8.24.2009
Follow up on last week’s expository ramble on my inner thoughts. I wanted to make a few things clear--tho I grew up in the exact landscape of “the Ice Storm”, my life, my parents’ life, was not like that at all. I have many good things, great memories etc from my 1970s suburban-american-WASP upbringing, and I was blessed with a great family. I had a dog, I ran wild in the woods, and generally didn’t get into any trouble at all. The suburbs are a little culturally monochrome in some ways--but I have filled in the gaps with my travels and experiences and by living in big cities all my adult life. And my folks and teachers took me to museums, operas, symphonic concerts--and again, as an adult, I discovered many things under the many-angled sun. So, if anyone read my post as a complaint about my upbringing--it was not. If anyone read my post as a snub of my American upbringing versus my life in France--it was not. In fact, in terms of family, I’ve had a great visit with my dad and stepmom, who are visiting this weekend. My dad hadn’t been to France in over 50 years. He traveled, like me, professionally for most of his career, and isn’t super big on the idea of travel as leisure but he took €25 club sandwiches and hour-plus TGV delays in stride (someone met their unfortunate end driving onto the tracks ahead of a TGV, which shut down the regional network just as my folks were about to get to La Rochelle). We showed them the island, played tennis, watched Aden put on her daily freak/genius show, had long dinners and lunches in the sun. Before they arrived, my friends Beth & Ed and their son Soren were here too, we met up for some swimming and dining and letting the kids play. Ed is a rocker dad, too (Urge Overkill) and Beth like Dom has put in many hours in music biz management. They were blown away by the charm of St. Martin (who wouldn’t be, but I forget sometimes) and we showed them all our secret coups de coeur. The local paper today had my pic in it twice, and when we went to pick up my folks at the train station in La Rochelle there were posters everywhere for the festival. Allergies this week. Crippling. My stepmom turned me on to Zyrtec; when I take that and about 50 other pills I can usually open my eyes by dinner time. I would line up pills like little soldiers and pray for rain (literally, as they are milder when the weather is worse). Restaurant compare and contrast-- We were saddened to see that what had been one of our favorite dinner spots on the island, La Cabane du Fier, was not up to the same standards this year. Not only did we not get the table we requested (We had booked several days in advance) but the servers were on our back to order about 30 seconds after we sat down, and returned every two minutes, as if they couldn’t wait to get rid of us. When you needed to get someone’s attention of course...impossible. Once you have that atmosphere, you can’t really enjoy the food as much and it’s true that some of our favorite items were gone from the menu. So, we give away one of our previous secret spots as it’s now a place to avoid. Compare that to the terrace at Le Richelieu--Le Richelieu is a luxury hotel and spa next to La Flotte, and its restaurant has a Michelin star, with white linen and hushed waiters. However, on the terrace, the atmosphere is casual and the location is right by the sea--you can jump right in after lunch (I’m pleased to find those 20 minutes of required digestion time go by much quicker than they did when I was waiting for the green light to re-enter my grandparents’ pool). It’s basically the same menu as the inside and it’s definitely the same wine list. There’s a patch of lawn that the kids can play on (I don’t think that was the intention, but they don’t mind). We arrived 20 minutes late for our table and they held it for us. And the food is perfectly executed. So, this is the best lunch spot that I am willing to tell you about on the island...enjoy. Woke up in the middle of the night as huge storm battered the island...artillery was firing from/at our village directly, as best as we could tell... Love KS St. Martin de Re
8.19.2009
Liberated from the reporting of my day to day b.s., I can muse freely this week. Because this week was like last week was like next week will be. That’s why I come here. The environment is stable and always the same things are on the menu--sun, beach, wine. So, my body and mind can unravel, they have the space. Often my body just collapses. I sleep for hours at a time during the day, and still crash at ten, and sleep til 8. In my head, it all comes apart. It’s like a coke comedown--I know to expect it, I know it’s ‘just’ in my head (as if I have any other instrument to measure the environment) but it’s a hard wave to buffer--I run the emotional film of my year in reverse--sadness, anger, joy, fatigue, hope, despair, disappointment. It comes out of context, or sometimes, brutally contextualized. You’re a joke, you’re too old to do anything that matters. You’re on the right path, you’re living a great life. It all sprays around, like an untethered garden hose on full blast. And then it moves on. So it means, go with it, right? Ride out those triumphs, ride out those doubts. They are telling you versions of the truth and to not look them in the eye is to waste an opportunity. It’s here you gain your courage. It’s here that you grow, in the month where you feel like you’re doing nothing. When you are screaming ahead at a mile a minute during your working life, what can you achieve but holding on and keeping just current emergencies under control. Favorite activities last week: --watching the Perseid meteor shower in the front yard. --The swarm of thousands upon thousands green leaf hoppers for just one night, invading our hair, our bedrooms despite our best efforts. In the market today I saw them piled up like green confetti on the big light at the base of the church in Le Bois Plage. --Standing in perfectly calm, clear water, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of tiny fish. So, my essential beach reading this summer: The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. Perhaps one of the most stimulating and fascinating books that’s entered my life. An exploration that seeks to define the role and value of the artist in society at different times in history as well as the present--it’s philosophy, anthropology, history, and has two in depth examinations of the life and work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as illustrations. I can’t do the book justice in description. It’s simply too complex and subtle, but at the same time will make so much clear. Will Work For Drugs, by Lydia Lunch. Lydia gave me a copy of her latest work this year. I read it one sitting. It’s a series of short essays, raps, rambles, rants--call them what you like. But the voice is clear, gifted, relentless in its honesty, and great fun. So many killer one liners, they snap over the net like Federer forehand winners. Also in this volume she interviews other writers--Nick Tosches, Jerry Stahl, Hubert Selby Jr. You know, it’s true that I passed many pleasant days in France before I lived here, and always enjoyed spending time in this country. The Posies 2 week run at the Chesterfield Cafe in 1995, as ill-advised as it was for our career, was one of the highlights, lifestyle-wise. Spending a week at La Colombe D’or in St. Paul de Vence on REM’s dime in 1999 was amazing. And many great shows in the 90s with the Posies--in Bordeaux, at Festivals, in Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand, Angouleme, and of course we had some amazing shows in Paris. I had been developing my food and wine palate over the years, and it was inevitable that the exploration would lead me to conclude that life outside France (and Spain) would always leave me wanting for life within it. And then there was Dominique. Not only did she enable, nurture and share my tastes in culinary delights, but she was an inspiration and a fantastic partner in crime. And when, after a decade of knowing each other, we finally took the hints that fate kept dropping, I found another thing, far more exotic to me than pig innards or gizzards on salad: the Latin family. Noisy, nosy, under your feet and in your business. The ‘patria’ may be indifferent, but the value of ‘familia’ is without question. In a traditional French family as I’ve come to know it, at least as I’ve come to know this one, they take it seriously. All thru my wild gyrations, Dom & her folks have been there to scoop me up and make me feel welcome. My environmental background, despite my Slavic blood and its brooding, obsessive passions, is 100% WASP--’The Ice Storm’ depicts events happening about 100 yards from where I was living in that time period. It’s not that my parents didn’t love me, cuz they did and do, and they continue to show it. But perhaps I needed to join another family to see what blood does and doesn’t do--not having any blood relatives, I was never sure what family was all about, and if I was getting/doing the right stuff. And now I know, of course. Love KS St. Martin de Re
8.11.2009
It’s not a problem for me to sink into vacation mode instantly upon arrival to Ile de Re. The light, the air, the pace of activity--it’s chemically, physically, structurally so different from life in Paris or elsewhere as to cause the body itself to undergo a leisure-bound alchemy. It’s basically impossible to find internet access anywhere near where I live, so I don’t bother. Getting online means, either by car or bus, crossing the island to the busy main town of St. Martin--a major expedition. For what reward? To read the list of complaints and incomplete tasks from the outside world? Yikes. No, thanks. This year, like every year, Ile de Re is a little more crowded, but generally the view is the same. Our village hasn’t changed in the 6 years I’ve been coming here--now new houses, no new businesses (well, that’s a net change--in 6 years, we have 1 new restaurant, but we lost a realty office). So, we have the habit to head to the beach, every day, to swim and sunbathe. If the weather is cloudy or windy, we skip it, and I head (by bike, rain or shine) to a spa’s pool to use the sauna, hammam, and take aquagym. Aden takes her swimming lessons there. Friends of ours from Paris, who have a son Aden’s age, are here, on the other side of the island, and the papa is a tennis player, we’ve been playing. Mostly, I ride my bike, play with Aden, sleep, eat, and enjoy the simple pleasures of my family. In the morning, I ride into the village, or if Aden wants to come, we walk together. I have a cafe, pick up a newspaper, and head to the poissonier to see what’s good. Dom’s mom cooks it up for lunch, and we hit the beach after the afternoon nap. The local wine has been hipped up--in general, the growers give their fruit to a central production facility, which turns out 2 reds, a white and a rose (sorry, but blogger doesn’t let me use special characters like an accented ‘e’). The two reds are cheap -- 3 and 4 Euros a bottle; but now the more expensive of the two, Le Gouverneur, has a chic look in black and orange--the bottle no longer screams ‘cheap local wine, nothing special’. In fact, I swear, it tastes better in a more dignified bottle. Today at the supermarket we discovered that there is an upscale, 12 Euros/bottle red from Ile de Re called Ultimium. We tried it today; I barbecued a steak as big as Michael Jordan’s shoe and we ate in the fresh air. Ultimium smooths out many of the rustic edges of Le Gouverneur--and thus, is less interesting. There is a tangy edge brought in by the salty air that is unique to the island--its terroir, like the constantly adjusting coastline, is made of something ephemeral and elusive--like the time we spend here. To make something that’s like anywhere else--would be like putting up big ugly Miami Beach condos here--it’s not needed, it’s not welcome, and we are relieved that this island remains true to its roots. If the water is too cold, the beaches too rocky, the nightlife too boring, the campgrounds too tacky, the nonexistent wifi too limiting--good. Go to Ibiza and leave us alone. This year, there is a new attraction tho--a pavilion set up in a parking lot near one of the beaches houses a mobile zoo of reptiles--dozens of terrariums with cobras, rattlesnakes, pythons, boas, strange turtles, giant tortoises, alligators, caimans...fantastic. Right up my alley, certainly, and Aden loved it. Not only that, but there is also a massive collection of pinned insects from around the world. In general, we are asleep soon after dinner, around ten, before its even really dark. If we are awake and the sun has fully retreated, we can go out in the backyard and observe the lonely courtship of the yard’s sole glow worm--it’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen any, and this poor one seems to be on her own. Like the SETI antennae, she broadcasts her hopeful code into vast, dark and empty space, hoping one day her blip will wash up on a shore that is populated by those who might comprehend it, and answer in kind. The village had its annual fete, the square was filled up with tables and chairs, and a chaotic process of waiting in line, buying little tickets to get food and finding out you still needed cash to get some items (and wine), and trying to sort this out while a marching band blatted away on a small stage...it was great fun. I ate about 20 oysters. The fete has a serious side--during the daytime the tiny church by our house has a mass, a procession and a benediction for all those lost at sea and those the sea chooses to return. The church itself marks the spot where legend has it a Spanish princess came to shore after her ship foundered off the coast, and she dedicated the treasure she could bring with her to the church’s construction in thanks for sparing her life. Sorry I can’t tell you everything about my life here--there are many many locations, restaurants, special things that I want to keep as best kept secrets. I’m always surprised so few of my Parisian friends come here, but it’s just as well. I am happy to be an off-duty entertainer. It’s Aden who puts on the shows here--each night as dinner comes to a conclusion she uses the back doors as a proscenium and does an improvised dance/pedagogy/singing/acrobatic routine that is truly overwhelming in its range of subject matter--she may detour for 15 minutes into an exposition on the secret lives and conversations of various microbes on various planets--or guide us thru the guts of dead katydid as she imagines being an ant scavenging the soft bits. Last night we went to the village of La Flotte, to see the party, ‘La Nuit Americaine’--not to be confused with the awesome film w/in a film film by Truffaut--this was a celebration of the ties between France and the USA--where France aided the US in their revolution for independence, and took the ideas back home to enact their own shortly thereafter; and later we aided them in their liberty, ridding them of a peculiar species of gray insect. This exchange was wrapped up in a symbol--a statue, unveiled this evening, of one Nicolas Martiau, born in the 16th century on Ile de Re. From a rich Hugenot family, he fled to England when France reneged on its promise to tolerate non-Catholics; and later ended up in the Jamestown settlement in the Colonies--he survived the massacre, somehow...and ended up having children--a few generations later, one of his great-great-great grandsons, George, had a fair bit of success on the Revolutionary battlefield, and is commemorated today on the dollar bill. For the big party, at which the harbor of La Flotte was jammed with gawkers and for which parking was nearly impossible, they set up a stage and had the Glenn Miller Orchestra play--now, knowing that Glenn and band perished 65 years ago, and any contemporaries would be extremely advanced in age, we have to wonder how someone has the right to the name--Glenn’s work and image would have passed into the public domain sometime in the 1990s. Anyway, somebody gets to call this big band the Glenn Miller Orch, full of robust musos in no more than middle age. As we arrived later than most, we installed ourselves on a terrace and were across the harbor from the main event. And in fact, we were freezing so we didn’t stay for the fireworks... Life is rich here, rich beyond the power of money, and I want for nothing. Love KS Ste. Martin de Re
8.03.2009
This week has been ever so productive, spent in Larvik, working on new songs with The Disciplines. Larvik is the hometown of most of the band, and with a summer school break for Bjorn, this was the place to convene. Baard lives here year round. With all the connections the band has, it was easy to set up. Claus is living here now too. It’s true that he has retired from the band, and has taken an important position at Larvik’s gleaming new Culture House, which is opening this fall. So, Ralla is our man, and he came down from Oslo to work with us. Larvik is small, and centered on its waterfront--they were wise enough to place the industrial harbor away from the center, so the main waterfront is for leisure, mostly. A ferry to Denmark leaves from one pier. But now running north-south along the water you go from a pleasant beer garden, to a tiny harbor for small craft, to a bit of park, to a pier for large boats (a three-masted schooner, the Thor Heyerdal, was anchored there at week’s end) to a pier with a restaurant on it; then the bay twists toward Stavern and on that part of the shore there is the Culture House, and brand new hotel and shopping center, and a stretch of sandy beach. Between the waterfront and the rest of town runs the railroad, and on the inside of the railroad is main street--and then the terrain rises rapidly and Larvik’s center is clinging to the slope. The town square is not level, it slides down the slope as well. So, main street and the center are two different things. North of the center along the shore is where I stayed, in the home of Claus’ best friend, Gunder Gundersen and his lovely little family. They were away on vacation so Ralla and I had run of the house, and then as the week progressed more and more people were assigned by powers unknown to me to crash there--a band was rehearsing there, with a singer, Lippie, from Paris (I had never heard of her or met her before but have since heard her music, and it’s very good). A brother and sister, both with hare krishna haircuts suddenly were crashing in the office. It was like being in the Jefferson Airplane’s house in 1967--without the sex or the drugs, naturlich. Luckily I had arrived on the scene before any of them and had grabbed a good room. Now, to put Larivk’s Mayberry-ness in plain view, Gunder lives in the former rectory of Larvik’s main church--there has been a church on that spot for about almost 500 years. Next door to Gunder--now will live Claus and his family. Next door to Claus--Claus’ parents. Amazing. So, daily, Ralla and I used the bikes at Gunder’s to ride basically the length of Larvik’s Main Street, along the waterfront and the railway, to the Musikhuset, where there is a venue, more or less out of use, and places for bands to rehearse. We had the mainstage to ourselves, and Claus’ drums and the bands’ gear to play on. Instead of using the main PA, we simply plugged the out put of a wireless mic receiver directly into a powered monitor; bridged that monitor to another, and another and another. So only my vocals were amplified, and it sounded just fine. We set up on the stage (the drums on a carpet borrowed from Baard’s mom) sort of facing inwards in a rectangle, and the floor of the venue was used for me to pace around in. There was a beat up old piano for me to do vocal warmups, although before Gunder’s house filled up I would do warmups on his piano. On the way to rehearsal I would stop off at Pakkhuset, the restaurant on the pier, and have an espresso--there was better cafe available in the center, but the ride uphill is really punishing so...I accepted lower quality for less effort. All in all, it took about 5 minutes to ride from Gunder’s to the Musikhuset. We worked on getting Ralla up to speed with the 3 new songs we’d worked up with Claus (which we debuted in Larvik earlier this year) and managed to write 6 new ones. The last song of the batch, which is not quite finished, is a monster hit, and we have some really amazing new songs. At one point, Baard had to run up to Oslo, so we were done in the afternoon; I borrowed a guitar from Bjorn and that evening wrote a song in literally 5 minutes that’s like Elvis Costello meets the GoGos. Awesome. What I truly believe is the best song in our arsenal was written on the last day, when we were feeling like we had squeezed the goose for all her eggs, and I was starting to feel concern that long days of singing were going to have an adverse effect on the show the next day. Bjorn pulled out a couple of loose ends, I made a rhythmic suggestion and in ten minutes we had this monster chorus and groove, like the Strokes on steroids. Unf. we haven’t played it live yet, the lyrics are incomplete but close. I think we’ll be able to debut it in September for our Swedish shows. The days alternated in a ping pong match of awesome displays of nature’s fickle sentiment--one day we would be donning rain gear as streets flooded and lightning blasted the landscape--the next we would be shirtless and sweating in glorious sun. But the thermometer didn’t get too much of a workout--and I did not envy my Seattle friends enduring triple-digit temperatures. Most nights I crashed straight after we were done; although the night that the extra French and Norwegian house guests arrived we all had an introductory drink at the waterside beer garden just 2 minutes’ walk from the house. I watched my DVDs of Reinlykke (Reindeer Charm), a superb series that follows a family of Sami reindeer herders for a year in the far north of Norway. Randomly, Ralla & I watched the Godfather Part II, which you know, is really, really good. I think I prefer it to the first in the series. My responsibility was to make sure that Gunder’s daughter’s pet rabbit was fed, had its litter box changed and had water. A floppy, long-eared lop. Leaving a Frenchman in charge of a fat...delicious....rabbit...mmmmm. Super bad idea. LARVIK, 7/31 I slept in to rest my voice and went down to the space at about noon. Our mugs were in the local paper, we had a good preview for the show (evidently there was a good review in the print version, I haven’t seen it yet). We ran thru the entire set, me singing at about 25% of full voice and avoiding high notes. Then I went back to the house, where Lippie and the band were rehearsing--piano, acoustic guitar, djembe, and multilayered vocal harmonies. I took a nap, it was actually good music for daydreamers. Then I headed to venue, walking up the hill to Cafe Passagen, which is beyond and above the town square by half a block. The Cafe exists as a patio, a courtyard, hemmed in by other businesses. You enter a passage at either end of the courtyard and you’ll find a few tables out in the open air inside a the walls. The interior portion of the cafe has two floors--one with the counter for ordering coffee, cake, ice cream, and simple foods; and then upstairs is a room with tables and a tiny bar in the corner. A very friendly woman named Hege is running the place. It’s a sunny, pleasant place, and it’s amazing she puts on serious rock shows--a small stage sits under an arch at one end of the patio--she even had a black metal band play recently. Electronica, hip hop, it’s all welcome. For the shows, one entrance of the passage, that enters behind the stage area, is closed with a gate. A stand for selling drinks and barbecue is set up, the tables and chairs are put away, and a PA is brought in. When I arrived, the band was playing ‘Gonna Get Worse’ one of the new songs. I hopped up and was able to finish it, and we ran thru more tunes. The sound onstage was excellent. We were fed, and then I went again back to the house to rest. When I returned a little while before the show, the place was filling up. We pushed back our start time, and I ironed Ralla’s shirt for him...while doing so, a journalist from OP came to talk to us for some quotes she could use in the review. OP had suffered a SNAFU that day--the morning edition, that we were in, went to bed the night before just as a major story was breaking--a ship ran aground in the area and spilled 1000 tonnes of oil near a natural seabird nesting habitat--and thus the big papers were able to break the news and OP lost out on a slam-dunk scoop. So our reporter was reviewing our show *and* returning to the accident scene *and* writing the pieces all before 11.30 when they start to lay out the next day’s edition. Meanwhile, I prepared by careful, managed use of the Hege’s newfangled wine glass pouring machine--a rectangle refrigerated glass case that displays half a dozen upright wine bottles au choix. A nozzle brings wine out into the world from each bottle--in the meantime the machine maintains a level invisible cloud of argon gas on top of the wine, which means a bottle can stay open for weeks and still be fresh. It works for light, unpretentious wines and she had some nice French whites and a very good Crozes-Hermitage rouge amongst the selections. Below each nozzle are three buttons--one for a taste portion, one for a small glass and one for a large glass (most bars in Norway have two amounts that can be poured for wine that you can choose depending on your budget and thirst). You put a key card in that had credits on it--and Hege trusted me with it. I could have easily, in earlier times of my life, emptied that machine like it was a big, expensive shot glass. But I was a cheap date. Eyes on the prize on show day. Esp. since I knew I would be up early the next morning and have another show...and that combo cost me my voice in May. The show was excellent. Amazing. We were simply on fire, and the small dimensions of the stage were so easy to work with....the uneven terrain of the patio was good for comic acrobatics, and I even ran into the cafe a few times--literally, once. The new songs were already woven in seamlessly--except that in many ways they are better songs...my voice was i perfect condition, and I made good jokes (best of the night: in the band introductions, since Baard lives in Larvik and is everyone’s buddy, he got way more applause than Bjorn. I played it as: “well, I can see which one of you has been using more effective birth control methods” as if Baard’s fanbase were illegitimate kids! Heavy!). People were eating that shit up like cottan candy made out of crack. After the show Claus had nothing but praise for the band’s development, and Ralla’s addition in particular. And Ralla is ridiculously good. I hope we can keep him entertained enough to stick around. I think we can...and I think these new songs are gonna make us rich. I was Cpt. Sensible, I had one glass of wine and went back to the house and slept, because.... USKEDALEN, 8/1 ...at 5.45 my alarm went off. I felt great. The sun was out already, it was already a radiant birdsong-y morning. I showered up, breakfasted on Leverpostei and knackebrod, and did my best to wake up Ralla. God knows when he got in. We uploaded the maxi taxi with all his stuff, then finally beat him with a stick and threw him the van. 8am flight to Bergen, and then Daidalos, the festival organizer, met us at Bergen airport, and gave me some dough for our twenty minute taxi ride into the countryside. We were dropped off at a small quay deep up some fjord and we boarded a small boat that took us (and a Finnish fan, Anna, who came to see these shows and was on our flight) on a 90-minute trip to Rosendal, a small hamlet between Bergen and Haugesund. The hotel had its own quay, and we disembarked and I went back to bed. Perfect. I emerged only when it was dinner time. A van came and took us to restaurant about 15 minutes from the hotel, and brought us back to the hotel, waited for us for the 40 minutes’ downtime, and took us to the festival grounds which were, in fact, back by the restaurant. A big stage stuck on a paddock somewhere in farmland. Pretty full on production. We arrived, and it wasn’t long before we were setting up and suddenly, we were ripping in to it. The stage was about 9 feet high, and the audience seemed pretty far away. Plus, they were beering up in advance of headliners, so we really had to work hard, much harder than in Larvik. Getting down to the audience was quite a feat, there was a flight case I could use as a step, but everything was covered with plastic fabric...but I made it down and was able to jump around in the mud with the kids. So, in fact it was working. I think we were great, but, it wasn’t ‘our’ show, the night really belonged to Kaizers, and in fact they are really amazing live. This morning at 7.30 when the car was waiting to take us to Bergen, a 2.5-hour drive, I had to get a key from the front desk and bust into Ralla’s room and literally pour him into his shoes. Very funny stuff! Then flew home. Paris is marvelous in August--empty streets, no traffic. Ahhhhhh. Vacation time is upon me, purely and solely. Love KS Paris
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The latest release by Ken Stringfellow is a split EP with Spain's Muy Fellini, featuring never-heard-before music incl. Ken's take on Bob Dylan, released by
King of Patio records
in Spain on Oct 8, 2009.
Order it directly from Muy Fellini here www.myspace.com/muyfellini
10" VINYL ONLY!!!
older news :
8/3/2003
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