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Waking up and emerging into the dark lobby and hallways of the W hotel where I am staying is like suddenly being tossed into an (upscale) whorehouse. At night the entrance and lobby is dark and moody and filled with scantily-clad women in various states of inebriation. They wobble on their heels and hike up their bustiers as the guys around them attempt to act cool. The staff, all dressed in black, affect an air of efficiency as they move through the crowds — talking on their earpieces and walkie-talkie phones. Addressing drunks in tones of utmost respect. Well, you never know who they might be, I guess.
A couple of nights ago I did my presentation at the nearby Hammer Museum. No relation to MC Hammer, or even to Arm and Hammer baking soda. Related to Occidental Oil. There's a wonderful show of local sculpture up at the moment... along with a video installation by Hiraki Sawa, whose work I'd seen and enjoyed previously in NY. (In the video his little apartment becomes filled with tiny planes flying around, like the airspace over a large metropolitan airport:)
The main show, curated by their Scottish curator, is called Thing, which is appropriate, as the stuff sometimes elicits a "what the hell IS that?" reaction. A full-sized car made of unfired clay, crumbling and decaying in one room, a sloth sits on a metal table which in turn squeezes one of those big bouncy balls that kids play with, a sisal doormat on the floor includes a sisal dog sleeping on it.
The show and book signing go fine. Afterwards I walk (in L.A.!) to a nearby restaurant on the way to my hotel to have a drink and a snack. A businessman at the bar was at my presentation and he says hello. He deals in California abstract art from the 20th century. He reels off a list of artists and I've never head of any of them. Soon he's joined by his date, a young yoga instructor, and he proceeds to impart tidbits of random wisdom to her. It's obviously their first meeting, and I can't help but overhear everything they're saying.
I drive the next afternoon to meet Pat Dillett who is working on a Mary Blige CD. He's been here for months. She likes the way he records her voice, while other producers "create" the tracks, delivering pre programmed beats and sequences that she writes over. All hip hop royalty are involved. Producers like Dr. Dre and Swizz Beats are involved, along with other hip hop and R&B royalty. Some of these guys are getting as much as 100K per track (are their beats really THAT good, to be worth that much money for some BEATS? Well, maybe they are, they certainly jump right out of the radio.) Jay Z stops by. The list goes on. Pat says the record budget MUST be around 2 million. No surprise. But as they'll make that back in sales (presumably) it's a safe investment. On a vastly different scale from what I do. Am I jealous? Maybe. Maybe not.
We meet for lunch at the Farmers' Market, one of the few places in L.A. with some history and genuine atmosphere — or so I remember. Now it's been engulfed by a huge shopping and movie complex called The Grove, which is truly amazing. It's like a Disney version of a street of shops in a small town, but all the shops are chains and franchises. The Las Vegas casino malls are similar, laid out like streets, with lampposts and, in this case even a trolley, but of course it's all completely artificial, like a movie set. No surprise there either, I guess, but I'm still in awe. Shock and awe. Maybe here movies ARE the reality, so the idea of making real life appear to be a set is perfectly natural.
We walk through the movie set street and enter the old Farmers' Market which hasn't been a farmers' market for years, but has a slightly run down (unusual for here) and casual eating area where you get your food on trays from various vendors and share tables, mostly with retired folks. In fact, the whole place seems to be retired folks, tottering buy holding their trays with their cream pies and giant apple deserts. I get a fresh broiled fish and it's pretty good. I offer to bus some of the trays scattered all over, but am told to leave them alone.
(Man next to me on cell phone here in LAX where I begin writing this entry: "I've got to do this PowerPoint thing for this big case we’re working on.")
Later in the afternoon I drive to Irvine for my talk, 50 miles south of here. I'm advised to leave at 3 in order to arrive by 5:30, and judging from my Santa Barbara experience I take this advice seriously. I join the traffic crawling on the 405 and we inch our way south. Past the airport, then towns that seem to consist entirely of auto-related industries — huge car dealerships and oil refineries, sometimes right next to one another. It's bearable for a while, but after an hour I feel like I'm going to go out of my mind. I've made a few phone calls — that seems to be how people pass the time in their cars here — and I've scanned the radio countless times. I check the vehicles around me, lots of SUVs, monster trucks, and folks stuck in deluxe sedans, the luxe is of no use to them now. I wonder if people here realize that the rest of the world doesn't live like this? I wonder if, as all this traffic just gets worse and worse year after year, people will eventually confine themselves exclusively to their home communities — people in Silverlake will NEVER go to Santa Monica and vice versa, hell, people in Santa Monica will probably eventually stop going to west L.A.!. The area will revert to little isolated villages. It's already somewhat like that, but as gas doubles and quadruples in price, as it's bound to do in the not too distant future, well, then only the wealthy will be able to suffer these hellish commutes.
The rented Prius hybrid car I'm driving does indeed get amazing gas mileage. The drive to Irvine and back and the one yesterday to meet Dillett and the gas gauge has barely moved. Why haven't all car companies quickly adopted this technology as an option? There's nothing inconvenient about it, as with the all-electric cars, and it's super quiet, so phone conversations and listening to music are easier too. Still, if I count all the hours spent in a car in the last few days, well, I'm appalled.
The talk goes well. Beforehand I take a nap on the carpet of the sponsoring professor's office. I wake up and have rug marks on my face. Angela Davis is doing a visit apropos an exiled Kenyan writer who teaches here, but I don't see her.
There is no dinner or reception afterwards, which I'm grateful for, as I need to drive back. Leaving the campus I see a flash inside a neighboring car — a gaggle of beautiful and slightly chubby Asian girls are taking pictures of each other using their phone cameras. A radio host — or maybe it's a U.S. senator — on the radio says he doesn't need another investigation into the abuses at Abu Graib — "they're terrorists and are dangerous and I don't need further information. Our people are doing a great job over there and should be allowed to do it." O.K., hear no evil.
The plane to Cleveland has just passed over Hoover dam. I can see that the water level in the "lake" is low. The desert is in bloom, a dirty yellowish green from up here, apparently it's filled with flowers due to the torrential rains here this year (then why is the water level low?) We're approaching the Grand Canyon. From this altitude and angle one can really see that it is a cut into a land mass which is like a humongous mesa. One can imagine the mesa rose up under a river, and that the river stubbornly stayed its course — not only its course, but its elevation. The water level remaining constant in regards to sea level, while the land slowly rose up, and the water sliced a huge gully in order to maintain its original place and level. Unlike the Australian outback, where all sign of human intervention vanishes, here there are numerous roads, powerline cuts and landing strips that etch across the landscape.
I'm headed for Cleveland — the Akron Museum, actually, for what will be the last of these talks. I think I'll put this one to bed after this. Retire it.
Now we're passing over Monument Valley. I recognize The Mitten and Shiprock in the distance. There's Gouldings hotel where you can rent videos that feature the rock formations you see out your windows. I remember watching John Wayne in The Searchers taking months of movie time to go a few miles.
Toni Basil told me over the phone that it must be the effect of doing these "stand up" routines that have improved my comfort level and relative ease on stage evidenced in my recent musical concerts. She said the last one she saw there was a huge leap from how I was previously. Hmmm. Could be. These talks, when I began doing some on another subject some years ago, were terrifying. Working without a net. Of course, I made it worse by trying out unscripted and unrehearsed material. I thought I could just riff on a series of images as I do in the office and studio. I thought I could be as clever as I thought I was in the company of friends, but in public. I imagined that a series of random riffs and musings would, through accumulation, magically add up to a coherent point of view. Maybe I am not as clever as I think, even amongst friends. In public the initial talks were a bit stilted and hesitant.
I tried changing them — and at one point the flow if ideas and images began to take on an arc, a structure. It was better. So, encouraged, and somewhat enraged by current events, I decided to make further changes — I added a beginning section that was a political rant — this was just before the U.S,-led invasion of Iraq. It went down like a lead balloon.
Confining the thing to one subject has proved better. I can use PowerPoint as a springboard to talk not just about presentations, but about perception, visual language, theater… well, a lot of stuff. And yet the spine of the talk kind of holds it together.
More than once folks asked that I show more of my own work as part of the talk. Maybe I should. Especially if there is no accompanying exhibition. Haven't figured out how to do that without killing the flow and the nice interaction between me and the audiences. Well, there's time to think about it — I'm going to take a long break from these things for a while.
The drive to Santa Barbara yesterday was from hell. After arriving at LAX and getting a hybrid car I decided (unwisely it seems) to take Pacific Coast Highway as it's right by the airport and is scenic and hooks up to 101 pretty soon. It was bumper to bumper — moving about a foot a minute and no way out... 2+ hours to go less than 6 miles!! What do people who live here do? Suffer, I guess. Is it some kind of weird cosmic payback for having an exclusive house on the beach? ...maybe there was a mud slide or something? I finally bailed out and took Topanga canyon over the pass to the 101 and made it to the auditorium at 8:15 or something, just hopped out of the car and onto the stage — the audience never knew.
Did the PowerPoint talk in Berkeley for an audience of IT legends and academics. I was terrified. The guys that originally turned PowerPoint into a program were there, what were THEY gonna think? Well, couldn't THEY just get up to talk about their invention? The rest of the room was other IT illuminati and U Cal academics on computer science etc. They could call me out and denounce me!
Some friends came by which made me feel more comfortable. Some of the Extra-Action Marching Band came by too — there was a "reception" in the faculty club — a charming Meerbeck building on campus with fireplaces and a massive moose head looming over the dining area.
(I'm writing this in the airport, my flight is delayed, the businessman behind me is saying "isn't that the worst slide you've ever seen?" as he holds up a printout of a PowerPoint slide — a triangle with words in it. Gloria Steinem is sitting on the next row of seats in leather trousers talking on her mobile phone)
My talk goes fine. I can relax, they're laughing. Bob Gaskins, Denis Austin and Peter Norvig were there. Bob declined to be introduced — so I stuck with the picture of the concertina that usually stands in for him, which always gets a laugh anyway. He did tell me afterwards that he liked the PowerPoint as theater idea, which was a relief. I mean, there is a lot of hatred for this program out there, and a lot of people laugh at the mere mention of bullet points, so he must feel kind of vulnerable.
I finished reading Bob Dylan's book. It's beautifully written, though I think it should probably be filed under fiction. I always thought his persona, which early on was that of a young Woody Guthrie, was just that, a persona. It worked as a way of delivering those songs, so who cares? ...and he partly, but only partly, abandoned it later. But this book is, in my opinion, pretty much written from the point of view of that imaginary guy. What a conceit! It's a brilliant literary idea, but I hope people take it with a grain of salt... and humor. It's as if Mr. Rogers wrote his autobiography and continued to talk the way he does in the TV show. Some of the writing, the language and the metaphors that this character comes up with are brilliant. Moving and unexpected. For example, he describes rappers and "serious, throwing horses off cliffs" (Call me skeptical, but a Jewish guy from Minnesota talking and writing like a backwoods hick/poet, huh? What's that about?)
Went to see a show of contemporary Chinese art at the museum here. Mostly photos of performances and some videos. Almost all of them had to do with Chinese history, especially the last century, when everything seemed to get thrown into a washing machine.
Lots of references to change, memory, tradition, globalization and capitalism. And lots of artists, especially the men, in various states of undress. I was reminded of the late 20th century art of Eastern Europe, which, as with this stuff, featured a lot of artists using their bodies as the canvas or subject. Commentators claimed that Eastern European body art took place partly because under an oppressive regime the body became something that "belonged" to the individual. They also claimed that lacking art materials the body was a cheap and handy focus and subject. Maybe some of this Chinese work developed under similar circumstances — much of it was done in the 90s.
Nice to see so many Chinese folks checking it out — seems they're curious what's going on in the motherland — and how the artists' responses to history and the present matches with the visitors' own impressions and information. It's as much an Op-Ed piece as an art exhibit. A way of asking, what do they think about this? ...and what do I think about this?
Went to breakfast w/David Wild and his daughter Michiko at the Swedish Cultural Center. They serve pancakes with lingonberries or strawberries with ham at a buffet in the basement one Sunday a month. Ladies in costume played accordions on a little stage while other costumed folks danced. Through the window we could see the water — the sound, maybe? — trees and houses on the opposite shore. A seaplane took off. The accordion ladies were replaced by fiddlers and an elderly woman on guitar. A woman sang but seemed not to be moving her lips — as if she were lip synching to a voice from elsewhere. The dancers did skips and leaps. A man did a handstand.
Being close to the Redmond Empire I was slightly apprehensive that the humor in my talk here might not be as apparent. People might take Microsoft products and behavior as something essential to the survival and the economic health of the region, and therefore not a laughing matter. On the way back to the venue I imagined, what if everything that got laughs previously was suddenly met with stony silence? Humor is such an undefinable inscrutable thing, what if one time it's just not there? It could vanish into thin air, couldn't it? I wonder if standup comedians go through this? No wonder so many of them are a mess.
But in the end I got pretty much the same chuckles and guffaws as elsewhere, though being a larger hall the feeling of intimacy was lessened... but they did have an overhead projector backstage that I could wheel out for some show and tell.
Arrived in Atlanta and drove past Bobby Brown Boulevard. Past a billboard with a big picture of Elton John proclaiming Bennie and OUR Jets. I'm staying in a dorm room that is part of the art college adjacent to the High Museum. Lisa, who curates the shows at the art college gallery hands me a package that contains pamphlets describing the past exhibits she's curated.
One of them is of a series of half-scale wooden sculptures of people done by a young (white) South African artist, Claudette Schreuders. They are mostly replicas of the artist's sisters, neighbors and acquaintances — stoic, passive, slightly stiff portraits, a little like folk art, that look like white person versions of West African sculptures — (this is an Ivory coast figure):
Here is one of hers:
They have a similar powerful presence, but there's a weird rupture because hers are (mostly) of white people.
The artist grew up in a Johannesburg suburb under aparthied. Lisa said the artist told a story that although she and her brother knew their system was somehow in someway bad, they were, like most others, so sheltered by the situation and the censorship that existed then that they couldn't imagine other possibilities.
Apparently it wasn't until her brother went to Europe on summer holiday and saw a U2 concert in Berlin in which everyone was shouting "Down with apartheid" and "Free Nelson Mandela" that it struck home. They didn't know who was this Nelson Mandela that had to be freed. And apartheid was, as are most situations for children, simply a given. That was the way things were.
White South Africans traveling in Europe at that time were looked down on — as if they were all tacit supporters of the apartheid system. They were certainly beneficiaries of that system, but being kids it was not always by choice, and as their eyes were opened and other things intervened things changed rapidly.
What's shocking is how a regime can limit perception. One wonders if this can still happen in the age of the internet — I suspect it can. I know the U.S. public in general is pretty ignorant and mystified by how the rest of the world perceives the U.S. Alternate versions of the past, of history and of recent events, exist all over the place. Is it all relative, is there no truth? I think there is a truth, but one that incorporates the contexts and relativism of the various parties involved. You can see things from 2 sides but still pass judgment if one side has wronged the other. Simply being able to see from someone else's point of view doesn't make one impotent.
The talk here in Atlanta goes better than the one in N.Y., I think — I get more laughs. Here the audience is mainly art school types and in N.Y. there were a lot of business folks and professionals present — so the arties were maybe less familiar with PowerPoint and it was all fairly new to them. Carol the dean of the school suggested afterwards that I might have played one of my pieces as part of my talk. Many, herself included, were unfamiliar with what exactly I do with it.
I do play them on a screen as people were taking their seats, but maybe most weren't paying attention. And in the past sometimes there would be an accompanying installation, so playing a piece would be redundant. I'll think about it. I worry that it would halt the talk's momentum, but maybe she's right, the question of what I do with it is sometimes left hanging in these situations. I also like to engage the audience, throw out ideas and questions for debate or to ponder.
Afterwards I'm taken to the nearby home of a former photo gallerist who now has the job of overseeing the Elton John collection. What is it with Elton John and this town? Jim White and his fiancé came down from Athens, and they join us for dinner.
NY Times:
The extinct "little people" (about 3 feet tall) from the island of Flores (see my earlier entry) have had their smaller brains analyzed against their skills — and the result has upset a central concept — that brain size equals intelligence. It turns out they were pretty damn smart, and though their brains were 1/3 the size of ours they seemed to have an awful lot figured out.
The scientist claims that their brains may have been "wired" differently, and that using different pathways and connection they could cover most of what we think of as intelligence. It's all about the connections, the network, and not about how much gray matter or anything else there is.
Seems this probably is a metaphor that be applied elsewhere.
The U.S. has tried to block — by demanding a new added amendment — a declaration of women's rights due to be released on the eve of the International Day of Women's Rights (next week.) (So much for all that freedom rhetoric.) The declaration is 10 years in the making, being left over from the Beijing conference of women's rights way back then.
NY Times:
The United States proposed adding wording noting that the declaration created neither supports "any new international human rights" nor "the right to abortion."
The American effort produced objections from every regional group at the conference, which had argued for the statement's approval without amendments. After days of lobbying, the Bush administration was virtually alone in pressing the issue, and the many advocacy groups in attendance accused the United States of injecting national political views into an international forum.
On a closely related subject, here is Mukhtar Mai:
A woman who was gang raped at the ORDERS of the local village council in Pakistan. It was a revenge/justice rape... but I think not against her, but against her husband. Her eye for an eye, sort of thing. The revenge motive turned out to be partly in error.
This happened some years ago, she's been founding schools and suffering death threats.
Reading a New Yorker piece on Cy Twombly at the airport. It has some great aphorisms — "...conviction is overrated, Mere whim will serve just as well." What the article (a review of a Whitney show) leaves out is for me some of the most obvious points — his paintings challenge you to proclaim them as bullshit.
The bullshit part — the paintings are so barely anything, so purposely meaningless and wispy that, well, some look like poorly-erased blackboards and aside from giving one a newfound appreciation for art "found" in classrooms they could be said to be almost inconsequential on purpose. Something guaranteed to piss a lot of folks off who already suspect that Modern Art is a huge piss take at the expense of the common man.
They're undeniably beautiful, unlike the macho slatherings of some other abstract art… but that could be a problem for people, too — beauty, what's it mean? What's it for?
It's offhand, casual, but effete. That probably offends people too. It's aggressive in its quiet way. A "fuck you" that is all the more jolting because it's whispered, not shouted.
I begin a speaking tour today. Well, last night actually was the first date — at NYU, in NYC — the McLuhan lecture, which is sponsored by the Canadian government (I lived briefly in Hamilton as a child, so they said maybe I'm an honorary Canadian.
The talks are PowerPoint presentations about PowerPoint. I did some of these previously, some months back, mostly at places where my PowerPoint pieces were being exhibited — SECCA in North Carolina, and Eastman House in Rochester.
I decided that, like my other art talk, which is largely about the ubiquity of advertising and marketing in our lives and in art, this one would also not be about my own work. I'd seen too many artists and designers do talks that were basically a walk through their résumés — which one could just as easily find out by reading their books or even online — so I decided to try a different approach. In this talk I decided to try and talk about PowerPoint — what it is, how it came to be and what people use it for — and the various ramifications of all that.
It became obvious after doing just a couple of these talks that it was going to turn in to a standup comedy routine. PowerPoint is maybe the laughing stock of computer programs and here I am using it as an art medium and calling my talk "I [heart] PowerPoint" — well, all I had to do was throw up a typical PowerPoint slide with the usual bullet points and there'd be howls of laughter. I initially thought some of it might be mildly funny, but I didn't expect it to be as full of guffaws as it turned out. I wasn't disappointed, but now I sort of had to play out this turn of events for what it was. I felt that the laughs now had to keep on coming, and I had to keep the momentum going.
I'm not by nature a vivacious speaker — I am hesitant and maybe mumble sometimes — but I find the stuff that gets thrown up on the screen is amazing, funny and resonant — it's as if I am seeing it for the first time, and sometimes I am, as I constantly add slides to it.
I haven't gotten there yet, but I wonder to myself if I could even take this beyond being self-referential, beyond being PowerPoint about PowerPoint and make it a more emotional, conceptual and universal kind of performance — because it is a performance, a form of theater, one that uses very clunky and limited technology. I haven't discovered how to do this yet, and I don’t know if it will evolve into stand up with slides or maybe something altogether different, but it does seem possible that the slides are my ventriloquist dummy, or vice versa. One of us is the straight man and the other gets the laughs.
Amid all the guffaws I do manage to make some points, some of which have been made more succinctly or in greater depth by others, and I throw as many of them out there as I can. PowerPoint as a lousy conveyer of information (Tufte's argument), PowerPoint as theater, the idea that software has a point of view (Neil Stephenson is good on this), PowerPoint presentations as essentially phatic communication, etc. Here is where the audience often stops laughing, but occasionally I add a zinger that keeps the energy up.
According to a paper on PowerPoint by Jamie O' Neil that I received recently the percentage of communication that is non-verbal is between 65-93% (he got this from a book, Communication In Our Lives that I presume explains how these figures were derived.)
I'm not surprised... in fact I'd lean towards the upper end of the percentages. Part of this might be included under phatic communication — technically, verbal utterances that are not conveying a message or information in an obvious way. "How's your mom?" "New haircut?" "Want some coffee?" This banter establishes and affirms relationships, hierarchies, class and status. Sometimes the definition of phatic is broadened to include non-verbal remarks — ums and uh-huhs — but there's more going on than just verbal sounds and words. Gesture, posture, facial expressions, clothing — and that's just the interpersonal stuff — there's also all the visual and audio stuff surrounding and enveloping every situation and meeting. The room, the lighting, the way the chairs are arranged — and in the case of media, color, design, typeface, visual references — jeez it goes on and on.
The frustrating thing is that if indeed more than half our communication is non-verbal then why haven't we got words to talk about it? O.K., there are academic terms, but for most people it’s sort of denied that this communication exists because there’s no way to talk about it. Wittgenstein's the limits of my thought are the limits of my language, or vice versa. People certainly feel it — emotionally and intuitively — and may refer to it or allude later to what they felt as opposed to what was literally said. But other than mentioning body language stuff — twitching, scratching, slouching or stretching — a lot goes unreferenced. We can't talk about music, dance or love very well, either — but they're awfully big parts of our lives.
In other forms outside of meetings and conversations this gap is even more prevalent. In ads, displays, altars, graphic design, fashion, magazines, signage, architecture, television, movies, websites, on and on we’re being addressed and coddled and seduced and terrorized and we can't talk about it because we don’t have words for it. Visual "language" is a one-way communication.
The businessman beside me on the plane is twitching. He's fallen asleep with his inch-thick contract that he'd been marking up in his lap. He's doing that head bob thing where his head droops and then he jerks awake only to fall asleep again. Ouch.
"They are discovering what they are saying at the same time you are" — theater director Richard Maxwell on actors. It could just as easily be said about any live performers. (I guess I'm thinking about the PowerPoint presentation I will be doing later today.) Part of the thrill, and part of the tightrope effect, is suddenly discovering a new meaning or deep feeling imbedded in something you're saying because the audience reveals it to you. You discover what you're really saying.
We all had a couple of days here to recover from ferocious jet lag. T and I rented bikes and after lunch with my friend Darcy we rode along the Pacific coast up past the cliff house to the Presidio. It was one of those gorgeous SF days when I had to keep reminding myself this was in the middle of a city.
One afternoon I caught 3 art shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — one consisted of photos of pretty severely mentally and physically impaired adults — all had been given art therapy by a common teacher — and there were examples of some of their work. The glyphs of a man named Dwight, now passed away, I had seen before — they're powerful, as were some bound objects by a woman who was pictured burying her face in one of her constructions. Her pieces consisted of ordinary objects, more or less appliance size, bound tightly with multicolored yarn, bits of cloth and anything else that seemed to be available — they resulted in powerful talismanic objects, at least that's how they appeared to me... and judging by her photo she wants to merge with them — she was pictured hugging one, her face half submerged in the loops and layers of yarn.
To be honest, the photos of the artists were pretty intense. As much as I love and am inspired by some of this impassioned desperate work I maybe find it easier to feel the humanity of these folks by looking at their works rather than at their person. Obviously their therapist is beyond this stage. But for the person not accustomed to looking at these folks it's disturbing at first glance. That's not very PC, but it's the truth.
A second show was of large labor-intensive contemporary works, some of which were great. One was a wall of fans in a room that you activated by sitting down and breathing into a miniature version of the same thing on a desktop. It was as if your breath was being amplified, made more powerful and louder. A third show was lots of 18th and 19th century posters and handouts from the collection of Ricky Jay, the magician. There were flyers for mesmerists, automatic writing machines, the pig faced woman, and in one instance, an elephant — the first one to tour North America. The typography was amazing.
Barnum ("there’s a sucker born every minute") was represented by a small poster for a man he claimed was 161 years old. It turned out to be a fake, and Jay claimed that the European image of Americans and America were partly formed by this showman who was less show and more con man. Maybe not much has changed in that respect.
We did 3 nights at the Fillmore. It was a way to balance the budget (The Australia/NZ part didn't quite break even), break up the jet lag and it's loads of fun, it's such a great place. I had already invited the Extra-Action Marching Band to join us — and to join us more extensively than they did 2 years previously — Tony Fino did an arrangement for "Burning Down The House" and it was sent ahead of our arrival for them to look at.
As before, they entered the room after our set — how could we possibly follow them? — they entered from the back doors, wading into the audience and eventually making their way to the stage where we re-emerged to join up with them. Some of their cheerleaders (male and female) were pretty close to naked... which added another layer of headiness to the incredible grooves they were playing. (I think some of the rhythms and riffs must be Balkan, there are some odd time signatures going on.)
(Click here to link to an audience member's video posting of the Fillmore show.)
After our last show (our last for a LONG time) we went to the rehearsal/living space in Bernal Heights neighborhood where the Extra-Action folks and their pals were having a party with live music — one set was a guy playing cello through electronics accompanying a young woman who managed to smile almost all the time as she sang. Tracy said they teach you that in chorus class, but I think she was just genuinely enjoying herself. She said hi afterwards and she was still grinning. And...there was a genuine San Francisco light show — 2 movies projected onto the same screen — and on another wall oil and water made old school light show blobby shapes. The Extra Action band did a short set — how they had the energy after playing earlier and it was after 2AM at this point I don't know — though their music and show seem to generate energy rather than suck it up.
Once again, as happened 2 years ago, with this bunch I have the feeling of entering a chaotic and somewhat sexy utopia. People are wearing all sorts of outfits — Victorian hats and mustaches on some of the men, wigs on some of the women, and some folks wear not much at all. Haircuts are all over the place. I myself am in a baby blue western jacket and golf shoes. The music is varied and made with and generates sheer joy — that singer wasn't the only one smiling.
Why do scenes like this develop here? One of the players has some connection with Survival Research Labs, which is maybe another slightly more dangerous variation on this impulse. Maybe there's something in the weather, in the water, the light, the unstable land?
What is it about certain cities and places that fosters specific attitudes? Am I imagining this? Do people who move to L.A. from elsewhere lose a lot of that elsewhere and eventually end up making L.A.-type work? Does creative attitude seep in through peer pressure and causal conversations? Or is it in the water, the light, the weather? Is there a Detroit sensibility? Memphis? New Orleans? (no doubt) Austin? (certainly) Nashville? London? Berlin? Düsseldorf? Vienna? (yes) Paris? Osaka? Melbourne? Bahia? (absolutely)
Does New York foster a hard-as-nails no-nonsense attitude? Not exclusively, but maybe a little bit. Here creativity is a career, a serious business, something that can be achieved only by absolute focus — and sometimes by what seems like paradoxical means — silliness, sloppiness and studied anti-seriousness can all be serious pursuits.
Is it in the layers of historical happenstance that make up a city? The politics and local laws? The socio-ethnic mix? The evanescent weight of fame and glamor that weighs upon all of L.A. mixed with the influence of the Latin and Asian populations that are fenced off from that zone — that and the hazy light on skin might make certain kinds of work more appropriate. Yes? No? Maybe?
Maybe in some cases, but not all, this is a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own aura. But I think every myth at least stems from a kernel of truth... which might be as slight as the need for that myth to exist. The myth of urban character and sensibility exists because we want it to exist — in order to lend meaning and order to a sometimes senseless world.
George W. Bush is in the news preaching democracy to the Russians. From a grade school civics kind of mindset this might seem to have some basis in reality, but in fact it is pure arrogance coming from a man who was not even elected, has established a string of illegal penal colonies around the world, illegally invaded a sovereign nation and rejiggers zoning lines to disenfranchise half the population. The recent revelation that more and more "journalists" and white house press conference "reporters" are actually Republican plants — and are not even reporters at all, is an old Soviet trick. The pot calling the kettle black, as they used to say. That doesn’t mean it isn't in fact black, but... (and isn’t this a sort of racist aphorism?)
The last Australian show was at a rock festival in Perth. In the afternoon, after a morning sound check, I got my surfer wish and Kristin, Ames, Jennifer, Graham, Mauro, Paul and I went to Scarborough beach just outside the city. The guys were hooked on trying to get it right, as if guys won't. I managed to eventually catch quite few waves, but never got up above a kneeling position. But I was thrilled, as it was my first time and the water was perfect, brisk and blue and clear, and no sharks either. Mauro, however, ruled — almost immediately he managed to stand up and soon he was catching wave after wave even though a lot of them were deemed too small for any of the other local surfers to bother with — but Mauro managed to wangle a decent if short ride out of these.
Later, at the festival backstage we met Ray Manzerak of The Doors who is touring with Ian Astbury "doing" Jim Morrison. He recently moved to Napa valley and says he is growing fresh gourmet vegetables. He’s holding a Budweiser, so one of our group goes and fetches him a decent local beer.
I don't really like doing outdoor festivals much. Except the Italian ones that are spread out over a week and which allot an evening to each act. I feel like the audience is primarily there to party, to dance, drink, whatever... and the music is simultaneously the focus and the background. That's all O.K., but some artists are better at providing that than others. Most festival audiences naturally therefore have short attention spans — it’s a natural result of being outdoors, daylight, etc — so our normal show, which "takes you on a journey" as the cliché goes, has to be edited in this context, and the unexpected detours on that journey — often the stuff that makes it really interesting and in my opinion special — have to be curtailed and we just hit the high points. It's the Classic Comics version of our show.
These festivals have evolved into money-makers for the local promoters — staging one big gig or a weekend festival is way easier than doing a string of dates for each act in town — and the acts get paid well, so they show up. The booking agents use them as cash points between less well-paying gigs.
As we're playing I wonder to myself how these things got started. Maybe they began innocently enough with festivals like the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and semi-spontaneous celebrations in the parks and town squares of various cities. These then moved to stadiums and became more formalized. Occasionally some transcend the efforts to make them a big machine — the early Lollapaloozas, the New Orleans Jazz Festival.
Festivals are also used in the old argument given to bands:"it will expose you to a new audience." Which is true, but so would a lot of things that don't necessarily help one's career. My counter argument is that if the audience isn’t paying attention and you've edited your show then it doesn't really aid your career or attract new fans.
Again, this isn't always true — as much of a mud fest as they can be, I remember playing Bumbershoot (Seattle) and Bonnaroo (Tennessee) and weeks afterwards in other cities folks would come up and say how much they enjoyed those sets.
Blondie is on after us — their set is perfectly tailored for this event — they play hit after hit (at least they're all memorable songs to me) and they play them without pause, as if a DJ were doing a Blondie set.
Australian expressions: Hooley freaking dooley
Scrouch
Footie
Besides vegemite there is Spearmint-flavoured milk!:
After we do the three Fillmore shows this is more or less the end of this tour cycle. There will be a week of dates in North America in the summer, but those are an afterward. My feeling at the moment is that this tour was in a way a continuation and refining of the last one. An amplification of what that one was hinting at. These shows use the strings more fully and the music ranges more widely. I think overall it went over well — actually I know it did — and in some areas it made money. (This last leg is break-even at best.)
I suspect I'll want to radically change things after this. Two tours and records over 4+ years with more or less the same format might be enough. I can return to this format, but I suspect in the upcoming months I'll want to challenge myself with something that I will feel more intrigued and less confident about.
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