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| June 2004 »
There has been talk of purchasing a cheap Wall Mart bike in order to provide a community bike in addition to mine and Mauro's. After the show in Poughkeepsie, Fred, our driver, says there's a Wall Mart nearby and he's happy to stop for some midnight bike shopping.
We all get a little adrenaline rush at the thought of a class trip at midnight. We find the bike department. The store is huge, a hanger - and we proceed to ask the poor dude to take bike after bike off the racks so we can test-drive them around the isles (though you're not supposed to).
Our price range is from $59-99, and they have what seem like pretty decent 18-speed bikes in that range, certainly fine for getting around town on a tour.
I settle on an aluminum one for $99; it's lightweight and has shocks. It gets attached to the back of the bus and I hope someone uses it.
It's confirmed. Not only is the Earth getting warmer - greenhouse effect - but it's getting darker, too. Apparently the dust and pollution particles deflect a significant proportion of sunlight from reaching the earth's surface. So it will be hotter and darker in our future unless we can stop the endless denials of the Bush administration that any of this is happening.
Rumsfeld is quoted as saying the Geneva Convention is open to interpretation.
Yesterday in Poughkeepsie I search for a bike path along the Hudson River. It's a lovely day. No such thing exists on this side. But I spy what looks like a small riverside road on the opposite shore and take the Mid Hudson bridge over to investigate. It turns out to be a rocky gravel path that parallels the train track. It's a horrible ride. I occasionally pass some weekend fishers, so I assume the path leads somewhere... to a little town downriver maybe. But after a few miles of rocks and dust I reach a young man fishing off a ledge and ask him if he's caught anything. "Not yet," he replays, without turning to me. I ask if the road leads somewhere. He half glances at me, then turns away as he replies, "don't think so." I guess they don't care for strangers around here.
I turn up a dirt path away from the river. I can hear chainsaws in the woods. At the top of a hill the dirt path is blocked by oil drums and it empties onto blacktop. A kid on a bike tells me the road doesn't go to the big bridge... then he says "actually, I don't know."
His older brother appears and says I can get to Rt 9 but, to get to the bridge, I have to go all the way to McDonalds. And that sounds like the edge of the known world from his perspective.
Last night the audience sang "Happy Birthday" to me as we walked on stage. We're in a beautiful renovated theater in downtown, the topless muses frolic on a ceiling mural.
Leigh is from here and her parents give me a pre-birthday present — a glass dish her mom made with a copy of a peculiar Austin roundabout traffic sign on it, the same sign I had embroidered on some of our merch.
The next day I met my friend John Chernoff, writer and drummer, at the Mattress factory, an art space on the North Side. He talked about city finances. Some old timers remember when Pittsburgh was booming and smoky. With the combined smoke from the foundries, the coal dust and the coal heat in the houses the sky was often dark at noon. Black clouds covered the city for much of the year.
The last steel mill closed recently. They tear them down and the area that remains is called Brownland. They were vast. The largest one stretched for miles along the riverbank. The little valleys that eked out from the river each contained their own mines and a little town of workers housing and churches squished into the remaining space. A law, still on the books, says that if coal is found under your house, you have to allow it to be dug out. [John's correction: "Brownland" should be "Brownfields." "Brownfields" are former industrial sites that are being rehabilitated. The developments along the river are all Brownfields. There are a lot of sites that are under major reconstruction, such as the old Homestead foundry site that is now a development called Waterfront. Along the South Side, the site of the old Jones and Laughlin plant, among others, are all being redevelopment. But the main thing that makes them a brownfield is that they have been cleared in preparation for rehabilitation or redevelopment."]
Now, of course, with the passing of all this, these towns are boarded up, as are large sections of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods. But other parts are emerging, beginning to revive in one form or another.
The city is pretty much bankrupt, especially after having built 2 incredible stadiums right next to one another. [John's amplification and correction: "The city is not bankrupt because of the stadiums. There are a lot of factors, such as the shrinking population, and what you mentioned of the large nonprofit institutions that don't pay taxes, among other things, like many other cities, including lack of federal and state funding support. The boarded-up city neighborhoods you refer to are actually some of the old mill and mining towns. It's not neighborhoods in the city itself. And of course, there are people working to turn those places around in addition to the oligarchs -- grassroots community groups and small businesses all over the place. The bakery we visited is an example of a business locating itself in such an old town like Millvale."]
The voters said no to the expenditure, but a revamped initiative snuck through, and now the bills have come due, and as there was no raise in taxes to pay them. The Republican legislature squashed any tax increase, especially on the wealthier suburbans. Well, other services have been cut, city pools closed, police force has been cut, etc. The burden falls on the mostly poor in the city itself, who just don't have the money for it. Luckily some of the oligarchs, the Heinz's, the Mellon's and others, live in the city and don't want their town to go straight to hell, so they work to reinvigorate the city center, block by block, and to figure out some means of obtaining funds from the wealthier landowners. The largest tenants in the city are schools and hospitals – which don't pay taxes - so something has to be done. [John: "There are grassroots efforts being made to work on such matters as the North Side neighborhoods around the stadium. The renovated houses we saw on the North Side, around Central North Side, and Mexican War Streets, cost lots of money. The neighborhood is a mix of income levels and of privately and publicly supported housing investments."]
Various disastrous 60s and 70s urban renewal schemes have yet to be undone. A beautiful freeway cuts the North Side in two, insulating the stadiums and all their attendant businesses from the local neighborhoods. Housing projects create high crime zones and only the neighborhoods that were deemed beyond help - the neighborhoods of immigrant workers housing scattered here and there - are reviving. Some of them look beautiful. They still have local bars, mom and pop stores and some pedestrian traffic. We met after the show at a bar in a Polish or Czech neighborhood called Gooski's (sp?). It was packed.
At the Mattress Factory the Turrell installations are spectacular; there are about 4 of them. One room is so dark and the piece is just barely on the threshold of sight. One can't be sure if one is perceiving anything or not.
A piece in the alley is made of tombstones engraved with names and occupations of immigrants. A Calvino quote about finding one's part in a place one has yet to visit is inspiring. Now I want to try reading him again.
After lunch we look for a church in Millvale that had been recommended to me as having interesting murals. Millvale is a few miles down (up?) the river, a former mining village nestled in a valley. There are lots of boarded up stores, but a great French bakery. I buy a cake, as it's my birthday.
The church is Croatian and the murals, by Maxo Vanka, are spectacular. The Diego Riviera of Pittsburgh, I would say. They murals were done during 8 weeks in 1937 and they cover the interior of the church. Of course, there is the virgin holding the child, but below her, for example, on either side of what is now the altar, are Croatian people - on the left from the old world and on the right from the new. A steel foundry can be seen belching smoke behind them.
But more amazing are the political murals that echo the crucifixion. Widows mourn over a coffin that contains a bleeding corpse, a soldier. Crosses cover the hillside behind them. Another wall depicts a corrupt justice in a gas mask holding scales on which the gold outweighs the bread. Clearly WWI had a big effect on Maxo.
The virgin, on the verge of being bayoneted herself, separates two soldiers.
On another mural an oligarch done as Death reads the stock reports while being served a chicken dinner by two black servants.
One more: Jesus is stabbed, a second crucifixion.
These are badly in need of renovation - years of coal dust have darkened them. But one can hope that these amazing things will survive and be cleaned soon.
I wake up in America. The sun is blasting in the bus windows and we are in a huge parking lot in Buffalo, somewhere near the Canadian border. A highway passes alongside the parking lot and cars whoosh by. We are in the middle of nowhere.There are no buildings near us. In the distance is an office building and, to the left, our hotel.
Women in identical suits are watching a Powerpoint presentation in a glassed-in room. A man is walking the lobby, loudly explaining a marketing situation into his headset. Americans are focused, intent, bent on self-improvement and enlarging their market share. The papers show the Army attacking a mosque and the magazines show hooded Iraqis being tortured and abused by U.S. soldiers.
The Salvation Army is setting up tables by the conference rooms. The ladies all have Burger King cups.
The guest rooms are about 1/4 mile away.
Last night we played a song on THE David Letterman show. It went fine and it was fun, but it was all over so fast.
They had a segment called "Is That Anything?" Tonight they had a woman gyrating in a giant slinky, a guy jumping up and down with springy things on his head, and a familiar-looking woman in a metal outfit dancing and stoking herself with a power tool, which emitted showers of sparks. Malu and I saw her later. It was Kiva, whose wedding we attended at Sideshows By The Sea in Coney Island. At that time she was mainly a snake handler, but she went on to do a cabaret show featuring piercing on stage to electronic music and probably more I don't know about.
The busses roll at midnight and we have been joined by Suzanne, who will do lights. Her husband(?) Smokey drops her off. He plays with Mauro in the Forro band. It's a small world.
Daniel, the tour manager, who was on my last tour, has joined us as well. His stint managing Lucinda Williams is over.
Juana Molina, our opening act, introduces herself, along with her accompanist Alejandro. They're traveling with us, too. I volunteered that since there are only 3 of them (Chris is their all-around tech sound guy) they could save money traveling with us, as Jim White did. Her record Segundo is one of my all time favorites, so I'm curious to see her live.
After arriving in Buffalo, Mauro asks how far the falls are. I check a map and it seems like 10 miles or so - not more that an hour's bike ride, maybe less. So we head off for Niagara.
 It's a weird ride. We're not on a highway but almost. The road is, as Mauro points out, filled with stores that are all chains. Nothing is local, peculiar, or specific to this area. Everyone is an employee of some anonymous corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have no stake or investment in the place where they work. Of course, we can't see any of these people; there are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots as we inch along.
Which is exactly what I say to myself every time I have a cup of coffee.
Occasionally, there are falls information joints. Then further on, motel after motel. I tell Mauro this used to be a honeymoon spot. Now it's a little hard to imagine honeymooning here except in an ironic way. An ironic honeymoon? Anyway, who would want to honeymoon plopped down on a highway that looks like it could be anywhere in America?
 About 10 miles down the road, there is evidence of the massive electrical power generated by the still invisible falls. (This was where Tesla proved that alternating current could be transported.) We're feeling weird, hot, and a little tired. This landscape tells a story. Somewhere in the distance is an amazing and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon, but the reaction here seems to be: how can we exploit it and turn it into industrial might? Land not industrialized is abandoned. An egret stands in a muddy stream among old tires and bits of signage. Power, industrial and electrical, flexed its muscles and was proud. Now the mostly closed Lockheed plant "looks like a jail," says Mauro.
The town of Niagara itself is a peculiar ghetto of black and Italian immigrants. Italian grocery stores, hair salons and liquor stores. We stop for a sausage sandwich and Gatorade. A pale woman of maybe 70 sits in front of an ashtray overflowing with buts, leafing through a Country Stars magazine. I suggest she might get sunburned. She snuffs and ignores that hint and instead shows me a photo of Alan Jackson in her magazine. He's her favorite - "this year," she says.
The falls are truly amazing. The air is cool all around them - like the whole world is air-conditioned.
We are hot and spent and it was way more than 10 miles so we call Todd and ask if he can send the local runner with a van to pick us up.
The show goes incredibly well, though twice there are power failures in the middle of the set. Luckily, Graham and Mauro, the only ones whose instruments can be heard when the power cuts, play on, and the audience keeps singing "we're on a road to nowhere." If it's a serious problem we'll have to take a break, loosing momentum, but the power suddenly comes back on and we finish the song.
Juana's set before ours is beautiful and strange. She tells a story about one song – doing the voices of herself and her mother. Her mother was coming to visit in LA. They planned to visit the Frank Lloyd Wright, Neutra and Schindler houses together - but the mom wants to hit the 99¢ store. All this gets worked into the lyrics.
After our set she appears, teary-eyed, to tell us she was moved by the strings on "Lazy." (The beginning, I imagine.) I knock on their dressing room door so she can tell them herself.
Spent the day going over tour merchandise with Malu, Jennifer, and Jess. It's a little chaotic. Some designs aren't gonna work, some need refining, and some are late in arriving, but it's getting sorted.
Danielle and I discuss upcoming art projects — a sort of huge lightbox in Tokyo and a show at Eastman house in Rochester are coming up relatively soon.
7PM. Jennifer and Jess are still packing stuff up and I leave to grab some dinner before Malu returns home. I sit at a counter of a Japanese restaurant, head down, reading Max Weber on Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic. Anthony Kiedis taps me on the shoulder and we exchange compliments (I've got a bunch of their songs on my ipod). For a minute I feel like I'm having a glamorous life. He's eating at a large table further back.
The guy sitting next to me asks if he can share my highlighter. Jeez, no one's ever asked that before! But I mark up almost everything I read, even stuff I'm gonna throw away.
Bush has, according to the papers, "apologized — sort of" for the U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners. Well, he didn't actually apologize — he said it would be investigated. AND he made this speech on an Arabic language TV station funded by the U.S. government. Needless to say, Arabs will not take anything broadcast on this channel seriously. Most will not even see it, as Al Jezeera is the most watched network and website.
So, although the "apology" was virtual, it created the needed imagery of Bush "apologizing" on an Arabic language network, and is duly reported as a real event by the U.S. media. The "apology" seems to have been made more for the U.S. media than for the Arab world - the Arab world knows the channel is a joke - it seems to have been done more to plug the growing hole in Bush's credibility before election days than to actually respect the perception throughout the Arab world that the U.S. is not and never was interested in democracy.
Last nights show in Paris went wonderfully. I only forgot the words in one verse of "I Zimbra," but since it's in an entirely made-up language, only the band could tell. The audience members - seated - were out of their seats by about the 4th song... and by the middle of the set the whole crowd was standing and dancing. Maybe because of this lively reception and the fact that I hadn't had much to eat I felt light on my feet and tried a couple of new dance moves. I have no idea how they look but they feel to me like my body has been gripped by the swing and is about to hurl itself to pieces, or just about. It's a great disorienting feeling, like being dizzy, and I realize that I can't do it for too long as I have to sing seconds later. I also realize that it may appear ridiculous, this primal choreography (Leigh and Tracy always chuckle) - but it feels so good that I try it a few times.
Of course "Psycho Killer," with its French lyrics, was well received; it was added to the set more or less specifically for the Belgians and the French. Mauro's suggested addition of the rave-up, guitar-solo ending satisfies more than my original understated version.
In the early afternoon I cycle in blustery weather down to Louise's apt and together we check out the shows at the Pompidou. An Italian artist has a big show. I love one piece in which he casts his hand holding the trunk of a sapling, then puts the cast hand and wrist in place, and, many years later, there is a photo on the now grown tree pinching a little bit of the trunk.
Sophie Calle recently had a huge retrospective here, and became more of a Parisian celebrity than ever. She comes with a friend to the Bataclan show and we have dinner afterwards with a group of other friends. She dominates the table with her stories and tales of projects in progress. A lot of conversation revolves around the use of tu or vous - in various combinations - using vous with a first name is a sort of combo approach. Sophie says she just broke up with her last lover and they always used vous, the understanding being that they would use tu when they didn't love one another anymore.
Another story is about a piece she did about being abandoned by a lover in Japan. She used this event as the subject of a piece but never mentioned his name. Years later, after the Pompidou show, he wrote a letter to the paper outraged that his personal life was included in one of Sophie's pieces - but he wrote it under his own name, thus revealing himself. His indignation seems a matter of male pride, and the rest of the table concurs.
Deanne (sound mixer) wants a revolution in the U.S. I'm not sure exactly what she means or what form she imagines. OK, I know she means massive change, a complete reorganization and reorientation, but how? The multinationals seem to be beyond any government regulation – the Bush admin gives a complete bind eye to anything the corporations do - both the tortures and a significant segment of the war are being fought by private corporations(!). There are more of these private troops than there are British. These mercenaries, and that's what they are, are of course not under any government control. So maybe Deanne is right - working within the legal and congressional system doesn't mean anything, at least not to Halliburton and their subsidiary, Kellogg Brown and Root.
Sophie mentioned an ongoing project, which I am sure will become one of her pieces - she hopes to "get to my future faster" so she is seeing a well-known clairvoyant and whatever the clairvoyant says will happen, Sophie makes it happen (barring murder and death, she said). It will take a number of years to realize, and one wonders if this very dinner was predicted as well.
We arrive and awaken on the bus in a motel parking lot. There are only 2 rooms available, as it is graduation day at Cornell and I guess someone didn't book ahead. So we investigate a kind offer from Wade, a local kid who houses visiting bands at a house in the country. After a half-hour drive we stop at a dirt road with a funky house at the end. The porch is wrapped in plastic sheeting. Paul asks, "Did anyone ever see the movie Wrong Turn?"
Sure enough, there are bedrooms and a kitchen and even a drum set up in the entrance for impromptu rehearsals. It's a very kind offer from Wade but, well, we're not prepared for this adventure today. Thunderstorms are rolling in and the rain is threatening.
Daniel's Seneca Nation pals show up at the Ithaca show, as they did in Buffalo. They come bearing gifts - rattles made of turtles, including the head. I am also given a top hat decorated with eagle feathers, which is illegal for a white man to wear as it's an endangered species. One man demonstrates the use of the rattle by loudly singing a Seneca song in the theater after the show, while hammering the rattle against his palm. It's touching, moving, and ridiculously surreal.
We do an audience participation Scrabble game using theater marquis letters to start the show. It's kind of silly and doesn't work as well as I'd hoped, though the prize of one of the lady's undies merch items - autographed by the whole band - boosts sales of that item considerably.
A real estate company in UK wanted to use the song "Glass Concrete and Stone" in an ad. The scene would be a drive-by of modern soulless housing while the lyrics "well it's glass and concrete and stone, and it's just a house not a home" are heard. Presumably these images would be followed by images of the nice wooden charming homes represented by said real estate company.
It worked wonders for Sting and Moby - licensing songs to commercials increased general awareness of their CDs - but somehow I don't think this is the same kind of thing.
Oil is up to $40 a barrel, the highest it's been since 1990 (when Iraq invaded Kuwait). [today it passed even that – it reached $41] Blame is laid to various acts of sabotage on the pipelines in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It seems the invaders can't even get this right. One would assume that the Americans would at least prioritize their oil prices, but maybe Halliburton and Co. don't really mind. It's an excuse to raise prices and increase "security."
It has come out (NY Times) that Afghan officials who were detained by the Americans were abused and tortured in almost exactly the same ways as the Iraqis - further proof that it was not just some wild guards out of control, but a systematic methodology and policy. U.S. military promises an investigation and says it's the first they've heard of it. According to local human rights organizations, it's all lies.
I purchase two pairs of wide-striped overalls at a shop here. That's all they have in stock. One goes to Paul and the other to Mauro or Graham, depending on fit. I myself bought a wide striped suit in Torino, so the rhythm section is on its way to having an alternative summer look.
One of my one-piece suits got laundered instead of dry cleaned, and it shrunk. It's too short for me now, but it sort of fits Mauro. Leigh's was similarly laundered instead of dry cleaned, but more or less still fits her. Since we are all in sort of matching outfits this can be a problem. Luckily, the strings are switching over to the brown uniforms, so the fact that Leigh's jumpsuit got ruined will not be an issue for long.
 I go to the Rijksmuseum, the big one with the Rembrandts and Vermeers. I don't think I've ever done it before as I usually check the Stedelijk Museum (the contemporary museum) instead. Only part of the museum is open; it has a show that organizes part of the collection as a means of telling Dutch history through art.
Holland was from the mid-1600s a Republic, so the wealthy merchants, burghers, and businessmen became the defacto rulers of the town and country - much as it is in the U.S. today. The Dutch East India Company was the biggest company in the world. They didn't have so many colonies, it seemed to me, but they controlled the trade and shipping, so they profited from others' colonial adventures. They handled the slave trade, but they themselves didn't have slaves.
The Dutch East India Company became incredibly wealthy, forbidding the local artists to work for the Catholic Church anymore. The Catholic Church was soon outlawed as well... so the artists no longer painted crucifixes, Marys, and scenes of the saints but did, naturally, portraits of the merchant-class. They were encouraged to paint other subjects, too, at a more moderate scale than the massive works previously done to decorate altars. So paintings became a tradable commodity and symbol of status, like everything else these men dealt with.
"I hate this part of Texas" - grafitti in the dressing room in Hamburg.
The venue, a club called Fabrik that used to be a munitions factory (there is a sculpture made of bombs outside), is like a set for a prison movie or TV series. Wire grates on the balconies, metal girders and beams, and electrical cords dangling here and there. Out come the troglodytes, the denizens of this place for its 35 years. Ralf (not his real name) is a kindly giant in a sleeveless jacket and cutoff shorts, a rock and roll caveman, another man, skinny and shorter, has an extremely bushy mustache and beard like Popeye's granddad. There are more of them scurrying here and there. I wonder if this is the only place that these women and men can call home, where they feel comfortable and at ease. The place was made by them, run by them and ultimately exists for them. We visitors are just the excuse and means to keep it open. We allow this rock-and-roll tribe to continue their "underground" existence.
That night, the audience is great: standing, dancing, wedged into every nook and cranny of the prison set. We can look almost straight up and there are people leaning over the railings.
Mauro suggests I add electric guitar to the end of our low-key string version of "Psycho Killer." That night I give it a try and Graham improvises a new pattern, accelerates, and it makes a terrific ending after this sweet marimba- and strings-centered version.
That afternoon I take the front wheel of my bike to a shop to be repaired; when emerging from the Berlin club, my back tire got a flat. I could carry a patch kit and repair it myself but didn't feel like it, so this becomes my afternoon project. Then I go jogging round the lake as it's a lovely day.
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