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| June 2004 »
Fighter jets fly over Manhattan and I am immediately reminded of the days right after 9-11, when the only aircraft in the skies around NY were fighters. All commercial flights had been halted. I immediately wonder what new disaster has occurred — then I realize it's Memorial Day and this is probably part of the"festivities."
A giant transformer made out of S.U.V. parts has appeared on a billboard at 35th St. and Seventh Ave. There is no text or credit attached, so one is left wondering if it is an satirical art piece, a teaser for an upcoming movie, or a terrifying manifestation of a U.S. self-image.
The audience is unusually talkative during Juana Molina's opening set. She makes a comment to them that, for decades, people in Latin America listened to songs from the U.S. and UK without having a clue what the words were, and now she would give them a chance to have the same experience.
We add "Nothing But Flowers" to the encores, with 4 of us as a kind of Forro group. Paul, Mauro, Graham and I gather around the mic and play an acoustic version — the audience dances — but we wonder if it could fit better somewhere else.
A woman jumps on stage during Lazy and shouts things in my ear. The security gently escorts her away, all the while she was telling them, "but I'm a friend of David's…"
The NY Times has made a partial mea culpa regarding its reporting of the run up to the invasion of Iraq (though the Times and others persist in calling it a war.) Anyway, they admit to lapses in fact checking and to some reporters' over-reliance on Chalabi, who was obviously in the Administration's pocket. Well, what did they expect? They claim to have had balanced coverage, which I would agree with if one read between the lines, read to the bitter end of each piece, read all the inside back page stories, and then took the time to form one's own conclusions. But if one collected all the front covers one would see graphics, photos, and headlines making a veritable slide show for invasion.
But I guess I shouldn't be carping — at least they admitted they were lax and the floodgates are now open for other news gatherers to doubt the word of the neocons.
In June 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator in Iraq, granted broad immunity to civilian contractors and their employees. They were, he wrote, generally not subject to criminal and civil actions in the Iraqi legal system, including arrest and detention.
Since many of the prison employees and even troops are hired civilians, they fall outside of the view of "military" investigations - and maybe even prosecution.
Went to the hotel fitness center, as it's raining outside. Doug is already there on some stair-type machine. One soap opera character on the TV says, "you killed him, you smothered him with donuts!"
Another character, another scene, she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman and the character wonders if she's dead. The mans says, "No, you're alive," and the woman hands her a plate of donuts.
A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voiceover says what a wonderful guy her friend set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance... but she didn't tell me he has... tourette's syndrome." What? Did I hear this right? Is the guy about to start spouting obscenities? Is this a SNL skit? (To be fair, tourette's comes in many flavors and I suspect the sudden blurting of obscenities is only a stereotype.) The ad is for: www.tourette.ca. Types of tics:
Simple:
Motor - Eye blinking, head jerking, shoulder shrugging and facial grimacing;
Vocal - Throat clearing, yelping and other noises, sniffing and tongue clicking.
Complex:
Motor - Jumping, touching other people or things, smelling, twirling about and, although very rare, self-injurious actions, including hitting or biting oneself;
Vocal - Uttering ordinary words or phrases out of context, echolalia (repeating a sound, word or phrase just heard) and, in rare cases, coprolalia (vocalizing socially unacceptable words). The range of tics or tic-like symptoms that can be seen in TS is enormous. The complexity of some symptoms often confuses family members, friends, teachers, and employers who may find it hard to believe that the actions or vocal utterances are involuntary.
The local French language alt weekly compares my CD to Sgt Pepper. Is that good?
I screwed up.
The Pittsburgh entry, which appears to heavily quote my friend John Chernoff, has inaccuracies and misquotes. John has sent me corrections and they have been incorporated into that day's entry within brackets. I feel awful about it, not just because it's unfair to John and inaccurate, but, to make matters worse, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette saw my original Pittsburgh entry and ran it in their Sunday arts section as an outsiders view of their town.
So, while the parts about the church, the murals and the Mattress Factory are all true - parts of my version of the city's financial and renewal situations are less than accurate.
I guess the border between blogging and journalism is fuzzy. And when one quotes someone else, even in a blog, there is an obligation for some kind of fact checking. Jeez, I feel like a jerk, though it's probably not as bad as I think it is, and I hope John doesn't get too many calls from friends in Pittsburgh about his supposed opinions, analysis, and point of view, as interpreted by me.
Some of the Tosca Strings have begun their own exercise regimen. The hotel gyms often charge $10 for entry, which is silly if one is just on a machine for 30 mins and they're not ready for jogging. So the girls use the deserted hotel stairwells as their own gym. In Philadelphia, they went down 20 flights - round and round and down and down. In another town they went both up and down. Another band member claims to have heard suspiciously familiar giggling and coughing coming from the stairways.
It's cold, but I offer Juana and Alejandro use of the bikes and we go out in search of... what? We find the river, which is separated from the main part of town by a highway, and therefore pretty much inaccessible. From a bridge we can see it stretching away into the countryside on both sides. It's a little foggy and misty and it looks lovely. The banks are covered with trees that lean over the river and there appears to be almost no industry or development along its banks, at least near here.
There is also no bike trail near. I ask some kids on bikes but one of them says, "oh there's sort of trail near my house, but that's a few miles away."
We find a waterfront park, but no trail... so I return to the venue for soundcheck and Juana and Alejandro look for river sightings elsewhere.
The venue is a lovely Egyptian-style movie palace converted into a theater.
Mauro, his friend Renata, and I go biking from the hotel, which is located in a suburban mall. We ride to the center of town, which I remember from class field trips as being quaint and colonial.
We pass down the usual endless highway of malls, car dealerships, Fuddruckers, Marriotts, and other faceless chain establishments until we arrive at some semblance of a town. Unfortunately, it's been made over and cutesified. It's all fudge shops, Naval Academy t-shirt shops, candle shops, and the occasional restaurant. We find a restaurant overlooking the water for lunch. It's fairly pleasant being near the water; the powerboats chug in and out of the little port area.
Yesterday was graduation day at the Naval Academy so there are lots of midshipmen everywhere in their dress whites.
We arrive back at the hotel and I forgot I have a radio interview at the venue—which is somewhere down a turnoff on the highway we just rode down. I head back out and find the turnoff but miss the road to the venue, which is a converted old high school. I was told to turn at the Graveyard Car Wash. How could I miss it? But I did, and ended up in the countryside miles away. The cicadas are having their 17-year peak and I'm glad one hasn't smacked into me yet.
My mother, father, and sister come to this show. I think the fact that they are there flusters me, because I screw up some lyrics in the first few songs, then the adrenalin takes over and it's smooth sailing. The hall is a former high school auditorium — a nice room, actually - but it does have that public school vibe. I try to make jokes about 9th grade assembly and a fire drill after, but they fall flat.
A woman flops onto the stage like a fish near the end of the show. She's stage right, near Mauro. We continue to play and she just lays there, smiling.
As we're taking our final bows a blue bra comes flying out of the audience and lands on stage in front of Paul.
A day off.
I have a couple of radio interviews in the morning. An attractive freckled woman sits really close to me when she interviews me because we were sharing a mike (I guess). I got self-conscious.
Here in the USA people are wandering the halls making deals, whispering and yelling into phones, under pressure, hoping for that advantage, that marketing plan that will bust it all wide open. Some hotel rooms are arranged like little business offices- with a fax machine, whiteout, cello tape, a stapler and paper clips... even an archaic giant plug-in calculator — all arranged neatly. A business office from 10 years ago, sort of. Like an anthropological exhibition of what the typical 1990 office desk would have looked like. It must make non-business types staying here feel like they're slackers, not with the American program. I myself welcome the office supplies- though I don't need any today.
I bike to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and then to the Museum of Fine Arts. At the Gardner museum I was hoping to find sea creatures made of blown Venetian glass that I'd seen pictures of, but no luck. The place is a big, dark mansion filled with her stuff arranged by room decor, not so much by object, theme, or chronology. It is kind of like wandering though an empty rich-person's house and discovering a Cecil Beaton tucked among the family snapshots on the piano, except in this case it's renaissance paintings and Sergeant portraits. It would be interesting to present a regular museum show like this, as if it's someone's house.
At the Fine Arts museum there is a show of Japanese postcards, which are pretty spectacular. Who knew? Mostly very graphic, few of them have photos - and all very elegant and beautifully printed.
There is also a huge Gaugin in Tahiti show here, which simultaneously exposes him as a despicable person (quit his day job and left his family) and a fake (the poses of the Tahitian girl-women were often modeled after Javanese and Indian photos of Buddhist sculptures he had with him, for example). And Tahiti was far from the Eden he depicts it as. Missionaries had pretty much destroyed the local culture by the time he arrived. But it makes one wonder if a lie, a tempting seductive myth, has some positive value. To put the possibility of paradise into the world's imagination might not be such a bad thing. And they are lovely paintings, pleasing to the eye. Poor guy, though; he painted all these pictures and barely sold enough in Paris to cover expenses. He knew then his "vision" was not for Europe at that moment, so he returned to Tahiti and died there.
There is a big sign on Fenway Park, the baseball stadium, about locking your guns. It reminds me of a sign I saw on a car that said, "I don't call 911." I defend myself by shooting first was the implication, I guess.
We all have dinner at a seafood restaurant and I sit by tour veterans Daniel, Todd, and Joe the driver. They immediately begin to tell tour horror stories, which are hugely amusing - if you're not there. Apparently both Prince and Michael Flatley, like many others, don't care for red lights so they often arrange a police escort to and from airports. As they do with politicians, the police block intersections and allow the limos to speed through without stopping all the way to the airport, or from the airport to the venue. My jaw is dropping at this expensive, arrogant behavior, but it's fascinating. Apparently, there was an incident where the Prince limos were accidentally stopped at a light within sight of the arena and the fans began to converge on the cars. Guns were drawn. Sheesh... but it all calmed down and no one was killed on account of a red light.
The only soldier punished for the abuse and torture of Iraqis is the guy who took the well-circulated pictures. Since these crimes were known about inside the military and defense depts. for 6 months this is kind of shocking. It seems a typical case of blame the messenger... punish the guy that broke ranks and leaked.... I think he was the only one to plead guilty so far... what, are the others going to say - that's not them in the photos?
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