I was invited to be on the jury of the Estoril Film Festival, which, like many others, has a number of sections — tributes to directors (David Cronenberg, Victor Erice — Spirit of the Beehive) and actors (Juliette Binoche), a smattering of crowd pleasers (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist) and an actual film competition. The force behind the festival, Paulo Branco, a Portugal-based art film producer, had his folks select competition films from the pile that often gets overlooked at the other big name festivals, where films by big name directors are often in competition. So, we got some small to medium (Moon) films that often deserved another look or more attention than they’d gotten, though a few had indeed won prizes previously. Unlike Cannes this festival is not a marketplace, but an award or series of awards might help a small film find distribution. As it gets slightly easier to make a film — with digital projection and computer editing — marketing and distribution are no easier or cheaper than before, though innovative strategies appear, as with the super cheap to make Paranormal Activity in the US, which Paramount released city by city before it blew up.
We’d usually see 2 movies a day, and after viewing the dozen selections, we 4 members of the jury haggled over a nice lunch.
Here are the winners and some others we all liked a lot.
Best Film: Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Wow — I loved this film, even if the video projected version wasn’t so great looking. It’s very formal and stylized, and it begins in a way that appears to be completely hilarious and absurdist (one juror said it just seemed random at that point) — but soon it turned dark and became very disturbing. I noticed online that some people absolutely hate it. There was one scene where I turned away.
Here’s a trailer. (Spoiler alert: some images in the trailer give away too much, in my opinion.)
This from Variety: “Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents' cruel whimsies -- think an eternal ‘Big Brother’ house as designed by Lars von Trier.”
We split the second prize, as we loved both films.
The Girl, a Swedish film by Fredrik Edfeldt.
This is a beautifully made and shot film about a young girl in a rural house who is left in the care of a young aunt while her parents go on a good works trip to Africa. Soon enough, the young aunt abandons the girl as well — and she has to fend for herself, which isn’t completely bad, as most of the adults seem like jerks.
Eastern Plays, a Bulgarian film by Kamen Kalev about a young, artistic though aimless man who drinks a bit too much beer (the actor was also a junkie in real life). He rescues a Turkish family (and their beautiful daughter) after they are attacked on the night streets of Sofia by some fascist skinheads — one of whom is our hero’s brother. Slow moving, but wonderful. Sadly the lead actor passed away before the last few scenes in Istanbul were to be shot. The film integrates news footage of soccer hooliganism, racist attacks and Eastern European street fighting with the characters and the story in a way that feels natural.
This hilarious French film by Alain Guiraudie is about love among French farmers and tractor salesmen. These middle aged and older guys all appear to be normal hicks, but they love to frolic together in the woods and elsewhere. It’s a farce, I guess — I laughed a lot. The lead is an overweight tractor salesman named Armand who rescues a young girl from a group of teen bullies — she, though only 16, then falls obsessively for him, and he decides to try going straight, and the two end up on the lam, with the young girl chasing big Armand in his skimpy briefs though field and forest. I could just imagine the director pitching this concept in Hollywood!
Les Beaux Gosses is a French film by Riad Sattouf about pimply teens and their attempts at scoring girls. Sounds like a typical American Pie scenario, but these kids are (to me) funnier and more realistic in their awkwardness and geeky looks. Much, much better and funnier than any recent Hollywood teen movie. I think this one could be the most popular of the films we saw — the audience, like me, was laughing a lot. If close-ups of awkward tongue kissing and pimples turn you off then avoid this one.
Lastly:
Le Famille Wolberg, a Belgian film by Axelle Ropert about a Jewish family — the husband is a mayor, the wife had an affair, and we watch the model family fall to pieces in a very subtle way. The film touches on a lot of hot topics in Belgium, so it’s not just about one family’s problems.
Slightly inland from the seaside town of Cascais, nestled on a low mountain that seems to generate its own cloud cover, is the retreat of former royals and wealthy citizens called Sintra. The mountain and its cloud cover must have made for a pleasant coolness in the hot Portuguese summers. C and I made a couple of day trips up there to visit some former palaces, residences and monasteries.
One of these is called Quinta de Regaleira, the former home of a baroness that was later bought by Carvalho Monteiro, a super wealthy Brazilian, at the turn of the century. After buying the house he then bought up the rest of the hill where the baroness’ home was situated. After a false start at commissioning a design for a place for himself, he decided to hire an opera set decorator to design both the house and its chapel, but also to effectively turn the whole mountaintop into a colossal set, with fake ponds, underwater labyrinths and a series of underground tunnels that functioned as a metaphorical voyage of initiation and self-discovery — a voyage inspired by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and alchemists as well. Disney take note — this guy was doing freaky cosmic theme parks before anyone else.
So I asked myself, as readers of Dan Brown’s books no doubt have, who were these Knights of Templar?
They came into existence after the crusades had gained a foothold in Jerusalem. The first crusade, or shall we call it invasion of the Middle East by western Europeans, was in 1099. Jerusalem was captured from the Arabs, and Europeans began to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in significant numbers to see and feel the aura of the place where their faith originated. While Jerusalem was, for these pilgrims, a kind of protected Green Zone, the approach to it was not. The route from the port of Jaffa (alongside present-day Tel Aviv) inland to Jerusalem was dangerous, and scores of pilgrims were slaughtered by what we might now call insurgents, or freedom fighters…or defenders of their homeland? The hapless pilgrims needed to call Blackwater or some other ruthless mercenaries for hire to protect them. So, one hundred years later a French knight proposed the creation of an order that would attempt to protect these pilgrims — the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, so called because they were given a headquarters by King Baldwin II: the Al Aqsa Mosque, which, significantly, had been built over the former Temple.
What was this Temple of Solomon, I ignorantly asked myself? According to Wikipedia it was, in its first incarnation, “the first temple of the ancient religion of the biblical Israelites, originally constructed by King Solomon… It was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant” — so we’re in Raiders of the Lost Ark territory now. Other powerful relics were rumored to be buried at this site, but all we know is that the Templars got hold of bits of what were referred to as pieces of the “True Cross.”
The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times…marking important events in Jewish history. Here is a (somewhat exaggerated?) visual depiction from a Freemasonry website — it brings to mind the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago. Freemasons sometimes claim that the architects and masons who built this massive thing were the original Freemasons — hence the association with the Knights.
Eventually the Romans took it over, and built their own temple there — and at present there is once again a mosque on the site, which includes the oft-disputed Dome of the Rock.
Beneath a section of the Dome of the Rock there is a cave known as the Well of Souls. All sorts of wild myths abound:
“Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad ascended heavenwards from the stone above the cave, a related tradition has grown up that states that the Last Judgment will happen at the Sakhrah, and that the souls of the dead gather in the well of souls to wait for that event, and to pray… [and lastly,] according to pre-Islamic folklore, the well of souls was a place where the voices of the dead could be heard along with the sounds of the Rivers of Paradise.” [Source]
That’s a lot of mythical weight to bear!
The Knights were quickly endorsed by the Catholic Church, and wore recognizable white mantles featuring a symmetrical red cross (this cross appears regularly at Monteiro’s theme park). They became an expert fighting unit — proto-Jedi Knights, spiritual warriors and protectors. About 100 years after their founding the Pope not only recognized them but gave them special privileges — one can imagine how noble their cause would have seemed to the European imagination. They were granted tax-free status, and were allowed passage anywhere they wanted to go — borders were no longer of any import to the Knights. Being a kind of military and financial institution (see below), this papal bull was immensely helpful.
Though as individuals they were legendarily poor and relied on donations to continue their work, their order quickly amassed massive assets and devised innovative financial techniques. For instance: a pilgrim or entourage might want to visit the Holy Land but not leave their valuables unattended back home. So, they would place them in the hands of the regional Templars in their hometown, and in turn they were issued a paper certificate, which they could redeem for money in Jerusalem. The first form of checking, and banking of a sort, was born. Already the plot thickens — you can imagine the kinds of assets the organization accumulated. The whole island of Cyprus belonged to the Templars at one point!
Their power increased and they became an established institution (partly financial) in Europe and elsewhere in the following centuries. But not everyone was happy about this. King Philip of France ended up owing them a lot of money and he wondered how he could get out of his debts. He pressured Pope Clement V to go after the Templars. At first the Pope was timid in his attack on the Jedi — but King Philip must have had some leverage, because after a bit the Pope summoned the Templars to him and arrested and tortured them all, accusing them of heresy, homosexuality and weird initiations. Some signed confessions under torture (which they later recanted) and most of the powerful Templars were burned at the stake.
One cried out to the King and Pope as the flames consumed him that he would see them later; both of them died within the year…but not before the church and king had usurped the accumulated lands and property of the order.
By around 1300 the Templar Order was effectively gone, but as an inspiration they lived on.
Reader Luís Bonifácio adds: "The Order was disbanded in all countries of Europe with the exception of Portugal, where King Deniz, when notified by the Pope to disband the Templars, proposed to confiscate all their belongings, and to form a new Knight Order called the 'Order of Christ.' The Pope accepted, and all the knights, churches, monasteries and territories of the Knights Templar were transformed into the 'Order of Christ,' which was simply the Knights Templar by another name, commanded by a member of the Royal Family. Their symbol continued to be the red cross, with a different design, which you can still see in the sails of the NRP Sagres (sister ship of the USS Eagle). A century later, the Knights of this Order, led by the Grand-Master Prince Henry the Navigator, started the Portuguese Discoveries, an expansion towards Africa, America, India, China and Japan. The Order remained in the lead of the Expansion until Portugal's annexation by Spain in 1580. After 1580, the Order was disbanded, and today remains one of the most important honorific orders of medals in Portugal. In the XVI century, the role of the Order of Christ in Portuguese history was taken by the 'Company of Jesus' (the Jesuits), until the early XX century."
Both Knights Templar and Freemasonry were essentially secret societies — though very different from one another — which led to lots of speculation and rumor. They both also had a vaguely spiritual bent — an idea that initiates might be given special knowledge that was passed down, and strange rituals that both bound the members together and were metaphors for personal discovery. [Source]
Various spinoffs of the Masons in the US in the earlier part of the last century made the initiation and other ceremonies into lovely little quasi-theatrical events. Here is a “set” and backdrop from one such ritual that was for sale via the Webb Gallery in Texas:
One could argue that here was a whole genre of theater that existed out of public view.
So, back to Monteiro’s theme park mountain. The house is pretty great — with Arabic-themed rooms, and a hunting-themed room with mosaics of beasts to be killed and a huge tusked boar bust in marble looming out from the wall — but it is the gardens that folks come to see. Visitors head up the hill, along winding paths, past follies and fountains, through a forest of exotic plants imported from Brazil until one reaches a pile of moss covered stones.
We were told that in the past a hidden staircase led to the top of the pile, but as that route led nowhere, one was sometimes led through a crevasse to a hidden stone door with no handle. And the door was way too heavy to move by hand. How to get inside? Our guide showed us a hole in a crack near the rock door, in which was concealed a lever that released a counterweight, allowing the door to swing open — like a fairytale or an episode out of Arabian Nights come to life! Through the door was what is referred to as the initiates’ well…though it was never used as a well.
In Monteiro’s conception this allowed one to metaphorically descend into the underworld — a realm of self-testing, self-discovery and rebirth. At the bottom of the stairs was the entrance to a couple of tunnels. Our guide escorted us into one of them, saying the other led to a dead end. We pulled out our little flashlights.
Monteiro had a whole maze of tunnels constructed under his mountain — some led to grottoes, with no way out, and one led to another well that had no winding staircase to bring one up and out. To really leave the tunnel complex, and symbolically escape from the underworld (the subconscious?), one had to take a tunnel with no light at the end — to head into darkness. Eventually one emerged in the back of a little (man-made) grotto, and had to exit using stepping stones — stepping in a proscribed manner, right foot first.
Fun, eh! None of it is natural, but with the algae and mossy growth it all seems quite believable.
There is a chapel with a Knights Templar cross on the floor and a Masonic eye in a triangle on the ceiling. A mosaic shows a saint on a seashore preaching to fishes — the fish are leaping out of the water with their mouths open in rapt attention. Inside the main house there is a library that must have been constructed as a kind of contemporary art installation. The walls were filled with books on all sides, and around the perimeter of the floor was a mirror that appeared to extend the bookshelves down below the floor we were standing on. The carpeted ground in the center of the room seemed to therefore “float” — it was a creepy, unnerving sensation. I believe the lowest shelf you can see is actually a reflection:
Nearby Quinta Regaleiro is the remains of a small monastery formerly belonging to the convent of the Capuchos order. Like the magic mountain, it too was somewhat peculiar. There was no sign of a large building that might harbor loads of monks — just a small, rough cobblestoned area with two crosses on top of vaguely triangular stones. C looked behind one of the crosses, and sure enough there were steps that led to a crevasse between two huge boulders. In the crevasse was a door.
The monastery itself was not huge, and was tucked into the natural boulders and vegetation — we were told that these monks sought a kind of enlightenment in harmonizing with nature. Inside, the rooms were often lined with cork bark, as those trees were growing everywhere around. The bark walls, and bark covered doors and window blinds, made the tiny rooms appear even more primitive — as if some other kind of civilization lived here. The rooms for the individual monks, their cells, were so tiny and the doors leading to them so low and small, it seemed the monks were a species of Hobbit.
C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.
We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.
I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.
I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.
Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.
Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.
I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.
A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.
I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.
In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.
In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.
In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?
I did a week of events (NY, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and LA) around the theme of Cities and Bikes and how we get around. I began each one with a broad introduction that I hoped would set the scene — a background on how our cities became so car-centric, and some alternatives in various places around the world. There were some funny slides too.
As I mentioned earlier, at these events I was followed by a city representative, a representative of a local advocacy group, and an urban theorist. Different folks in each town. Q&A at the end.
The turnout was great — the theaters for the most part were lovely and averaged around 700 seats. It really does seem like this was a little catalyst for an issue that has reached a point of acceptance.
The “theorist” in San Francisco, Michael Teitz from UC Berkeley, proposed a lovely and surreal thought experiment in which the car had never been invented. An alternate present, with, for example, tunnels being a priority in many cities, as they make it easier for cyclists to avoid hills. In Los Angeles the man in this theorist role, Don Shoup, is a sort of famous specialist in parking. Such a thing may be laughable to some like me who don’t own a car, but in LA and elsewhere it is a serious issue with many ramifications. He pointed some out — if the price of a street meter (or a free spot) is lower than the nearby lot, then folks tend to circle the block in search of these bargains, to the point where the streets become clogged with naïve and hopeful drivers who spend a crazy amount of time looking for a spot. We’ve all done it, I know I have. I have also done concerts in “new” areas of LA (like downtown) and gotten complaints from folks who didn’t know if or where they could find parking close by. I think attendance suffered at those gigs because folks were worried about it.
The events in some towns, like Portland, well known for being bicycle- and public transportation-friendly cities (despite the frequent rain), were almost like little rallies; whereas LA, like Austin in a way, is so spread out that it has more obstacles to overcome.
I spent the morning walking around LA’s lively downtown district. One whole store sold nothing but glass pipes (for smoking) and another sold nothing but super realistic BB guns, and accurate reproductions of Glocks and Uzis.
An old cafeteria has a waterfall inside with a mechanical bear that emerged from a hole!
I suggested to the city rep that one might try adding bike lanes, etc. in specific neighborhoods, little by little, and not try to instigate a whole citywide program. Downtown, Santa Monica and Venice would be obvious candidates. Her response seemed to imply that the state of LA politics and bureaucracy makes that impossible — if one hood gets something, they all want it. Of course, if the mayor or other higher-ups were more sympathetic, as they are in Portland (or even Mikey B in NY), that entrenched bureaucracy might open up here and there. A poke from the top can indeed unclog a logjam.
Naturally there were some questions from the audiences about the messenger who nearly ran me over and, from the other side, why can’t I have a bike lane on my street? The question raised by the first issue is: can our behavior change? One is always skeptical if that can ever happen; one doesn’t naturally think that North Americans can be like the Dutch or the Danes. I think it was at the NY event where I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy in response to this question: who would have believed that those independent-minded New Yorkers, with all their attitude, would stoop to picking up doggie shit in little baggies and carrying it steaming in their hands to the nearest trash can? No one. But they do. Pretty much all of them. So, people can change some old habits — it happens.
Reading the morning paper here in Seattle, I was struck by the mood of what appeared to me to be propaganda. I didn’t begin ranting, foaming at the mouth or spraying my yogurt across the hotel dining room.
At It Again
A front-page photo/graphic in today’s NY Times shows what is rumored to be an Iranian nuclear facility of some sort. Maybe it’s just the graphic style of these things, but it looks exactly like the various photo-graphics we were inundated with before the invasion of Iraq. Pictures of buildings where WMDs were being stored, hidden or manufactured…all of which were proven to be merely rumors spread to lead and lure us into the morass we are in now. Folks fell for it then, and given everyone’s short memories they might go for it a second time.
Now I’m not saying this is definitely NOT a nuclear facility — only pointing out that the manner of presentation of alleged facts is the same.
Perspective
On the same front page we are told that socialism is collapsing in Europe because a number of countries have elected center-right politicians. I beg to differ. As the article says, the center-right accepts as a given “generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, [and] sharp restrictions on carbon emissions.” Those three ideas would place them on the left in the USA, though the writer says, maybe correctly, that in Europe the left traditionally goes further. That those givens are still not generally accepted in the US, and are currently the yelling, screaming indications that politicians are “socialist” (and therefore un-American), puts this supposed “collapse” in perspective.
Resurgence
Another front-page article brings the good news that the economy is rebounding and getting bullish again. While in some ways that might not be surprising (no serious regulation has been put into place to prevent a recurrence of the meltdown, or to restrain the hubris and greed of the bankers), it seems sort of like good news just for the sake of good news — feel-good stuff. The economy has been out of whack for so long that to cheer its “return” and resurgence to what is essentially a misguided and broken system is maybe not the best idea right now. That much of the country is living unsustainably means that while Goldman Sachs and some others might be raking it in — profiting from the downturn, some have claimed — that isn’t the real world.
I’m on a one week tour — a series of events focusing on bikes and cities timed to coincide with the release of my Bicycle Diaries book. I told the publisher I didn’t think I’d be very good as a reader — which is the usual way authors are trotted out to promote their books — so I suggested instead we do a series of forums focusing on our cities and how bikes have become a symptom of a new interest in urban living in North America. (This has a little bit of the added effect of hinting that the book is not just about riding a bike.) The publicity department of Viking, the publisher, generously helped put these events together. Sometimes they are held in bookstores, as those are the venues the publisher knows; and sometimes, like last night in Austin, in small theaters.
At each event there will be a representative of the local city government; an advocate; a theorist/designer/planner or historian; …and me. We each do short (10-15 min.) presentations about our area of expertise and then there is some Q&A and then we’re done. So far, I’ve been to NYC and Austin and Seattle and it’s working pretty well. By bringing these elements and people together the events serve as a catalyst, a reminder and a symbol that perception and policies are changing — about bikes as a way of getting around and about how our lives in cities can be. The interest and turnout might be as much for the content as what’s on stage.
The morning after I arrived here I rode around Austin and discovered that a surprising amount of the downtown area has been given over to parking.
There are parking lots everywhere and, maybe because of the oppressive heat in the Texas summers, lots of indoor parking structures as well. Some of these take up a whole block and some only take up the ground floor of a downtown building. Either way, they kill any potential for life, business, interchange and encounters on those blocks. It seems that not only did the city accommodate cars with some massive freeways that are often jammed up, but they have given some of their best downtown real estate simply to house automobiles. I was reminded that the vibrant “people” streets (South Congress and 6th St.), no matter if you love or hate those scenes, would never exist if there were massive parking structures on every block there. The vacant lots on S. Congress are now filled with tent kiosks and tiny Airstreams and other trailers that serve as specialized food carts (like the ones in Portland). I got a mushroom tamale and berry smoothie at one, and they were great.
Austinites were surprised when their city bike lane and trail rep Annick Beaudet revealed how many of the city’s residents commute by bike already, and how much new infrastructure is going to be added in the coming years. If they can conceive of replacing some of those parking lots and structures with mixtures of cool housing, office and retail they would inevitably lure more folks into the central district, where cars are not absolutely essential for every activity. Where will all those new workers, consumers and residents park then? — well, some will find it more practical to use public transportation and some will…ummm…ride bikes. The policy of infinite accommodation to the car needs to stop and be reversed if our cities are to survive as more than clumps of offices and parking garages.
After the Austin event I rode to the Continental Club (the hotel has loaner bikes) to see the guys in Heybale do their usual Sunday evening set. The band, partly made up of veterans from the bands of artists like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash, play their repertoire of mostly classic country songs (Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, Webb Pierce) and a few originals with consummate skill. The guitar player Redd Volkaert and the pedal steel player in particular are amazing musicians — their frequent and concise solos are both surprising and inventive, and technically mind-boggling. More than once I’ve seen young musicians standing close to the stage with their jaws hanging open as these guys whip off another effortless solo. I was reminded of the days when Clapton was heralded as a guitar godhead — well, these guys are in that class, though the tunes are a little different. At least three of the band members sing, and pretty well, too.
I happen to love those songs, though I realize they’re not to everyone’s taste. What’s just as wonderful as the band is the audience they’ve amassed over years playing this Sunday night residency — all ages: 20-somethings and folks my age and older, many of whom have come to dance the two-step or the waltz, depending on the song — and they fill the floor as soon as the band starts. I’ve seen 20-year-old girls in dancing dresses and grandmas in the same outfits. Last night one of the very best dancers in the joint was a young man who didn’t look like your typical country music fan — he could have been Mexican, Indonesian or Syrian. All the girls were happy to dance with him.
Living the Dream
The next morning, as I changed planes at Dallas Ft. Worth, I saw a guy talking on a cell phone outside a fast food place on one of the endless concourses. He was in full cowboy costume and it was, to me, so extreme and clichéd that he could have been a member of the Village People. I don’t think he would have appreciated hearing that. He had the full gear — a checkered Western shirt, old Tom Mix-style hat, jeans, boots, a belt with a giant buckle, and a handlebar moustache. Halloween ain’t for a few more weeks!
I guess you can get away with that here in Texas, though this guy was pretty out there. There isn’t much call for ropin’ and herdin’ around DFW, unless it’s rodeo season, but even then the rodeo guys I’ve met don’t dress like this. This guy, it seems to me, is role playing. If he’s not that guy he’s going to at least look like that guy. If he were to walk into a NY office in that getup, folks would point him to the casting call across the way. But Texas is, sometimes, big and crazy enough that one can take the risk and reinvent oneself and folks go along with it.
I went to a show-and-tell demonstration of the BIXI bike share system that will be coming to NYC in the not too distant future. It will be a pilot program, subject to tweaks and adjustments, and will begin in a few logical neighborhoods — the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, the Village etc. It is a system that has already been installed in Montreal, so it’s been road tested. I used it to bike around there the day before Halloween [link to Journal]. As long as one avoids the Royal Mountain it’s a perfectly acceptable city to bike in, though in the middle of winter I think it might be inhumanly freezing. In summer the city is funky and beautiful.
Here’s what the BIXI system looks like and how it works. As in Paris, Barcelona, Lyon and of course Montreal, there are racks of these special bikes (made specifically to fit the racks, with a limited but adequate number of gears and a holder for bags and groceries) spaced around the neighborhoods.
The idea is that you use the bikes for grocery shopping, going out at night, running errands and going to meetings — trips that are usually under a ½ hour. They’re not for day trips to Nyack. You swipe your credit card and you are charged $5 for 24 hours of use. (Or you can subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan, which includes a BIXI key.) After swiping, the machine spits out a ticket with your code to release a bike. You punch in that number at any dock with an available bike, and it releases. I presume that if you don’t return your bike within a 24-hour period the system will assume that you’ve stolen it — and you will be charged accordingly. If you take a long ride there’s an additional fee, but you can take as many short trips in the 24-hour period as you want with no surcharge. One trip and you’ve saved a cab fare; a few trips and you’ve saved the equivalent MetroCard fares.
Yesterday, for example, I biked from my home in midtown to my office in Soho; then, after some meetings there, I picked up some groceries and took them home. Later I went to Joe’s Pub to see Emanuel and the Fear and then up to Terminal 5 to catch Battles. Then home. All of these trips were, I’m pretty sure, under a ½ hour. I have room in my loft for my bike(s) so I normally use my own — but many New Yorkers, and certainly visitors, either don’t have bikes or don’t have room for them in their NY-size apartments. (There is a movement to outfit all new apartments and offices with built-in bike storage space, but that hasn’t happened yet.)
If the stations are as tightly interspersed throughout the city as they are in Paris, one is never more than a couple of blocks from a place to pick up or deposit the bike, so you’d never have to lock it to a No Parking sign or to one of my bike racks. These share bikes do not come with locks — they’re meant to go from station to station, so theoretically there should be no reason to carry your own lock.
How is the bike itself?
They’re fine for what they are. There are chain guards so you don’t get grease all over your nice white pants or dress, and the gear switching mechanism is inside the axle, so no grease there either. In other words, you can wear normal working clothes to ride these, as you would wear the rest of your day. You don’t HAVE to dress like a messenger unless you want to. There are fenders as well, so if there is some wet area or a puddle you won’t get a gray/brown streak of NY street water up your back. The bike I tried seemed sturdy, which made for something a bit heavier than what I would personally choose. The front wheel has a limited turning ability, so no tricks or super sharp turns are possible.
In Montreal and other cities the adoption of these kinds of systems has been rapid — even Parisians take to them. It has relieved a lot of congestion and has probably lowered the carbon footprint of those places as well. I have heard that people have begun to change their habits based on the convenience and availability of these and similar bike systems. Folks don’t have to plan their evenings, for example, based on where or how they can get a taxi or last train home. They also have begun to re-form their mental maps — now free from concerns about heavily trafficked routes, congestion or nearness of subway lines. They have begun to experience their cities in different ways — ways that are more self-organized, improvised and accommodating to change.
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.
