 |
| MAIN | SEARCH / ARCHIVES / NOTES | RSS |
« September 2004 |
Main
| November 2004 »
The flight across northern Argentina is bumpy. The Andes are smooth air, the sun has almost set, so they are in shadow and in a purple glow.
The following day, a few of us go downtown to a hill with a castle on top that Darwin climbed when he visited this city. The rocks are covered with messages of love. "I'm yours, forever and always," "Flowers in water die in a few days, my love will last forever."
We walk down a pedestrian mall to Plaza de Armas. This town is less polluted than the first time I was here. That was on the Rei Momo tour, when I brought the large Latin band to Latin America — which sounds weird, but the truth is that a lot of the audiences here weren't familiar with that music.
The venue at that time was horrific, in more than one way. It was a large gymnasium, so there was negligible ambience, the sound was terrible, and, lastly, it was the place where the military tortured Victor Jarra after the U.S.-backed coup on...Sept 11.
Victor's hands were cut off: "You'll never play guitar again," his attackers reportedly boasted. Bush I was CIA head. Kissinger asked that human rights violations go unreported. At least I'm not playing that place again, I think to myself.
 In the morning, the nearby Andes peaks loom over the town, but by mid-afternoon, when we take our walk, the smog is already building up. The last time I was here the smog was so bad that these buildings would be obscured as well; this time you can still see them a little bit.
In the evening, we are all invited to a nice Tapas restaurant, where the wine flows and the plates accumulate.
The following day is show day and lunch at the Mercado Central, where numerous restaurants all serve pretty much exactly the same things. Then the museum of Pre-Columbian art. Amazing stuff. Tiny mummies, each about two-feet long. The people at that time removed the internal organs and stuffed the corpse with twigs and mud. How that results in a miniature person is not clear, but here they are, like creepy childs' dolls.
There's a fascinating string spiral on one wall – the Inkan (as they spell it) way of both keeping financial records and notating epic tales.
Ceramic sculptures reflected the aesthetic ideal, a look that guaranteed and evoked a position of local status: a deformed cranium, crossed eyes and filled teeth — filed so as to make the front two appear large, like buck teeth. So a cross-eyed, buck-toothed pinhead look was the appearance that got you where you needed to be. "Hey, ladies!"
Ames said she saw a sculpture that was a of a man in a flayed monkey skin costume. The apes toes protruded from the man's shins and he wore the monkey face over his own.
Walked over to the venue, a former train station. If I thought the sound in the gymnasium/torture chamber was atrocious, I hadn't seen nothing. The present place was a Victorian arched vault of steel, copper and glass — a massive hall. The platforms have been filled in and seats laid out across the expanse. Echoey is not the word for it. I became immediately depressed and angry.
In response, I tailor the set to songs that might survive the acoustics of this room. That means mostly ballads - a lot of the Talking Heads songs that I suspect this audience would love to hear will sound like shit in here, so out they go. A few of the up-tempo numbers remain, but not very many. I go lay on the floor of the curtained-off dressing area and sulk.
The place fills up respectably (one local newspaper review estimates 3,000) and, as we walk on stage, there is a surge of young people filling the gap between the expensive seats and the stage. I'm sure the patrician ticket holders love that.
The kids are wildly enthusiastic, some hold signs for specific songs, and they dance at the slightest provocation, which is sad because there won't be so many opportunities for them tonight.
Oddly enough, the reviews in the papers the next morning are all positive. I guess the horrendous acoustics didn't phase the critics, or the audience. This cheers me up a bit.
The next morning, a few of us go to Pablo Neruda's house here in Santiago — a lovely place with a nautical theme. There are bars in almost every room. The guide (one can only tour the house with a guide) used to live in NY and knows where I used to live on 12th Street, which is a bit of a shock. He's a young, long-haired guy with a goatee whose grandmother was the inspiration for some of Neruda's most well-known and best-loved poems. It seems she was the one who got away, the one who was never forgotten.
Our guide points out some letters on display and says, "These used to be in a drawer in my house, I'd see them from time to time."
He, our guide, left the U.S. when Bush II was elected and reminds us that Bush I was the CIA chief when Allende was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military coup on Sept 11 (!), 1973. He said seeing people all over NY with signs looking for missing loved ones after 9/11 was too familiar a sight, even though the cause of the tragedy may have been very different. It just had too much resonance with the years of torture and people who "disappeared" during the Pinochet regime. He said that Allende was not perfect, but that Chilean socialism was very democratic, and they were finding their own way until the leadership was brutally crushed. Maybe if Kerry gets elected, our guide will return to NY, a place where he has a lot of friends.
We arrive safely and approach the town via La Rambla, the seaside road that reminds me of the Malecon in Havana. Palm trees and nice houses face the sea wall.
The venue last night was the same one Mauro and I remembered from the "David Byrne" CD tour. It's a converted movie theater — a triplex, at least — and the largest room has been the rock venue du jour since I played here last, in 1994. I see on the marquee that Paralamas, the Brazilian rock band (they were backstage, and performing, at the Sao Paulo MTV awards), were here the night before last.
This hall has a unique format. The orchestra seats slope upwards towards the stage in a gradual incline that makes the 9-foot-high stage seem even higher. It's like one of those false perspective rooms in that it confuses one's senses for a moment. The 1st balcony above this is fairly small, but the 2nd one, which extends further back than the orchestra, is huge; easily more than half of the audience is up here.
The sound is cavernous but the audience is wonderful. The cheap seats way up high are packed and, in the orchestra, there are just a few empties. I had heard that only 300 or so seats were sold as of a couple of days ago, but, if that was the case, there must have been a tremendous walk-up.
After the show, a group of us walk to a pedestrian street on the way to the hotel for wine and snacks. Some fans stop and say they enjoyed the show, although a few add that we should have done Teatro Solis, the beautiful, classic theater I was originally scheduled to be in.
Uruguay doesn't have a favorable exchange rate with the dollar, so for a while now there have been no "international" acts passing through. Paralamas are from Brazil next door, which sort of doesn't count; besides, they had a huge success here when they did versions of their CDs in Spanish. So I must be a rarity, of sorts.
From the dressing rooms a doorway leads to the cinema projection room, where the latest Tom Cruise movie is unspooling on a giant platter. The projectionist is amiable and doesn't mind folks visiting out of curiosity. Last time we were here the marquee said “David Byrne — Picapiedras” (Flintstones in Spanish).
I suspect that the weird architecture is partly due to this cinema palace being divided up at some point in the past. God knows what the movie audience must hear once the band gets cranked up and the audience starts with their foot stomping and soccer cheers.
I go for a bike ride at noon the next day. There are people out for a Sunday stroll, catching the sun and fishing, their thermoses of hot water tucked under their arms and a cup of mate in their hands. Others simply lean against the sea wall, thermoses at the ready, their faces turned to the sun.
A group of us walk to a Pajarilla restaurant near the port. It's a touristy area, but we can sit outside and the food and wine are pretty good.
The Uruguayan paper has an article that says some U.S. troops have refused certain missions in Iraq. One could see this coming — the extended terms of duty with no end in sight, added to the prospect of getting blown to bits by the people you’re told you’re there to protect.
The beginnings of a revolt by the common soldier is heartening. It's the beginning of the end for Bush and his buddies. The military may have a limited perspective, but they know when a fight is doomed. If the Army and Marines turn against the occupation, it will be over in no time.
The military, in the meantime, is debating how to punish these "resisters." How does one punish people who have begun to think for themselves?
Terry takes a photo of some graffiti on a wall - "Sonic Youth," and a few yards away, "Mudhoney." He was on that tour, but it didn't reach here.
Last night's show in Rosario went well. It was a lovely traditional theater with two horseshoe-shaped balconies (Teatro Broadway), which pleased me. As we were about to begin, the house seemed not quite full. There were fair-sized patches of empty seats here and there, which is sort of depressing. But as the lights went down and the show got underway, the seats more or less all seemed to get filled.
The audience here, as in BA, were incredibly enthusiastic, occasionally breaking into "ole ole" soccer chants between songs. By the middle of the set they were up and dancing, filling the aisles. When we did a quieter number, they'd immediately sit down. So there was a lot of up and down all night.
This town, a university town, by the look of it, has a grid of streets lined with old frilly buildings of a few stories. The character of the town has been preserved, even if the buildings are a little dingy. People were filling the cafes and bars that occupied the ground floors as we went to bed around 1PM.
The review [in Clarin] of the Buenos Aires show says that, whereas, before, Talking Heads might have appeared like white kids getting funky, now, with the addition of the strings, it is positively an albino getting funky.
The same review — which is funny and positive — says we come out looking like building security guys, with our brown outfits.
The next morning we're on a small prop plane, chartered to take us from Rosario to Montevideo. We pass over the vast flood plains of the Parana and Plata rivers, the latter a huge expanse, like a lake. Water and inlets are everywhere, vast stretches where no road can go. We are the only passengers on this plane and we fill every seat. Hand luggage is on laps and laying in the aisle.
Yesterday I biked out to the neighborhood called Palermo-Hollywood for lunch. It's rumored to be the trendy up-and-coming area. I guess it is, but there isn't the concentration of boutiques and cafes one sees in other neighborhoods of this type. We have lunch at a place called Christophe, which was opposite a working-class joint, where swarthy men sat behind a grill filled with roasting sausages.
Stopped at the new contemporary art museum, where there is a show Usos de Imagen, based on a Mexican collection. There are some of the usual international names, but there are also a reasonable number of Latin artists represented. One guy had a video of indigenous women repeating a Spanish phrase they'd leaned phonetically that went something like, "I am saying something that has no meaning to me."
He also had a photo of another indigenous group, whom he paid to dye their hair blond. In another, a truck was paid to block the highway for 5 minutes.
Another artist, Francis Alys, paid 500 Peruvians to form, side-by-side, a huge line, and then to shovel the sand in a massive dune outside Lima – theoretically, moving the whole dune imperceptibly as the human chain made its way across the hill. "Maximum effort — minimum results" was the catch phrase that summarized the effort.
Our show is in a basketball arena called Luna Park. It's much bigger than I feel is reasonable, and it's the wrong sort of place as well.
As it turns out, the place is pretty horrible sound-wise, but not as bad as it was at sound check. It is respectably full, a pleasant surprise to me, and the audience is wonderful — definitely the best in South America so far. They’re all up and dancing, like we're used to, by about the 10th song or so. Some of the guys from La Portuaria, a local band, say hi, as well as Alex Kysler, who is working on a new CD.
The promoter added another date here in BA a few days from now; I'm surprised that he thinks I can fill this place twice, but that's been my experience here. I've previously done 2 shows separated by a few days, and the promoter assumes that word of mouth and favorable press will generate interest in the second show. And sometimes they're right.
A few of us go to an incredible seafood restaurant, where we all share one giant fish. Daniel had made reservations for 20, assuming all would want to have a nice dinner, but there are only 3 of us at a huge table. The restaurant doesn't seem to mind and we gaze out on the modern buildings reflecting in the ship channel.
This morning we bus to Rosario, a nearby town.
Susanna Baca's in town today, playing at a small theater. I'm sorry I'll miss her; we'll be in Rosario. There's also a rock festival in town this weekend that features Café Tacuba and others, so we will miss that too.
Last night after a day of promotion some of us go to La Cumparsita, a sort of tourist tango joint in the San Telmo district. It's a small club, with a professional dance couple, who teach tourists from Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and even South Africa a few steps. I try, too, but I am pretty hopeless learning structured dances. Paul does better.
There are the ubiquitous pictures of Carlos Gardel on the walls — many, many of them. I have about had it with the Gardel myth. I feel like saying, “He’s been dead for a long, long time — get over it, move on!”
This morning I struggle to wake up. I pedal to Casa Del Tango, about 4 km away, to join the strings at a rehearsal by a group called El Arranque. I picked up a couple of their CDs recently; they're incredible. Wild innovative arrangements and impeccable playing. We sit in the dark theater seats watching the rehearsal, and then they play us a few full numbers, which are amazing.
I pedal back to the hotel for some radio and phone interviews; many journalists ask what is going on in NY. They mean: what is the political feeling since 9/11? I usually reply that NY has more or less returned to its cosmopolitan, multicultural self, but the interior of the country, with access only to USA Today and Fox News, is trembling with fear that Saddam or Osama are going to come and steal their SUVs. The lack of information and the continual effort of the Bush administration to keep the population in fear has created a populace that wants nothing more than to close its doors and hide. They want someone else do whatever it takes to protect them from this weird, inscrutable enemy that, they believe, wants to take their comfortable lives from them.
Most of these journalists here, as in Europe, are searching for an explanation from me as to why a people continue to support Bush and Co. It's a constant puzzle to them. If it continues they will surely lose what's left of their admiration for the North American people, whom they largely have looked up to for their spunk, business acumen, can-do spirit and pop culture.
But I also tell them that I am guardedly optimistic. In our touring experience, lots of ordinary people, many of whom voted for Bush last time around, expressed feelings that he hasn't done a very good job, even if they more or less believe that the war (for one thing) was justified.
 Glover Gill, who is here as leader of the Tosca Tango group, invites anyone interested to see a traditional tango group at a baroque palace (El Palacio de San Martin), as part of the World Tango Festival. It's an incredible edifice — a stained-glass panel of St. George killing the dragon, exhibition dances from some of the top dancers and a performance. The place is from 1880 or so, but is in perfect shape.
The audience, except us, is all dressed in their slinky finery — elegant and sexy. This is a town that likes to dress up for the evening. (Some of them do, anyway.) Here's a view form the balcony, taken with my phone.
 El Palacio de Papas Fritas is where we had dinner earlier. Everything here earns superlatives. The widest avenue in the world is Av. 9 de Julio. The biggest steaks and the most over-the-top, ornate buildings are also here. It’s not just a palace of French fries, as the name suggests. They have typical and delicious Argentine steaks and monster salads.
We had a late show last night, with chaos on the production end, as usual. Maybe it's due to cultural differences, or maybe to language gaps, but the theaters sound better than on previous tours, so I'm thankful. In Rio and SP, I was thrilled that all those musicians and various other types attended — even Fernando Meirellies, co-director of City Of God, came to the SP show, I was told. I am playing to my peers, which wasn't often happening before, as I'd often be in the "wrong" venues. I wonder if the fact that Caetano invited me to appear with him on MTV (and covered a Talking Heads song on his last CD) helped to legitimize me here?
Today we all slept late and then went to a churrascaria and OD'd on meat. There was a live "country" band in this massive meat emporium near the center of town — "country" meaning vaguely gaucho music, sort of like Tex-Mex. There are no foreigners here; it's not a beautiful city. But there is a floor show, where gaucho dancers in regional costumes dance in boots and spurs.
Mauro's family is here. They live in a nearby town. They all go to a football game along with some of our bunch. I went to one in Salvador once and there's a wonderful vibe. In Salvador, the fans bring drums — massive surdu's — to the stands and rev up a massive groove when their team goes on the offensive.
I walk into town, where the center has been turned into an outdoor pedestrian market, with vendors selling various kinds of mate, statues of saints, medicinal potions, piles of butchered feet and heads, and lots and lots of bootleg CDs. (I stop in a legit shop and buy a few Brazilian music DVDs.)
The port and water a block away are obscured by warehouses, docks and a highway. I can see the tops of ships, but that's all. The city seems to have turned inward. There is a park nearby that borders the bay, but it's a ways away.
We performed in Sao Paulo last night at a club (Tom Brasil) modeled after Canecao the venue in Rio. There were tables with drinks and snack menus in a vast room with a large stage.
The audience was more reserved than we are used to. Maybe this was because they were seated and it was sort of awkward for them to comfortably stand, but we've played in plenty of seated venues, some pretty fancy, and the audiences often are up by the 7th song or so. I suspect there are other reasons. I suspect that the patrons of these clubs are mostly the higher classes in Brasil. The tickets are probably not cheap by Brazilian standards, and, therefore, in these clubs, one is supposed to behave in a somewhat refined manner. It would be unseemly to be shaking and waving one's arms like any ordinary (lower class) Brazilian. The hole in this theory is that there were plenty of younger members of the audience, and usually they tend to disregard those class behavioral guidelines, at least for a while.
The room sounds good, the PA is more than adequate and the gear all works. The show runs pretty smoothly, a change from the disastrous MTV event.
Afterwards I say hello to Tom Ze, who lives here. We agree to meet the next day to catch the Bienal of Contemporary Art that just opened. I say hi to a few other folks and some of us quickly depart, as there's nothing in this part of town.
Flying in to this town one can see a nightmare vision of the future: an entire landscape — endless, monotonous — of banal and unremarkable high-rise apartment and office buildings. They stretch to the horizon. There are almost no defining features, at least to an outsider (well, actually, there are a few landmarks). It's a little like LA, plus Tokyo plus Mexico City all rolled into one. Caetano and Tracy both pointed out the lovely purple flowering trees, which seem like incongruous explosions of beauty amidst the endless urban sprawl.
The next day Tracy and I catch a cab and meet Tom Ze at the Bienal. It's in a massive convention center in a park, near the Niemeyer-designed auditorium and smaller exposition hall. There is a terrific Cai Guo Qiang piece that is an almost full-sized small airplane made of woven basket material, into which has been wedged thousands of objects that had been confiscated by security: Swiss army knives, scissors, screwdrivers, nail clippers, knitting needles, etc. They turn the plane into a porcupine.
As we saunter around the massive space, I get a call from Daniel, who has headed to the airport an hour and a half ago with the rest of the band and crew. "We're stuck in traffic," he says. "It's the traffic jam from hell. It's biblical. I doubt we'll make our flight... I think you should allow 2 hours to reach the airport."
He's right, they do miss their flight, but, thanks to Mauro, they find seats on a small carrier that has a 10 PM flight to Porto Alegre. Their original flight was for 4PM.
According to Icaro Brasil, the Varig in-flight mag (is my research this limited?): "The Bienal is the child of post WWII. In the wave of victorious euphoria and post-WWII ideological and economic ties, the western bloc intensified the circulation of information and cultural assets. The Bienal was cosmopolitan, from the start, with the idea of bringing the international avant guard together every two years, not only to exhibit, but also to discuss and evaluate."
Already this makes the avant guard appear an arm of western capitalist ideology.
There are documents that attest to the U.S. State department's involvement in creating the Bienal. One person even called it, at the beginning, "an international art trust headed by Nelson Rockefeller," a "machine for corruption and propaganda" designed to sink Brazil into the "morass of modern formalism." At the time, there were heated debates on figurative and abstract art. Leftist intellectuals considered only figurative art valid — as a bastion of humanism. Nowadays, with abstract art not having the modern hegemony it once did (except in Fort Worth), this idea seems somewhat more valid to the international set. Abstraction was seen as alienating and a sell-out strategy of the right.
This gives a different perspective on a lot of Northern art museums and institutions. I'm surprised that it appears in an in-flight magazine.
Lots of school groups recognize Tom and have their pictures taken with him. Others flock to Jair, a musician who is producing Tom's new CD. Tom jokingly says to me, "you are a nobody," though, in fact, some of the school groups recognize me too. On our way out, we run into Daniela Mercury, out of MTV makeup. She's touring the exposition with her parents and grandparents. I wonder what they'll think of the Bulgarian artist Rassmussen Rassim's video piece of him getting a circumcision. One screen had a close-up of the knife and the cauterization tool and the other screen was a wider shot of him watching the procedure.
Last night's show in Rio went pretty smoothly, at least compared to the MTV event. The audience stayed seated most of the night, which is kind of unusual for Brasil, but the sound was good. Despite working with new and rented gear, most things functioned incredibly well. Caetano joined us again, for both "Nothing But Flowers" (now done Baio-style) and "Marco De Canavazes," a song we wrote together.
Afterwards, Virginia Rodriguez, Maragethe Menezes and various local acquaintances said hi. Marisa Monte sent a note saying she liked the Verdi tune. If I remember correctly, she has classical training.
It's been overcast all day here, so we missed the stunning beauty of this town, but it's still pretty amazing. A few of us have some drinks at a beach cabana near the hotel and a kid comes by offering, rather aggressively, to shine shoes. No one wants an overpriced shoeshine and he must feel he's losing a certain sale because he begins to shine Ames shoes, even though she said no. She taps his shoulder and he feigns falling over and then works up a head of steam. He's no more that 10 years old, we guess, and under 5 feet, but he immediately begins angrily pointing at Ames going, "FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU" in his little man's voice. We all stare in sort of disbelief. How do we northerners deal with a Rio street kid? Does little Pixote here deserve a spanking or a hug?
Our gig in Lima has been cancelled, I learn today. Supposedly, the venue was closed, but who really knows? The promoter of a lot of these shows, Aquiles, has responded by offering us a second show in Buenos Aires, which is great if we can do 2 shows there, and it will help the bottom line as well.
|
In the morning, the nearby Andes peaks loom over the town, but by mid-afternoon, when we take our walk, the smog is already building up. The last time I was here the smog was so bad that these buildings would be obscured as well; this time you can still see them a little bit. 