Friends

day230, originally uploaded by persephassa.

wearing: pink embroidered dress i got in ventura at street scenes classics when i was in college; minnetonka moccasins, ebay

( y más )

I couldn't help noticing, at the Faraday Festival, just how different my act was from everyone else's (with the possible exception of Robyn Hitchcock, who really blew me away with his set of surreal psychedelic songs). I seemed to be the only performer not playing a musical instrument, the only performer to move around on an empty stage, the only performer to use his body to any significant extent, the only performer to be aware of the positions of the lights and orient specific songs to specific lights or stage positions, the only performer to dance vigorously while singing, the only performer to mime the situations unfolding in the lyrics, the only performer to use gestures that assumed constant attention from the audience, the only performer to embody various dramatic personae in the course of the songs -- men and women -- and the only performer to be dressed in a costume and a wig (see Jordi Vital's photos). And was anyone else swordfighting?

I don't say this to boast, just to note a radical divide between what I've come to do in my music shows and what most bands do: they stand there, playing instruments and singing songs, while a lighting guy does their lights and a sound guy their sound. That -- and the odd forceful gesture with a guitar -- seems to be enough for them. Anything more would be eccentric, unmanly, dangerously artificial. It's as if we came from two completely different traditions, these musicians and I. They come from music, I'm essentially a theatrical clown, in the direct line of commedia dell'arte.

It's partly a question of age: I'm older than most of them, formed by the 70s, by glam rock performers like Marc Bolan and David Bowie, or obscure 80s followers of theirs like Alberto Camerini, the synth pierrots of New Romanticism. The glammers and the pierrots took Bowie's "whole new school of pretension" and Adam Ant's "ridicule is nothing to be scared of" very seriously -- and, sometimes, to ludicrous effect. But somehow, after them, music lost touch with theatre. Glastonbury and Avignon went their separate ways. I personally blame Grunge's puritan revision of punk rock values ("we mean it, man" became we mean it, man) and MTV's association of theatricality with everything over-commercial and untrustworthy.

It's a great pity, because the result is a festival completely overshadowed by the drama of its own setting. Faraday takes place in magnificent clifftop gardens, dominated by Romanesque villas and a lighthouse, overlooking a nocturnal sea, with a cape of glittering stars flung overhead. During my set there was a brief power cut and a firework display over the sea. Naturally, all this got incorporated. The audience loved the mime -- a hit-and-run accident acted out entirely in gestures for "The Mouth Organ", a scooter ride through Rome for "Giapponese a Roma", a wheelchair-bound Robin Hood, the disabled Beowulf -- the ludicrous gesticulations, the theatrical magic happening on the stage. It was as if the music were finally working with the magic of the setting, rather than against it. It was as if people had been hungry, in this atmosphere of cookie-cutter, formulaic "indie" music, for some kind of theatrical eccentricity -- and a wider sense of what "indie" is -- to re-emerge, to re-enter pop music.

On Saturday afternoon I bought a copy of french newspaper Libération, and sat there over coffee on the seafront, under the palms, reading it. Libé had a pull-out special on the Avignon theatre festival, which runs this year from July 4th to 25th. It reminded me of my snobby boast to the NME all those years ago, and of my constant refrain, in interviews, that pop music is the most conservative artform and needs -- desperately -- to learn all it can from other, more adventurous, arts. Avignon this year has a whole series of plays based on Dante's Divine Comedy, including Romeo Castellucci's production, which sees the damned forced to gaze at each other through eyes pinned open by Ludovico's Technique, from A Clockwork Orange. This, more than any music paper, was the world and the stuff of my songs.

The atmosphere of Libé's Avignon section was darkly, glamourously Gallic. "Everything I do has a connection with catastrophe," Castellucci told the paper. "Every story starts from a darkness, an emptiness" said director Joel Pommerat on the next page; his play was said to "fog up the viewer's perception to the point of anxiety". Huguette and Rene Radrizzani (that's Rene's splendidly grizzled face on the left) were "transmitters of obscure forces, passionate about sulfurous texts". They'd translated "difficult" German expressionist August Stramm into French. Also appearing at Avignon this year: Mathilde Monnier and Philippe Katerine, Ostermeier's Hamlet and the new Heiner Goebbels, Jan Fabre and the Brothers Quay.

One day I'll go to Avignon itself, but for now I'm happy to be a kind of mini, portable Avignon-of-pop, bringing a touch of bizarre theatricality to an indie music festival near you.

sunday we went up to the olympic peninsula to a town called port townsend where my friend robin's parents have a house. IT WAS SO NICE. very peaceful and the stars were great. i really love traveling. i guess we've established this already. BUT its nice being able to compare the stars in port townsend, wa to the stars in marfa, texas. man those stars in marfa, they were REALLY something. it was like some crazy incredible glittering maddness. so anyways, i have a running list in my head of the "best-of's"and things are slowly stacking up. i don't know if it is a good thing that i am keeping a running list of places as i go. basically a place becomes eligible even while i am still in the place. instant reflection! i guess i'll just go with it. see what happens.

still not sure what exactly is happening next. we were toying with the idea of going back to eugene for the country fair, then we thought maybe we'd go back to portland and spend time in hood river and then head to boise and east from there. but i think maybe we decided to go to canada? vancouver for a day or two and then drive south-east to glacier national park and then down to yellowstone from there. does that sound good??? TIP ME. PLEASE. why are people always telling me "oh i read your blog" but then no one ever comments?! i just don't understand. what is with you people?

also! we are watching reality bites (again). why is this movie so ingrained in my life? but now that i've actually been to houston, i can relate to this movie on a whole other level! its so much better! i am so happy!

okay so. i think its time to say goodnight. so goodnight! and see you again soon!!

These chemist's shop and hairdresser signs date, I'd say, from the 1940s, though I may be wrong. I really adore the letterforms here, Modernist but still quirky.

The tiled street signs are magnificent. I'd date these to the 1890s; they're clearly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec theatre posters, the Paris metro, and Art Nouveau.

Train and restaurant graphics from the 1920s and 30s. High Modernism is all mixed up, in Italy and Spain, with Mussolini and Franco. It must be difficult for Spanish to admire Modernist graphics without thinking of these dictators.

Then again, I can't look at Comic Sans -- woefully popular these days in Vilanova -- without thinking of contemporary "dictators" and their "evil empires".

Even worse than Comic Sans on a Spanish cafe blind is Comic Sans condensed on a van or a supermercat Staff Wanted sign.

Microsoft paranoia began to set in at this point: could the writers of political graffiti also be using Comic Sans?

Here's a fascinating example of uniformity in the service of diversity: the same paper, with the same Helvetica graphics and the same stories, but two different language editions, a Spanish and a Catalan one, distinguished only by the red and blue tops. The lead story is about linguistic diversity, but the paper's title is wonderfully generic: The Periodical.

No Parking graphics from "the age of the car".

Some nicely-fatigued signs at the train museum, demonstrating that even where mechanical type systems strip a town of quirk and diversity, the weather can bring it back.

Our hotel had a splendidly non-harmonised series of monograms on towels and sheets.

Some nautical references in a fish shop and a block of flats on the seafront.

Finally, postmodernism gives us some big, bland drive-in graphics and a half-hearted attempt to revive the kind of hand-lettering -- and therefore the kind of personal, local, quirky charm -- its reductive uniformities of global logistics and standardization threaten.

But let's not forget that when it's fatigued, discontinued, safely historical, all this -- and even Comic Sans -- will take its place in the rich tapestry of graphic design's endless diversity. The rehabilitation of Comic Sans, as we saw the other day, has already begun. The dictator becomes, in the end, just another citizen, the crushing weight just another geological layer.

braxton found this... it's a video game, it's really amazing.

day229, originally uploaded by persephassa.

wearing: vintage red slip, bought in some shop on melrose in like 2003; green melissa wedges; earrings from ebay

grainy photo, i dunno why.