance cameras, how is the traffic on Seoul's principal bridges.
He reminded me that the linking of image and music is a result of the fact that vinyl scratches easily, so it needed nice board packaging - and even those packages didn't originally come with images, credits, liner notes etc. until recently. People happily enjoyed music for centuries without any accompanying visual aids. He said that as much as we might like to think that audio is only the most saleable part of a total concept and philosophy as embodied by a performer or band, it will be back to just the audio without the rest of the peripherals fairly soon.
I can survive on art projects, song licensing, and live performing, but this is all happening awfully quickly. How will artists who depend on record company funds be able to tour?
We had dinner with Matthias Arndt, a local gallerist, and his girlfriend, an art historian. Matthias has moved his gallery from Mitte, where he first opened, to a big new space at Checkpoint Charlie, where there is a cluster of new galleries. He says most of his sales are outside Berlin, and most of those are outside Germany. Despite the glut of galleries and artists here, the buyers and curators don’t support the local artists much.
The artists do, however, have it pretty good: incredible studios and living spaces for much less money than in Williamsburg or East London - and in the center of town, too. Nice weather at this time of year. Lots of cafes and restaurants. Earlier Stefan and I visited the studio of an artist Tomas Demand, who makes huge and elaborate paper constructions of the room where the Florida recount votes were checked, the tunnel where Princess Di had her car crash (that particular paper construction was 30 meters long and was filmed on a special dolly). The paper constructions are destroyed, and the photo of it is the exhibited artifact.
On the floor are a couple of remnants from a just-completed piece - a life-size reconstruction in paper of the bunker where Saddam Hussein was found. There is a paper propane gas cylinder, a paper orange peel, and a couple of other odd objects. Beautifully made and soon to be destroyed.
Matthias mentioned a young (Leipzig trained) painter who he passed over some years ago that has since become very popular. "Too beautiful," was what he thought of the work then. He said he has a problem with beauty and realizes that this prejudice is not always in his best interests. Stefan quoted Tibor, who said, "I have no problem with beauty, but it isn't very interesting."
Matthias said beauty - being ephemeral, evanescent and impermanent - reminds us of death. I would have never put an equal sign between the two myself – seems overly Romantic a la Rilke again, but I see his point. The morbidity of beauty. Huh.
He said that the first generation to emerge from the Leipzig school was Richter, Polke, etc... then nothing... the school under the DDR was a bastion of painting craft - ostensibly to train future social realist painters. But now that painting is selling again - it is always the easiest to show, hang and transport - a younger generation of well-trained brush wielders have become very popular.
The talk turns to the beauty's opposite, in a sense - the Vienna actionist generation, in particular Otto Muehl, who recently got out of jail for having sex with everyone in his commune, children included. Being rehabilitated, he has now been accorded a retrospective. His work was typical of the actionists: made from blood, urine, shit, and maybe even some paint. The commune was supposed to be an extension of the art - art into life, so to speak. But it turned into his personal fiefdom, a real nightmare.
A great show. The audience interrupts the show more than once with sustained applause.
Afterwards we are all invited to dinner by a local restauranteur. It turns out he has a few places - two of them across the river and one of which we'd been to a couple of years ago - just before the torrential rains in Europe caused the river to flood. We are shown pictures of the outdoor terrace where we dined last time completely under water. And the water continued to rise... the rushing floodwaters opened drawers and caused giant refrigerators to float up and become beached on the roof.
The Archa theater, where we performed, was also flooded. Water filled it up to the balcony, so the whole place became like a big indoor pool. Closed for 14 months for renovated.
Last night Leigh told me she really wasn't feeling too hot about the jumpsuits. Says the waist on hers is too high. I apologize and wonder if something else would do the job - giving everyone a clean, simple unified look, but flattering. Maybe because these were modeled after a jumpsuit made for men they're not fitting the women so nicely?
I dunno. We'll all have a think and group discussion about it.
Had a little charge left in my phone so I called Malu to tell her that her Granny was sick and to say hi. She was watching Lost In Translation and doing homework; she didn't think Lost In Translation was funny at all.
Pedaled my bike to the Leopold Museum, the KunstHalle and the Medical Museum. The first one had a show called Eros and Tod featuring Egon Schiele and a contemporary of his who also had sexy morbid preoccupations. Scheile sure looks the punk rocker - spiky hair and scowling attitude. Died in his 20s, I think, so he's a martyr too. Their jottings and poetry - reproduced on the walls - is pretty impenetrable to me, but then so is Rilke.
In his self-portraits he gives a come hither look while looking like a man with AIDS, his women lie sprawled out, usually with their red raw vaginas facing us, also looking sort of blotchy and pale.
Four Museums are located in what is called the Museum quarter. Compared to Italy, this town is loaded with museums. A couple of them in this complex look like giant bunkers or tombs. The Leopold is all white marble; another one across the plaza is gray. Neither has what you would call windows. There's lots of wall space inside, but these sure look like imposing, monolithic slabs. If I had to guess I would say these are the churches of the north, as Italians still have faith, so they don’t need these places to commune with the ineffable.
The medical museum on the other side of town is well hidden. A tiny sign on the University campus points to a door. It houses a Viennese physicians' collection of wax anatomical figured made in the 1700s in Firenze. There are vitrines with a flayed woman, smaller vitrines with wax hands and hearts, and another of a man, skinless, lounging sexily on a purple silk cushion. That particular one has an especially detailed endocrine system. The rooms are dark and filled with vitrines so old the glass is all wiggly.
The other room has old medical instruments. Beautiful silver things. Maybe I don't want to know what they do.
The bookshop sells a book on skin diseases with pictures (ugh), a lovely text on male genital adornment and mutilation (ouch), and a thin volume on the great masters of Urology.
We perform outside of town at an arts center, a former shipbuilding factory on the banks of the Danube. A collaboration between an audio and a light artist is outdoors. There are lights floating in the river that glow blue at night, and speakers all around make odd bell-like tones and froggy noises. Deanne said she left some of mom there and hoped that Mom wouldn't be too freaked out.
I check my Email after the show in the closet that serves at the production office. I get two from my sister in DC, who says my mother has been taken to hospital for "nausea." Nausea? I phone the hospital room and talk to her. She sounds sick and scared.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the car accident they just had a few weeks ago. Once again, I found out from my sister, not from them. It seems that a driver hit or ran them off the road. They flipped over twice, landing right side up in a ditch, miraculously unscratched - on the surface, at least. I phoned and they seemed fine; they were more annoyed at not having a car. It was new and it had been totaled.
Tracy and Mauro are up now. She's chatting with the driver up front and Mauro is playing and singing Brazilian songs on his guitar. He does it all the time; it's totally charming. Just sits and figures out the chord harmonies and sings in a sweet tremulous voice. I know some of the songs, but not all.
A U.S. astronaut who is by now on the MIR space station communicated through his doctor that he would like to receive Emails from me. I’m thrilled - Email to outer space! I can even send MP3s, he said. The catch seems to be that everything has to be in a specific font. Batang. I don't have it. Never heard of it. Is this serious? Is this some Russian software weirdness?
I've requested more information and have asked them to send me the font please. No answer yet.
[it turns out this font business was a joke]
At Deanne's suggestion a bunch of us end up at the Hunertwasser apt.
building and museum here, as it is a day off. Hunertwasser was a Klee-
or Klimt-like painter (almost a contemporary) who also designed
buildings – giant, eccentric, freeform, pre-hippie structures. No
straight lines and no flat floors, were his motto. They (straight and
flat) are Godless, he claimed. He had other rules, too.
In the photos that accompany his bio he goes to Paris, dallies with
Paloma Picasso amongst others, makes the scene, and soon enough grows a
beard and becomes a prophet, a sage - and, I imagine, quite a pain in
the ass.
His paintings, I think, are pretty nice. Some of them incorporate
gold and silver leaf in his proto-psychedelic, concentric whirlwinds.
His buildings range from an apartment building (more hippie than Gaudi,
but pretty nice) to a giant incinerator, a dubious choice of building
in this part of the world. Even a model of a whole proposed village is
on display, which, to jaded contemporary eyes, looks an awful lot like
Hobbiton.
At the café (also with uneven floor) Deanne says she's been, "taking
her mom on this tour to the tower of Pisa and to the beach in Alysssio"
(sp?) the little town where we stopped to let the drivers rest in
Italy, before Marseille.
She is referring to her mom's ashes, which she has carried along,
and is scattering in places that either her mom wanted to visit or that
they visited together.
Europe is manicured. The whole continent, except for some semi-inaccessible places in the alps, northern Scotland or Scandinavia, has been groomed and tended by the hand of man. It's a vast millennial project, requiring the cooperation of scores of nations and peoples speaking different languages.
America has nothing like it, except maybe the aptly named New England. America still has, lurking around the edges in tattered remnants, bits of wildness and danger. Even in places where that wildness is illusory, it exists as a living memory - people internalize its existence and act as if it is still there.
Maybe that's why lots of North Americans feel the world has to be tamed and brought under control while Europeans, having achieved that control ages ago, feel a duty to cultivate, nurture, and manage.
Even in their social worlds Europeans find adventure in their neighbors, in other people, while Americans feel a need to search for it "out there."
I didn't really have a sense of our precarious coexistence with nature until I took a short, puny, trip to the Australian outback. I realized that non-aboriginals don't last long there deprived of their bottled water, gasoline, functioning cars, and maps. The same can happen an hour or so outside Sydney, in the Blue Mountains, where trekkers into the valleys and gorges often don't come back. There is s sense that nature and wildness are out to get you, and will grab you by the ankles and pull you in if you're not careful. Even a short walk into the nearby suburban bush can be deadly. And swimming - jeez! Between the jellyfish, sharks, and the rip currents, you're on your own.
I suppose lots of Russia and the former Soviet republics are like this, which might explain a thing or two.
Its 10 am. I'm the only one up besides the bus driver. We have driven overnight from Torino and are almost to Vienna. The road is now straight, a highway surrounded by farms and the occasional factory. We're headed North. The sky is gray. In Italy, it was sunny and hot.
[11:30: Now the sun is coming out in spots. I see a little village in the distance - red roofs and a church spire poking up amongst the green fields. Like a stupid postcard, I think to myself]
Yes, the tower really does lean. Climbing up is a disorienting experience. A long winding marble staircase is enclosed in the center, with scattered openings to the outside revealing the horizon at a skewed angle. More than half of the pillars on each tier have been slowly replaced by harder marble because the original marble was showing signs of crumbling. Maybe the whole thing will be replaced, little by little, piece by piece, with harder and harder materials resembling the original, until there is nothing of the original left.
Pisa is a small university town and all of the students ride bikes. There are bikes leaning everywhere, not locked to anything - unthinkable for a New Yorker. The riders weave through the pedestrians and much of the center has almost no auto traffic.
The show is in a neighboring town 10 km away, at an arts center in the middle or nowhere. It's baffling that it's here. I suspect most of the Pisan's won't be able to attend because it's beyond comfortable biking distance. So why are we here and not at a theater in Pisa? Italian cultural politics again?
After the show I ask one of the local girls and she says that this arts center is the more adventurous one; they stage more avant guard plays and present more unusual musical acts (Meredith Monk is due here soon). The theater in Pisa is more conservative. So here we are, surrounded by freshly plowed fields and yapping farm dogs in the distance.
The audience is a disorienting mixture. I see gray-bearded professors and young women, but not together.
Images of fallen U.S. soldiers returning in coffins have appeared in the U.S. press for the first time in this war. It has been as if none of the boys ever really died. Sure, there were reports of Americans being killed, abstract numbers, but without images somehow the U.S. public didn't register the fact. Maybe it will begin to sink in now. The Pentagon is furious.
Bush's ratings have apparently gone up. He made a speech saying that bringing democracy to Iraq is our God-given duty. Of course, the Bush Gang are not really interested in democracy; they confuse it with brutal capitalism (not even with their favorite phrase - "free enterprise" - as the U.S. trade agreements have never been fair and balanced). Bringing God into the picture - a kind of Manifest Destiny - makes it a Crusade, a religious war. So we can expect more Hell than Heaven.
The Herald Tribune reports that the Japanese captives, on being returned to Japan, were subjected to more shame and humiliation than they received at the hands of their Iraqi captors. The Japanese cultural reaction was that these people went there against their government's advice, as renegade independents, and "now look at the trouble you've caused for all of us." Their stress levels confronting the Japanese negative reaction is higher than that at the moment of having knives held to their throats.
Jim White was selling his own shirts as merch at the UK shows, where he opened for me. I don’t know if he'd previously worn them, but the gas station shirts and embroidered local merchants shirts were all purchased in Pensacola thrift stores and are just like what Jim wears on stage, so who knows? Anyway, he signs them and sells them at a healthy profit. They're one of a kind. If you find one you can be sure no one else has it.
Morning. We stumble off the bus into bright daylight. A flea-bitten dog with an enormous tick in its head greets us. We're parked alongside a huge wire frame and plastic hanger/Quonset hut. It is arrayed with a few thousand seats in rows and the sound echoes all over the place in weird ways. I think to myself, "uh oh, this is going to be depressing."
I look at this place and think, "jeez, from the perfect acoustics and sightlines of the Roman amphitheaters, it's all been downhill from there." Does this cheap structure on the edge of town (it looks like Co-op City) represent the relative importance of theater and the performing arts nowadays? Well, certainly it does performing arts of a certain type - I'm sure there is still an opera house in Bari and at least one other lovely Baroque (probably) theater....relics, of a sort.
The performing arts are, judging by these venues, spectacles. As an audience member, one only has to be present: the sound, the intelligibility, understanding and comfort don't really matter. One only has to witness the apparition, the manifestation. That is sufficient.
But, once again, I am proved wrong and have to eat my words. In the evening, when the hall is full, the sound improves slightly, slightly. And the audience is hugely appreciative - they even sing along. They are made up of all sorts and ages. Beautiful young women on dates and older couples - the men look like university professors. I can see that they are singing along with Un Di Felice, so I decide to offer a karaoke opera experience. After we perform the Verdi song I ask if anyone wants to try singing along and say the band will accompany them. A super energized guy with a barrel chest in front is chosen and he comes on stage and talks and gesticulates to me wildly. I gesture back and explain that there will be a two-measure count off - "oh, never mind" - I count it off and sing the fist line with him, then I back off, giving him the mike. He's timid, we can barely hear him at first, but after a bit, in a slightly wheezy but honest voice, he goes for the high notes - and does it. The audience cheers him on and laughs. He's a brave buffoon. Bravo. We hug and he returns to the audience signing autographs and shaking hands.
Earlier that day I rode my bike from the ridiculous Quonset hut to the port, where there are winding small streets and wonderful fish restaurants. As I cycled, I found that the Metro Rail tracks ran almost along the seaside, effectively cutting the town off from the water and its beautiful coast. There were almost no crossing places, so the mostly low-income concrete high rises that filled that part of town were isolated from the pleasures of the water. Was this intentional or was this where cheap land for the train was found at a particular time? I recall the highway building efforts of Robert Moses in NYC, projects that effectively cut off the city from its own seaways and harbor, forcing introspection. His work is only now being corrected, at least in Manhattan, and it feels like the city can breathe again.
As a cyclist I have a sense of where I am most of the time, something I find car drivers don't have. They seem to navigate solely by signs and landmarks. They told me the center of town was too far to cycle to, for example, but when I looked at a map I could see it was only about 2.5 km. However, the autostrada route, the one they would take, is about 5 times as long.
I found a restaurant I remembered filled with businessmen dressed in dark gray or black suits and, outside on the street, a makeshift charcoal grill where a man roasted fish. I look at the businessmen and think, "their only hope to catch a woman is power. They are boring and paunchy and who would want them, unless they are wealthy or powerful?" Maybe businessmen know this, hence their continuous and intense jockeying for position and prestige.
The volcano looms over this town.
The big eruption of Etna in 1669 caused lava to flow down to the town, which was then a walled city. The lava flowed around the castle and into the sea, eventually forming new land and leaving the formerly seaside castle stranded quite a ways inland, but still intact.
Mauro, Paul (who went to NY to visit family), and I arrive in the early afternoon, wiped from a night flight in impossibly cramped seats (American Airlines). I am hungry - the plane food was terrible - so I head for a trattoria behind the hotel and the others join me soon, and we have fresh grilled fish, white wine and tiny fish appetizers. Wonderful. Perfect. I collapse back at the hotel.
At night there is a big seafood dinner for the whole band, courtesy of the local promoter and the civic supporters. We look out the restaurant balcony and in the sea there is a skin-diver - we can only see the light from his underwater lantern moving about under the surface. He's illegally gathering small fish, a delicacy here, and later he loads them into the back of his car.
Show day. During the dinner I had arranged with one of the local dignitaries a band trip up Mount Etna - well, as far as the road goes.
We leave in the morning - it's not far- and stop at the mayor's office, where we are presented with a book, a large plate, and videos of Aetna. The van climbs up the slope through little villages until there are no more villages, just some fields and lava flows. It gets more Martian and more desolate - like Iceland - and colder too. It was sunbathing weather in Catania, but now we are cold, even in sweaters and jackets.
It's all dark gray lava flows now and the occasional cinder cone from a former small eruption. At the end of the road we stop and it is snowing fairly heavily. The wind is blowing furiously. A souvenir and coffee shop is there next to a cone and we climb up to the crest. The wind is so strong we can barely stand. I have to brace myself to avoid getting blown off the outside edge of the crater. It's like nothing I've ever experienced, not being in a hurricane. Paul and Mary end up scooting to safety on their butts, so as not so get blown over.
At the coffee bar there are postcards of the souvenir shop with glowing red lava flows from 2001 in the background. About 100 meters away from the shop the flow went down the mountain and covered the road, which has since been rebuilt. On the way downhill, we pass a house with only the roof sticking up above the lava.
 The show is in a new theater arts complex built on the site of a former ceramics factory, near the waterfront. There are scattered giant chimneys left standing. The theater itself is a giant, black, egg-shaped thing - it must get ferociously hot in the summer here. It has been sold out for weeks, but it doesn't hold many people. Maybe 1,500 maybe. There was a request to allow a video simulcast in another space but I thought that sounded like too much to technically oversee and it could be dodgy, so I said no. I wonder to myself why we're not playing the beautiful old theater we played the last time I was here 10 years ago. Hmmm.
The theater was designed without either front hanging points (for lights and sound equipment) or built-in ceiling lights, which is baffling. There is nothing to light the stage with! Maybe it was to be a movie theater? Large metal light stands have been brought in and scores of chairs removed to accommodate the stands' legs.
As we play I look out and see various civic dignitaries in the front row - except the mayor, whom we have crossed paths with over the last few days. I wonder to myself if this explains why we are in this peculiar semi-unsuitable theater. This turns out to be only partly true, as the promoter knows the opera house would have been preferable, but he says there's a production of a terrible 20th century opera there now, and it's only dark on Monday. All the same, I wonder if civic patrimony brought us here as part of the Aetna arts series of concerts (Ute Lemper, Dave Brubeck and Elvis Costello to follow) and if the trade off is to be in inappropriate places like this. I don't mean to sound ungrateful, it's wonderful to be here, but sometimes I think to myself, "How many times will I play in this town in my life? Twice so far. Maybe a third time? Don't these people deserve to have this rare (for them) experience be as best as it can be?"
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