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« February 2006 |
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| April 2006 »
The very first performance of HLL. It was billed as a preview, so no press allowed yet. It went pretty well, from my point of view — seemed like a full house, some folks dancing in the audience; we played well (after only the 2nd full run through!) and the arc of the story was, I think, apparent. As a band member I felt elated and relieved — we got through it with no big hitches and there was a fair amount of groove and feeling being thrown off the stage — and I’m sure the video elements helped a lot, too. Whew whew. A helluva lot to accomplish. Brett, the festival director, said it was courageous, which was a lovely compliment. It will improve in leaps and bounds, I suspect, now that we’ve got the first one under our belts. The band, many of whom must be fairly jet-lagged, did incredibly well — no obvious tiredness or grumpiness.
Onward and upward.
One of my favorite pieces in the Whitney Biennial:
Long tech rehearsal today. Band is amazing, as most of them have just gotten off the 20+ hour flight — they check in to the hotel and then are rushed over here to the venue. They all work hard and no one complains about being tired, not once.
It’s like doing a first gig ever — so many new songs and so much to remember — lyrics, marks, lighting, guitar chords and settings — I’m scared and overwhelmed. Kind of nice, though, thrilling even, being less than sure and confident about it all. Jumping in the deep end without too much of a safety net. But scary as hell.
Aussie cuisine:
Pie Floater — a meat pie “floating” in sea of mushy pea soup, with a squirt of tomato sauce on top. To be eaten when drunk.
Flavored milks. Saw a large strawberry milk at the venue lunch counter. Milk here comes in a variety of flavors, such as apple, banana, caramel, chocolate, cookies 'n cream, lime, malt, mango, papaya, strawberry, tropical fruits and vanilla, with a few more exotic flavors available.
 NZ features many more flavors — spearmint and…peanut butter flavored milk!
Woolworth’s in Whangarei (NZ) decided they could get around some selling restrictions by also selling "Milk Flavoured Milk". Milk flavored milk!
South Australia has the highest consumption of flavoured milk per person, where Farmers Union Iced Coffee outsells Coca-Cola.
I remember from a previous visit the shockingly unusual crisp (potato chip) flavors. Ham and mustard. Big red and meat pie. Feta and herb, Thai chili.
To be fair, almost every restaurant meal I’ve had here has been extraordinarily delicious. It would be nice to think that the cooking is simply all top notch, which in many cases it is, but I think other things might be involved. I’m going to suggest that due to the relative sparseness of the population here, and the fertility and abundance of the local fields and seas, there is an unusual availability of fresh produce, meats and seafood. I suggest that it is this freshness of all of these that makes the foods so much better — and that we, especially in NYC, are just not used to super fresh foods. The taste is definitely better.
I had some calamari that were lovely and an octopus over greens that was much much better than the mangy little tentacles served up in top restaurants in NY. This was like a steak but with big suckers on the side!
The band’s flight from NYC was cancelled. Graham texted me as did Ganda. No reason is given or replacement plane offered. They have managed to catch the same flight the next day. They will therefore have no day to recover from jet lag, and will be ushered into rehearsal almost immediately upon arrival.
Marianne’s flight from NZ was cancelled, too.
Rode my bike to the beach by following a bike path along the Torrens River that runs through Adelaide. I was told it’s a 10km trip following this winding route, which took about 45 minutes each way. It’s shorter if one takes the road, but this is more peaceful. The path winds through eucalyptus groves (gum trees they are called here) and there are magpies and pelicans hanging out.
The trees eventually begin to disappear and the river empties into the sea. This was a Sunday, it was hot, but there were only 6 people on this part of the beach.
A bit further north in the town of Charles Sturt there were cafes and restaurants overlooking the beach. I had a beer, some calamari and assorted dips, then headed back to practice guitar and went to the venue for yet another tech check (the Australians are careful, so I’m told.)
The sold-out PowerPoint talk goes well. Some of the slides (Hamlet as a PowerPoint-style slide turning the famous monologue into a list of pros and cons — to be, or not to be — etc.) get big laughs, no credit to me — I just found them online. The talk has a little arc to it now — it starts off with some jokes, then gets serious for a bit, then winds up with the PowerPoint sent to me from the space station, which is also amusing. It’s becoming an example of my proposal that presentations are a form of theater.
Some of the crew has arrived in town today and in spite of their jet lag they’re up for the festival’s party in a hotel walking distance from this venue. An attractive woman with bangs that cover the top half of her face delivers some “gossip rap” about celebs and their diet problems — accompanied by slides of Oprah and Brittney. I discover a bucket of oysters on a table (a bucket!) and not having had dinner I park myself there and suck down a few.
Reading The Selfish Gene, the Richard Dawkins book about how things that often appear to have a “purpose” in fact are merely arriving at an evolutionarily stable strategy. It’s a relatively early classic in this field and he has added loads of footnotes apologizing for mistakes in the first edition and his past overprosyletizing.
Some amusing bits:
• The Virgin Mary was never a virgin in the original Hebrew version — she was simply a young woman. It was the much later (mis)translation by Matthew into Greek that changed the word and hence “improved” the story. In English it would be sort of as if young woman became maiden, which someone then assumed meant virgin. I would suspect that this change in a word made the myth, the legend, more amazing, cosmic and profound. The story got embellished in retelling, as stories do. Hollywood would say it have been given a “polish”.
• Not only does the female mantis often eat her husband after he’s mated with her, she sometimes bites his head off ahead of time. It seems he performs better without a head. Ladies, take note. Talk about thinking with your dick!
Dawkins now is hosting a TV series in the UK that “proves” most religions are bunk. You’d never see a show like that in the U.S.
A cluster of Aborigines sits on the grass in a tiny city park. A few meters away the traffic roars through the main street of Adelaide and pedestrians pass by. The little clump of people are like living ghosts, a reminder of the deep history of this land that is now currently occupied by people of European descent. These people are, if not the land’s custodians, at least its children, birthed and formed by this land — they embody it, they do not manipulate it. (Maybe this is a romantic view.) The fact that they have chosen to congregate in a little patch of lawn, right in the middle of town, visible but ignored, is somehow portentous, meaningful. It’s a sign, a reminder, and a living billboard that says that all the buildings and hustle and bustle surrounding them and us who pass by is superficial. That there is a deep and slow biological and geological history that this new colonial world seeks to cover over and obliterate from memory.
But it never will be obliterated completely.
Australia is full of unpleasant reminders.
Poisonous snakes, frogs, spiky plants, poisonous spiders, rip currents. They’re always there to remind you, to assure you that you’re just a guest.
Did a tech check at the PowerPoint talk venue, Elder Hall.
Score card. On the negative side, his company is predatory, anti-competitive and monopolistic. Microsoft’s products are not the best you can get, but by God they will force you to use them anyway. They have driven other companies, both large and small, out of business, even if those other companies made better products. (So much for the market as a force for separating the wheat from the chaff.)
On the plus side he is now, with his wife, a significant philanthropist, mainly focusing on the elimination of rampant diseases like Malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS in Africa. Surely, this is a good thing.
So, does one cancel out the other? Does he become a saint now that he’s a philanthropist? Does the good wipe out the bad? If one does what is generally accepted as a bad thing (and Microsoft continues to defy legislation and decisions in Europe to limit its monopolistic grasp, so they are not exactly repentant or reformed) and then also does what is perceived as a good thing — helping the poor, supporting institutions of learning, building hospitals — is one forgiven? Should one be forgiven? Is there any connection at all, or should each deed be viewed solely on its own merits?
Are alms from Mr. Burns (Homer Simpson’s boss) tainted? Or does it not matter where money for good causes comes from? One does not fault the sun for sometimes burning people or causing devastating heat waves. One takes the good, the warmth and energy of the sun, and hopes the bad doesn’t happen too often. One assumes the source doesn’t matter, especially if the giving is truly without strings — if it is not tied to a massive publicity campaign or a product the way cigarette and booze companies support the arts and therefore receive “placement” and “presence” in spots where ads are no longer allowed. Does that taint their arts support? Does the purity of the giving depend on the relative size of the company’s logo in the program and posters? If the logo is too big or occurs too often is the gift suspect? A small mention of who the art supporters are in a program might not seem poisonous, intrusive, like advertising, but logos plastered on all available surfaces surely are ads in disguise, and may even be a cheaper way of putting the company’s name in front of a desired target demographic than paid ads.
And vice versa, can bad deeds sour what was previously a good thing or a person? Does the good that the U.S. stands for (freedom of speech, opportunity, relative equality) become irrelevant in the wake of much recent bad behavior? To much of the world it does. Much of the world has, for decades, despite extensive evidence to the contrary, looked to the U.S. as an example. An imperfect but good-intentioned exemplar of those noble values. An example of the reachable good life and possibilities. Now, with the behavior of the Bush regime continuing unabated, the world has revised its opinion. Those values now seem merely a smokescreen, hype, and bullshit hiding less noble intentions. Now it is as if those noble values might never have been part of the U.S. program at all.
In fact, it’s possible that now those very noble ideals have been tainted, and have become suspect.
But what I really suspect is that there is no score card and that the seeming effort to balance bad deeds by good ones is pure spin. They exist independently and without any connection to one another, and good and evil are imaginary concepts and what really exists is a scale of morality based on something else, something not based on our intellectual constructs.
Carnegie Hall invited me to curate one of their “perspectives” series some months ago, and at a meeting yesterday it was decided it is a go. It will happen a year from now, more or less, and will consist of at least 4 concerts by myself and folks of my choosing — 2 in the big hall and 2 (or more) in Zankel, the less reverberant smaller room downstairs. Caetano did it previously, as did Emmylou Harris and Youssou N’Dour.
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