GAMERA OBSCURA
For real complete-ists, trainspotters and what have you the tour CD for the White Flag Italian tour earlier this month, "Piangi Con Me + 3 [Expanded]" has a couple of singing bits by me...or someone who looks like me. You'll hear familiar strains in verions of 'Butcher's Tale' orig. by the Zombies and 'Tomorrow Never Knows', the Fabs tune. It's a burned CD we sold at our shows, there are also several original tunes. There's a 10" vinyl version but my songs didn't make that, it's just 4 songs as far as I know. Anyway, drop a line to susmotta@gmail.com and see what happens...
UTRECHT 2/21
I eventually got over what ever was trying to turn me inside out; I slept it off and woke up pretty much fine. I was feeling pretty gun shy about food, tho. I finally got brave enough to venture out and look for some lunch, and ran into my friend Carsten who was in town to see the show—I tortured him dragging him up and down the Oudegracht looking for a restaurant that didn’t offend my post-trauma stomach. We settled into a crowded place and I plied it with fizzy water, diet coke, tea, and a very mild pasta. It stayed down, so I was in the clear. Turns out Jon had eaten something nasty too and he had been sick all day yesterday and Alex didn’t feel well the night we got into Utrecht either.
The Tivoli-Oudegracht holds plenty of fine memories for me as does the town of Utrecht itself; the Posies had a couple of great rock shows at the Tivoli in the 90s and REM spent a week rehearsing there three years ago, and capped the week off with a show for 1200 lucky folks. During REM’s visit we adopted a bar called De Witte Ballons, forgive my estimation of the Dutch spelling, but it would be called The White Balloons in English. Turned out to be a very friendly place, open pretty late, not too crowded and not too empty. I did come back after the Big Star show and pay my respects: I would have paid for a few drinks but nobody let me
As for the show itself, it was damn fine. I really felt like I was getting the hang of it, little did I know that in Gent things would really click—imagine what we could do if our tour was more than three days long!
GENT 2/22
I had no idea what was waiting for me here. What it was was one of the best venues in Europe. De Handelsbeurs. A beurs, like the French bourse, is an exchange, a commodities market I suppose in this case. They told me this building had been the first such thing in Europe, probably an exaggeration but it was as lovely an adaptation of an 18th century mercantile building put to cultural use as I have ever seen, that’s for sure. Some of the highlights include: an adjustable stage configuration, with two settings—the club setting, like what was in place for Big Star, with a level floor and a meter-high stage; and a theatre setting, with a sloping floor leading down to the stage—any piece of the room can move down 15 feet. I was shown the mechanics of it all, huge metal stabilizers that looked like the ‘2001’ monolith broken in half; dozens of collapsing/telescoping aluminum tubes which served as brakes; and the lifting devices themselves, huge crossed bars of iron along the edges of each moving piece. Down in the wings there’s a big ol’ Steinway, which I poked at a bit. The theatre setting is used for chamber recitals so the pianos lay waiting to be rolled out on to the sunken stage. Next highlight is the public men’s room. Adjacent to the venue is a very large reception hall with a bar; beyond that is small (very good) restaurant. Out big glass doors from either one is a very small lobby and off that the toilets are accessed. You head down some stairs and there they are. The men’s room has a playful design—most of the room is long and narrow and lined with backlit panels; the urinals are in their own little cave. The room where the urinals stand was probably furbished; i.e. prior to being re-furbished, in the early 20th century. All the walls and original urinals, fixtures etc. are intact but fully enclosed on all sides by glass; the modern, small urinals are in front of the glass. So as you do your business you essentially look into a diorama of the building’s past.
Show: best of the three; we settled into what we call a ‘groove’. Stage sound was excellent—we lowered our volume as there is a serious sound limit on the place, but I had a different bass amp than usual and it had a little more grind to it even at the lower volume. We rounded out the evening with ‘In Space’ ‘s old school rocker ‘Whole New Thing’ (‘baby I gotta go…’) and left everyone up, way up.
I myself was down physically in a quiet sort of way afterwards—spent by my gastro disaster, and knowing I had to be up at 5.30 to catch the train home, I walked back to the hotel in solitude.
I was up on time, and had a bit of a scare when the cab the hotel called took forever to come—at that hour, there were no others around. I had just 5 minutes to get from the cab drop off to the platform—no easy feat with a very heavy suitcase, a computer bag and a guitar (by the way, the guitar had been repaired by Big Star’s low country boy, Matthijs—thanks for re-pegging me!) But I got on the thing, which thankfully was delayed just a minute, or two as an entire school’s worth of kids were boarding at once. I never really slept well as I stayed in a folding seat by my bags, but I was OK once I got home. Things I did this week at home: saw Depeche Mode (and met 2 of the 3 REM colleagues that I knew were working on the tour, namely, Spidey and Shrimpy!) who were largely excellent—I didn’t quite get on board for the piano ballads, but that’s just my humble opinion (I would have loved to hear People Are People, World Full of Nothing, Princess Di is Wearing A New Dress etc.); saw Kelly Di Martino, about whom I knew nothing beforehand, another yank in the Parisian wilds, perform at a lively (and cover-free) venue called the Fleche D’or; and tonight I made one of my rare but treasured visits to a cinema to see Walk the Line, which was superb. I gathered lots of inspiration and couldn’t help but see familiar themes from my own life, albeit in a very different context, up there; I came home thoughtful and took inventory of all that was important to me, and renewed my intention to continue ever forward.
Love
KS
Paris
