I got an Amazon Kindle DX (the large-size one) before leaving on this last 6-week European tour leg. I thought that I could afford to be a guinea pig (it’s almost $500!) and try this way of reading. I loaded up a bunch of books ($10 for most, many just out) and some New Yorker magazines before I left, and as a result saved some space in my luggage, which usually gets filled with books I brought or purchased on the road. My luggage, as you can imagine, still got pretty full — mainly CDs and DVDs I was given — but a pile of books and magazines would have put it over the top. You can therefore “carry” more books than you might read, and if one is boring you can easily just dip into another.
Here’s my report.
The screen contrast approximates reading a newspaper — the background is off-white, rather than the ivory or white of most books. So it’s not super contrasty, but for me it’s OK — I didn’t feel eye strain. The device is heavier than a small paperback, but lighter than a hardback, so that part was no problem — and it’s MUCH thinner than any physical book, so it slips in a bag easily. The B&W screen isn’t so good with photos, though they’re often no worse than a B&W newspaper image. But, since most of what I was reading wasn’t photo- or chart-heavy, that was OK too. Reading The New Yorker, for example, was pretty great — no ads, you can skip around to various sections of the magazine, and the new issues download via a cellular network automatically.
There are a few websites that offer thousands of public domain books — Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Joyce and lots of wacky, forgotten, orphaned volumes as well. I got one by PT Barnum. So, if you wanted, you could have hundreds of books in this thing and not pay for any of them.
One of Amazon’s selling points is instant gratification. You want a book (at least in the US — there’s no coverage in Europe or elsewhere) and you can have it in about a minute — if there’s a Kindle version — and… you can shop only at Amazon (or through certain other Kindle content providers).
Here’s where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files — Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. — but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they’re converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can’t share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle. No doubt, as with MP3 and iTunes, book publishers would only agree to this system if people couldn’t share their purchases. As we know, Apple has relented on this, and has taken DRM off many of their music files. But which ones? How do you know? Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books — if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are fucked. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.
There are other e-book formats out there (EPub is being touted as a cross-platform format, but still, ugh, with DRM). I saw a guy at a bar reading a Kindle book on his iPhone, as the files are available for those and for the iPod Touch through an Amazon app, but it looked kinda tiny, and the backlit screen will drain a battery in a couple of hours of constant use. The slightly strange electronic ink system in the Kindle (and in the Sony Reader) has no backlight — so, like a book, you can’t read it in bed at night without a nightlight. This was an understandable tradeoff, as the battery life is unbelievable. With the wi-fi switched off (you only need it running to retrieve orders or magazine subscriptions), the thing stays charged for weeks.
Do I miss the “physical experience”? I will certainly miss being able to read books from my personal library, but if the title I want to read is all text it doesn’t make much difference to me. The smell will be a bit of nostalgia, as will fading and water damage. The Kindle only uses about two fonts at present, so some may miss type layout and design. But I suspect additional fonts will be added soon. On the e-book file I can still highlight sections to refer to later, and there’s a built-in dictionary! I forgot that! You put the cursor next to a word, and a little definition appears at the bottom of the page! Students will love that. I do.
I hear that the Apple tablet will use a format that is more cross-platform, but will that mean I can share a book with my friend? It’s surely a way we make friends sometimes: “I just finished this GREAT book, do you want to read it? I’ll pass you my copy.” As with music, sharing things is a way of getting to know one another and a form of reciprocal debt — if I “lend” you my book, you sort of owe me… a book, or something. We’re linked now, which is how we use these things that represent our inner selves — as social connectors. Take that ability away, the ability to exchange stuff that represents us, and I’ll bet some of the “value” of these kinds of e-books goes too… the social interconnectedness value, not the dollar value.
The Apple tablet looks to have illumination, which will drain battery life really quickly in book-reading time (many, many hours on a train, plane, bus, back porch, bed) — but sometimes the color, photo quality and ability to read in low light that Apple promises (and the touch screen!) might win out. We’ll see. I do think, based on my limited experience, that if some of these bugs and proprietary issues can be worked out in any of these reader things, then yes, the future of reading (and of selling books) will be very different, whether it’s this device or another one.
The bookselling and publishing worlds will be shaken with repercussions. Imagine the hundreds of pounds of textbooks a lot of college students are expected to lug around every year — and pay hundreds of dollars for as well. And the resulting medical bills. If those textbooks can be sold as weightless $10 downloads the students and their parents will cheer, and the chiropractors will cry. A LOT of publishers count textbook sales as their bread and butter, because the poor students HAVE to buy them — which is why they are so damn overpriced. If the income from those textbooks shrinks by 90%, they’ll be hurtin’.
Likewise, if, as Amazon hopes, all books will be priced around $10, then publishers who regularly charge $25 for a new hardback (cheaper than a textbook) will also be crying. Or going out of business unless they jump on the wagon.
The upside for publishers is that with digital files there is a much lower distribution cost. There is still the expense of setting up and maintaining the e-commerce situation — which is not nothing, but it is mainly front-loaded. The ever-recurring printing costs, trucks, warehouses or even, ulp, percentages to bookstores go away. (“Hello, Tower Records, meet Barnes and Noble.”) So the printing and distribution costs will be significantly less — though there are still the costs and skills involved in marketing. As things move in that direction, it seems obvious that writers will begin to realize that the percentages and royalties they normally give up for those services — well, why should they pay them? Kinda like the music biz.
Another parallel to the music biz is that writers will be able to self-publish and distribute. Who knows what they’ll live on, but there won’t be any printing costs or distribution percentages to subtract from book sales. Just like the musicians (like me) who sell downloads from their own websites, writers will sometimes bypass publishers. Would Tom Clancy or Steven King need their publishers to print and distribute their latest? Hardly. Their fans, like Radiohead’s or those of NIN, will just buy directly from the author’s website. Amazon has already launched a test platform called Digital Text, which enables anyone to upload their work, suggest a retail price, and pocket 35% of sales.
Lastly, and scariest for publishers I guess, is that inevitably someone will hack the Kindle (or other formats) — and the books will become shareable… and copiable and infinitely reproducible, just like MP3s. People laughed at the record companies, with their reputations as money squanderers and for their waste and extravagance — but music hasn’t suffered, and writing and magazines might not either, especially if both writers and publishers can learn from the record companies and not pretend that publishing is any different.
Did my second audiobook reading of the Bicycle Diaries NY chapter today. My first attempt, last week, was marred by maybe a combination of nerves and a wonky lower lip, as the braces had just gone in and were scraping the inside of my mouth. (I smashed a guitar into my bottom teeth about a week before the tour ended.) There’s less of that slurring and slushing going on now, and perhaps I am more confident and relaxed as well. It went pretty well, though I’m no David Sedaris or Ira Glass. The plan, still in the testing stage, is to add sounds and some subtle background music to the reading, to make it more like an NPR radio show than a typical book on tape (audiobook). We’ll see if it works. I recorded a bunch of bike sounds, traffic, trains, squeaky doors, sidewalk pedestrians and a lot more to add to the mix.
Another part of the plan, if it works, is to make each chapter available as a podcast-type download for 99¢. Like a song… only MUCH longer. That way, for only a dollar you could see if you like it — it’s not a big risk. The recording won’t be finished by the time the US version of the book comes out — as Penguin (the publisher) would have liked — but I think in the end that may be OK. As with record releases, trickling things out might keep the story alive a little longer.
I stayed an extra day to record another singer on the Here Lies Love project. It’s almost done — the double CD, that is.
The hotel I’m staying in gives out two newspapers in the mornings for free — The Daily Telegraph and The Irish Independent. I am reminded just how many newspapers there are in this relatively small country. It’s staggering how the population here can support so many papers, tabloids and broadsheets. Newsagents must lose their minds occasionally.
The Daily Telegraph London Evening Standard Yorkshire Evening Post The Birmingham Post Bristol Evening Post Hull Daily Mail Liverpool Daily Post Shropshire Star Stoke Sentinel The Times The Guardian News of the World Belfast Telegraph News Wales Daily Express Daily Mail Daily Mirror Daily Star The Sun The Independent The Irish Independent The Scotsman The Dundee Courier The Glasgow Herald Scotland Today
And more… !!!! Unbelievable!
How is this range possible in an age when most newspapers are watching their sales dwindle daily, and are desperate for some survival strategy?
My guess is that two factors allow this plurality to exist in the UK, at least for now. The country is proudly regional — the Welsh, the Scots and the Londoners all see themselves as very different, and not just in class (though that factors in too), but also in their specific local interests and sensibilities.
Then there is class. It’s never gone away here — don’t believe what they tell you — and the paper you read obviously says a lot about your class, personal interests, politics and aspirations. That’s true everywhere, but what’s different here is that there are more distinct class subdivisions — you can be identified by your job, accent, dress, football team and what paper you read. The subtle distinctions escape me — though the tacky scandals and topless girls of the Murdoch-owned Sun scream lower class, and the redesigned Guardian shouts middle class smartie.
Given the number of papers, you can imagine the competition is fierce for stories that will attract readers — so it comes as no surprise that News of the World reporters (another Murdoch paper) have tapped into the cell phone lines of celebrities and royals. They will indeed stop at nothing. In my opinion they’re also skilled at turning on the charm when they meet you, then making outrageous comments about your appearance and personal life when they turn in their copy. Everything needs to be embellished just a little more than what the competition might write.
There are also plenty of headlines about fat celebrities, cheating footballers, drug addled singers and poor sods who beat their kids to death (this week). A cat stuck in a tree would make headlines if it could be spun in some sexy way. Any story makes the rounds like a house on fire — which is why bands shoot to popularity so fast here and similarly disappear almost as fast.
Oddly, there is no daily or even weekly paper for the left wing bohemian class, like Libération in Paris, The Village Voice in NY, or other alternative weeklies elsewhere. Members of that demographic, who fancy themselves as being beyond class, have been suspiciously left out. Time Out, which originated in London, doesn’t really count, as it and others are more listings mags than news and reviews. Private Eye is unique here… a newsprint political humor weekly that requires a lot of knowledge of the players in order to get the jokes. Don’t know if anything like that could survive elsewhere.
Sufficiently caffeinated from the morning’s bus coffee, Mark and I hopped on bikes and rode downhill to the seaside hotel in Leith. Fed, showered and shaved I ride back into town, noting the interesting shop fronts along the way.
Later I meet up with Hungarian-American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth and his family at the Talbot Rice Gallery, where he has an installation. Right now the family is living in Roma, which must be interesting — a lovely city, but I imagine it’s a bit hard getting things done and running an efficient organization out of a southern Italian town.
His show consists of quotes from Nietzsche and doodles by Darwin, interspersed and rendered in white neon. One has to “read” the exhibition. It’s presented in a room that was one of the studies where Darwin worked; this one originally contained thousands of stuffed birds. The frilly Victorian details add a nice touch; the columns along the walls serve to break up the texts at irregular intervals, making reading a bit difficult. Cleverly, Joseph arranged that the text fits perfectly, making a circle around the entire room and its little balcony. The Nietzsche quotes form an argument that art and creativity are the highest forms of philosophy… the Darwin doodles look like proto-genealogical trees, as if his hand was unconsciously figuring out how evolution worked.
Next door is a show by Jane and Louise Wilson based around some stuff they found in Stanley Kubrick’s archives. Here is an image from the Kubrick archive site:
Apparently he’d planned to make a film about a Polish-Jewish woman who passed herself off as a Catholic in order to save her family. The film was never shot, but a lot of screen tests with a young actress, and much location scouting, were done.
The Wilsons’ video shows the now slightly older actress re-enacting some of the earlier screen tests and poses, with her voice-over added. In another room were some of Kubrick’s location shots, which, to me, were truly bizarre. Like anthropologists or archaeologists he photographed banal details (windows, doorways, corners of rooms and stairways), always with a striped yardstick in the picture, sometimes held by an assistant. (The inches were alternately painted black or white, so they could be easily counted in these 8 x 10 prints — much easier than trying to see the little gradations on a regular yardstick.) As with archaeological and dinosaur dig photos, these give an accurate sense of scale — critical when one is looking at a photo of a fossilized bone fragment or a piece of partly buried pottery, but a normal Polish room interior? It seems a bit obsessive — a clue to Kubrick’s working method — and maybe that’s the point of the Wilsons’ inclusion and interest in these.
I wonder how many unfinished projects Kubrick had on the go? Another one was A.I., the film about a robot boy looking for love, which was eventually directed by Spielberg. Apparently the original story and script was a Kubrick project, and completing it was Spielberg’s way of making homage.
I meet the Kosuths at the Café Royal, where Joseph claims Princess Anne used to meet her lovers. It’s a baroque pub and café tucked away in an alley behind busy Princes Street, so it does seem plausible — though the place is too crowded for secret assignations these days. I have local food: black pudding (blood sausage) followed by local oysters. The food is gastropub fare nowadays — the black pudding isn’t wallowing in grease as it might be in a more typical Scottish café. Here there are dainty little greens sprinkled around it.
I went for a walk in a sheep pasture this afternoon and wondered to myself why it is that friends and acquaintances ALWAYS, without fail, marvel at how we get around by bus, while journalists NEVER ask about such pragmatic or mundane matters. Maybe the journalists already know how such things work, maybe they think their readers don’t care, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s all somewhat the same for many touring groups, so there must be nothing special about us. Maybe our friends are interested because they are completely unaware of how musical acts get around, or they think we all travel by private jets — like their image of rock stars of yore, or bands like U2 and Rolling Stones today.
Anyway, here’s how it works:
The other day we played in Amsterdam. The day after we played in London. We don’t hang around. Economics of a tour of my scale mean that I have to play a certain number of shows a week (at least four, but often more) and of a certain size (and therefore income) to be able to pay everyone’s salaries, the bus rental, the gear rental, etc etc. Budgeting is worked out before the tour begins — I sit down with some folks and look at the numbers, which tell me more or less what level of show I can do that year: how many performers to hire, if I can carry my own lights and PA or not, how many busses we can afford… all of that is determined before the tour dates are booked.
In the past, live shows were viewed as loss leaders to sell albums, but I doubt that too many folks believe that anymore… though shows do make people a teeny bit aware of a new record. Record companies who espoused the loss leader approach used to advance money to up and coming acts to cover tour losses — but I don’t know anyone who does that now.
On this tour the shows tended to be in medium-sized theaters — around 2,000 seats on average (I think). Occasionally we’d play a place quite a bit smaller (see the “Thank You U2” entry), sometimes larger, or a big pop festival that would pay better than the theaters — thereby subsidizing shows in the Balkans, for example. We traveled with 3 busses this year — one for band (which includes me), one for singers and dancers, and one for crew. Note to friends and acquaintances: I do NOT have my own bus with a big round bed in the back.
The busses have bunks in them, so that’s where most of us sleep. (Some folks have issues sleeping on the bunks — more on that later.) The bunks have their own air vents and curtains, so there is a measure of privacy — and they’re surprisingly quiet. For someone who sleeps through NY traffic noises, a bus bunk is quiet. In the US the bunks have little fold-down DVD screens! — though I’ve never used those. Rule number one: always sleep with your FEET pointing forward — if there is a sudden stop or accident you don’t want your head to impact first.
We usually have drinks backstage or at a nearby bar after the shows, say hi to friends and fans, pack up our personal stuff, and within an hour or two the busses are rolling. Sometimes we watch DVDs before we go to our bunks — The Wire or The Mighty Boosh were big favorites on our bus. During tennis season Mauro and Keith would go to a separate lounge and watch games they’d recorded on a TiVo type hard drive. There is a refrigerator and microwave, a coffeemaker and a toilet (though only number 1 is allowed). There is electricity, and this year, wi-fi!... so sometimes the common area would turn into an internet lounge. Nothing wilder going on than the tapping of little keys.
In the beginning of this year-long tour, the singer/dancer bus was more of a party bus — they put on music and danced for at least an hour to burn off the adrenaline and excitement. That doesn’t happen as much any more, though everyone still enjoys the shows.
On average we’ll roll into the next town at some Godforsaken early hour — so sometimes at 5 or 6AM the singer/dancer bus will arrive at a hotel where an arrangement has been made for very early check-in. They rouse themselves and stumble into their rooms and attempt to get the rest of a full night’s sleep. More power to them. I think they’re nuts — but whatever works.
I prefer to stay in my bunk and get my 8 or 9 hours sleep — which means that if we arrive in the wee hours, the bus driver will park at the hotel or outside the theater, plug the bus into a power source, and turn off the motor. At around 9 I’ll wake up, make some coffee, do emails, read the paper online, heat up some leftovers, and most days ride a bike (which was folded up in the luggage compartment) to the hotel to shower and shave. Then I’ll explore the town some more, maybe have a nice lunch, or go to meetings if some have been arranged, and return to the theater by 4 or 5 for soundcheck.
Dinner is provided after soundcheck — we eat backstage. Because we jump around during the shows most of us can’t eat much prior to going onstage, and we certainly can’t eat right before the shows. So as shows are often around 8PM, we can’t meet friends for dinner, and as we leave town on the busses about 90 minutes after the last note rings out, we usually don’t go anywhere to eat afterwards either.
As you can see, in this scenario we don’t spend the night in a hotel bed — though if there is a day off, we do. The hotels are booked so that we usually have to check out by mid- to late afternoon, and we never return unless it’s a day off. It’s not as bad or weird as it sounds — you get used to the pattern and sequence. And the big advantage as far as I’m concerned is that by traveling by night, one has most of the day available in each town to explore. When you wake up you’re already there. If one flies (commercial flights) then one usually has to get up early, do the whole airport rigmarole, and then one doesn’t arrive at the hotel in the new town until maybe an hour before soundcheck. It’s MUCH more draining to fly that way than to do the bus thing.
Our US busses ran on biodiesel. Not sure if the European ones did. That meant we’d book refueling appointments based on estimated fuel consumption. Local fuel tankers would meet us at pre-arranged places and times, as most gas stations don’t stock the stuff… yet. Sometimes I’d walk out of a hotel and see the little biodiesel tanker arriving in the parking lot to mate with the busses.
Here is a tube station poster for this installation:
I spent the day talking to the British press and demonstrating the workings of the Playing the Building installation, which opened here tonight in a building called the Roundhouse, a former Victorian industrial train repair facility in north London (near Camden Town, and sort of near Kings Cross station). Because the building is round, steam engines could be rotated over troughs radiating from the centre, positioning them in the proper direction for repair.
In the ’60s it was the site of (UFO) psychedelic rock shows, some promoted by my friend Joe Boyd — Ten Years After, Pink Floyd, etc. It also hosted The Living Theatre and other scandalous naked performers. I played my first UK gig here — Talking Heads opened for the Ramones and the Stranglers in ’76. We had a single out at the time, no album yet. The place was pretty grotty, and here we had our first experience of gobbing — the quaint UK custom of audiences spitting on bands as a sign of appreciation. Yes, it’s for real, and it was disgusting. One could see, like little shooting stars in the stage lights, the white gobs of phlegm flying your way. I didn’t get hit that much, but the Ramones really got pelted. They REALLY didn’t like it. Luckily their leather jackets served to protect them and, in this case, went beyond just presenting a unified look. Beers in plastic cups were also thrown — one landed right on my hairline and tipped its half-consumed contents over my head. Funny how England, the country fairly well known in centuries past for fulfilling its self-proclaimed duty to export “civilization” to the unwashed and the heathen of the world, has a flip side on a par with any unsavory sport or bizarre cultural practice anywhere else. Well, we all do I suppose, but gobbing is a pretty weird way to show your love by any measure.
The venue fell into further disrepair, though being an industrial landmark it was never torn down, and its unique shape made it recognizable. Occasionally it was used for performances that took advantage of its funky rawness, but that also limited its use. A few years ago it went under extensive renovations, and a new structural shell was built that, miraculously, is almost invisible — the Victorian era scrollwork, and cast iron pillars and girders still appear to hold the building up, and are what my installation “plays” — and the new supporting structure is now largely hidden from view, sandwiched between the exterior roof and the massive, original wood beams of the inner roof.
Here is a view showing where new and old interact:
The new roof can support 20 tonnes of weight if needed, more than ample for flying PA systems, lights, stage gear and sets. None of that was possible before, so now this is poised to become a much more viable and active venue in town — though the round shape still makes it unique, and inappropriate for shows requiring a conventional proscenium.
The book I wrote over the last couple of years (though the notes for it date back as far as 15 years) came out in the UK this week. I decided that since I am finishing my tour here, the UK publisher (Faber and Faber) and I would auction off the bike that I rode around many of the cities featured in the book — Sydney, Istanbul, Berlin, Columbus, and London. The proceeds will benefit the London Cycling Campaign as the bike is located there — which means that the auction is really geared towards UK bidders.
After helping to oversee the installation of Playing the Building at the Roundhouse on Thursday, Danielle, my studio manager, and I needed to get to the Smithfield area of London for a dinner appointment. London traffic is notoriously snarled much of the time — though congestion pricing has alleviated that a bit — so we decided to take the tube (subway). Rain began to pelt down; we used bin liners (plastic trash bags) to cover ourselves. The nearby Chalk Farm tube station lobby and ticket area was filled with people, and a young man was writing on a whiteboard that no trains on the Northern line, northbound or southbound, were running. There was no suggestion of “20 min. delays” or “We’ll let you know when it’s fixed.” Instead the instructions were, in a word, “Go away.” Then, to add insult to injury, he hollered at everyone, “You need to clear this space because of fire regulations, you can’t stand here” — effectively shoving everyone out into the torrential rain. We saw a sign for a southbound train approaching the station and rushed down to the platform, but we missed it and that was the last one. We took the man’s advice and went looking for a southbound bus, which we found not too far off.
The windows were all fogged up, but using the GPS on our phones we could see where the bus was going, and when it began to diverge from the direction we needed to go, we hopped off and got on another one (at least London busses run frequently), then repeated the process. After riding three busses (and purchasing two umbrellas) we made it to the restaurant, slightly soaked but on time.
The show at the Barbican was being filmed in HD, so I went in early and helped adjust lights with our LD David Ambrosio and Will from Hillman Curtis’s crew so that the stage looked to the camera more or less the way it looks to the eye… at least on the songs that hadn’t previously been shot. Before that I went up to Camden Town to the Roundhouse, where the Playing the Building installation will open on Friday, to see how it was going. The building, now cleared of circus staging and other crap, and with its skylight open for the first time, is spectacular. Mark McNamara and Justin Downs were just getting some of the motors and pipes into position, so no sounds to be heard yet… but all seems to be well. Here’s a shot of work in progress:
The crate containing the actual organ was opened in shipping — probably by Homeland Security, who carelessly repacked it, as they do — and in the process the keyboard was almost destroyed (though it’s repairable). We hope none of the other mechanical or electronic bits inside were damaged, but will know soon enough. I feel more secure, don’t you? How, I wonder, is international shipping of goods, samples, art, products, etc. supposed to happen if this kind of behavior is tacitly encouraged by the US government? The Bush legacy lingers. Is there someone we’re supposed to pay, some service we’re supposed to use to guarantee more considerate handling? The inspection would be fine if they had put the bits back with some semblance of care.
[Alice Rawsthorn adds: "Your problems with Homeland Security reminded me of László Moholy-Nagy's misadventures when taking his enormous Light Space Modulator into the various countries where he and his family lived in the 1930s. Whenever it crossed a border, customs officials pounced and refused to believe that it was a work of art, until Moholy took to describing it as "hairdressing equipment" and it sailed through unscathed."]
I walked on the net, high above the Roundhouse floor, that rings the innermost catwalk… you can see it in the photo. The ring looks like it’s floating… very exciting.
I tubed it down to the Barbican Centre, where our show will be. The walkways, as one approaches this sixties brutalist monstrosity, provide views reminiscent of the scenes in A Clockwork Orange when Alex returns to his parents’ flat after a night of the old ultra-violence (minus the blowing trash).
Anyway, at the show Leo Abrahams sat in with us for two of the songs on which he played on the recent CD collaboration with Brian. He wore the mandatory white, and plugged straight into and out of his laptop, using some software effects — and it sounded great. No amp or other bits of gear! I lent him my spare Strat, so he didn’t even need to bring a guitar.
Jenni surprised us by bringing Julian Barratt (Howard Moon) from The Mighty Boosh backstage to say hello as we gathered in our snack room. We were all stunned and flattered. He came to see us even though he really, seriously does like jazz. Julian, Thom Yorke, Brian, and some others joined us after the show. I made the rounds saying hellos, then Cindy and I went back to the hotel. Thom was very excited to meet her — I guess from his art school days, she was (is) an icon of sorts. I was wearing a not so special white shirt and Thom immediately knew the designer — a friend of his. He must have spotted some subtle detail. I never would have pegged him for someone knowledgeable about fashion.
C and I pedaled over to a show of design art furniture at the V&A. There is some truly lovely and wacky stuff, but not enough of it to be a real survey of the currently hot genre. The whole categorization is questionable for some — as it’s limited edition furniture that is super expensive, and usually not that comfortable to sit on, placed into an art context. It’s functional but not really. The not really part makes it art — if one agrees that art doesn’t serve an (obvious) practical purpose. I’ve done a series of functional (you can sit in them) but uncomfortable chairs in a variety of materials that could be considered to fall into this genre, so I’m fascinated.
This one, by Sebastian Brajkovic, is made mostly of cast bronze — it must weigh quite a bit!
The show is called “Telling Tales”, as if there was some Grimms’ Fairy Tale theme running through the work — death and incest and dark mothers and fathers and forests… though to me that all seems like a stretch. Pretty much all the work, except for two pieces (one British — Julian Mayor — and one by Boym, the Russian-American designer), is Dutch. Leave those out and the show could have been called a survey of recent extreme Dutch furniture design — though there is a lot more going on there design-wise as well. The Eindhoven-based Droog Design crew, which spawned Hella Jongerius and quite a few others, don’t strictly make furniture — they are also pushing design boundaries.
A road sign in Hyde Park — there’ll always be an England.
The One Year Family
The tour is winding down and we’re all feeling a little weird. I suppose my dreams are all related to the imminent end of the tour. It’s amazing we all held it together this long — there were few meltdowns and only one crew person defected, and that was months ago. The shows have been successful, and the band doesn’t have any serious substance abusers or complete lunatics — which was fairly common for a pop music tour back in the day — so maybe all those factors helped to contribute to how well we held it together for an entire year.
Extended tours like this are like movie shoots — everyone bonds, like a little family. We often do things together, and we all sleep together (well, close by) on the buses. We know our family will only last a year, though there are sometimes splinter unions that last longer. Some of the crew will go on to work on other projects and tours; some of us musicians, singers and dancers will work on stuff together in the near future; friendships and even love bonds have formed — but none of those projects or relationships will include the whole one year family. This particular unit will break apart in about a week…
We’ll all keep in touch, I hope.
There was going to be one final farewell concert in NY— a free show in Times Square to inaugurate the permanent closing of Broadway there, and celebrating the greening of the zone, on August 17 — but the production needed funding from some donors. We would play for free (or at least I would), but the cost of the stage, toilets, trailers, PA, local crew, lights, etc. was considerable. Though we came very close to finding the money (Janette from the DOT was doing this part — I don’t know donors or sponsors) and doing the show (a free show in Times Square! Santogold was going to open!), at the last minute there just wasn’t enough to cover costs, so we had to admit defeat.
South America? Didn’t get there this year (except on holiday). I’ve played many cities there many times, but this time — maybe due to the financial crisis and its ripple effect down there — the offers simply weren’t enough to pay for band, crew and shipping. So, despite asking friends and others for advice and contacts, I had to let the idea go after a while.
So that’s it. A year of touring this show (there was a break over Xmas and New Years, and during the month of May) and we’ve been almost everywhere we can reasonably go — sometimes more than once. The show has been incredibly well received, the record has sold so-so (though because it was self-distributed in a fashion, there were profits early on) — and we all feel exhausted but very, very satisfied… like, um, after something else.
