33 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn July 1, 2010

Surround Sound

It is summer in the city and we’re Brooklyn bound for a party above the Metropolitan Exchange. I’m close encountering people in the subway, one of whom rocks back and forth  as I start to hear a bass line and a drummer who hovers over the snare drum with a pair of brushes waiting to pounce. A voice cuts in to announce delays because of a train that has lost the will to venture beyond Wall Street. I commiserate as I begin to lay the foundations for a quiet evening at home when the doors close. A little later, we emerge from the subway and despite the sun in our eyes, we are able to decrypt the BAM sign that is our compass for this evening. A cigarette is lit but I am restless and so convince the smoker to abandon at half mast as we follow a woman talking to a cell phone to an elevator that takes us up to a roof top where we discover dancers, architects, musicians, film-makers, a public defender, painters; I meet a sound designer who lets me DJ with his I-Phone which directs its playlist to jump through the hoops of an itinerant sound system. As the sun sets, I pick my way across the vegetable garden to pay my respects to the Manhattan skyline before finding my way to the stairwell where I unpack my guitar and play with a saxophone player called Paolo to my left whilst Pablo plays trumpet to my right. I take off my shoes and a boy with 1950s scientist glasses sits down and starts to beat out rhythms on a watering can whilst a few people pull up chairs on the landing above. Paolo is playing a little too safe so I lean in towards him and sing that what I’m after is a walk in the park after dark….A girl’s voice emerges from somewhere above us to back me up and as Paolo takes my hand, I am suddenly surrounded by sound. I won’t go quietly; I’m singing and dancing, I’m laughing and romancing and I’m grazing my fingers on the steel strings of my guitar that have me nursing them in salt water the next morning. After we finish our set, the flame of the party is starting to flicker so we leave, scattering promises to have lunch sometime like confetti.

In the subway, Paolo curses the potency of the Sangria, before falling asleep with his head resting on the window behind him as I keep watch whilst reading a book of Russian poetry. Just before his stop, his saxophone case skids out from underneath him towards a young couple who are holding hands. He recovers the saxophone, nods apologetically and there is just enough time to tell him about a gig in Harlem at the end of the month. Later, as I walk home, the smile that I direct towards two elderly women who are sitting on a stoop, denounces a world that is sometimes too wonderful for my weary head. I think of the tangled web that we weave to hustle for gigs, book rehearsals, compare schedules, order flyers, update websites, distribute flyers, send out invitations that can wear musicians out so we forget to remember what it’s all about. 

I think back to an African-American woman who walked in front of me along 1^st Avenue a few days ago, singing a Brazilian lullaby with her arms outstretched and her hips swaying, hushing the traffic until something in me stood very still. As the woman makes a right turn, I stand at the crossroads of 26^th and 1^st turning the message over in my hand as though it were a rare coin on which the inscription reads that you need to play wherever, whenever, whatever and with whoever to surround yourself with sound until shutting down is no longer the question. 

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Corner of 6^th and Avenue A, NYC June 18, 2010

Wherever the day took You

I am in an impossible yoga position. Yet it is – and I become – possible. A voice fills the room, telling me that control is an illusion. I find myself in a head-stand in spite of myself. The day passes as a dreamscape. Way up high, painted on a building at the corner of 6^th and Avenue A, someone has written “YOU GO GIRL!” I take it personally. Heading towards Avenue B, in between two blocks of flats, there is an oasis where beauty perseveres. Someone has named it the “Creative Little Garden”. How apt, I think before finding my way to a small Italian bakery which serves cream sodas which ensnare any doubts you might have during a mid-morning crisis where the items on the to-do list seem to require several life times. A day passes, at times unnoticed, despite efforts to give it the attention that it deserves.  Later on, I am at LaMama watching an evening dedicated to young choreographers. A kaleidoscope of thoughts audition on the mind’s inner stage: how do they do that? Or why did they do that? And then why wouldn’t I do that? If you don’t get the picture, watch this space.

Afterwards I meet up with Paolo and Constantine who are sitting outside playing chess on Thompson Street. I marvel at the time signatures of their tactics as they strike whilst the iron in their minds is still hot. We head off for an improbable pizza before catching the father of Afro-beat, Tony Allen at the Poisson Rouge. The mind’s inner audition resumes, only this time, I am bewildered by one aspiring thought who is singing how could you not need to do that?  “Hey Tony!”, shouts a girl to my right as he is taking a solo, she is dancing and stroking her hair, swaying her hips sunny side up before she flips him the bird. He smiles, looks away, then back for a  double take; I don’t know what happened next because I get distracted by one of the guitar players who is making something implausible look far too easy. As I look on, one of my thoughts is singing why can’t I do that? in perfect pitch.

It’s late. I share a cab until 63^rd and Park Avenue. A few moments later, I am standing outside my apartment and I can’t find, I don’t have and I don’t know when I last saw, my keys. It is two in the morning. I walk to the Deli round the corner where I buy a cup of coffee as the owner plays with a kitten: it’s a party but not a blast as I am tired all the way down to my bone marrow. I ask the owner if it is ok if I just wait here for a few moments while I decide who to call trying to remember those New York friends who have trouble sleeping or who work on round the clock projects. I’d call myself but what if I pick up? I call someone else. I leave a message. I wait to be called back as I sip my coffee. Then call again. A voice tells me the way to Roosevelt Island. I reach out to borrow a pen, take notes before taking a plastic cover for my coffee cup as I step over the kitten who takes a swing for one of my shoelaces on my way out. I half listen to the cabdriver’s lost key stories as I am trying not to spill coffee on my lap as well as take in the sights to behold as we cross bridges that lead to a corner where a that’s what friends are for smile awaits.

I turn to face the Manhattan skyline which seems worlds apart instead of a short ride on the F train. A few hours later it is the next day and I am forced to borrow clothes before going to find my keys which are in my office. I go to lunch. Afterwards, I play guitar. I get depressed. As I am about to send the jury out to decide whether I should practice every day for 8 hours or never go near my guitar again, I am invited to see an open rehearsal and a film showing of an artist in residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a Swedish choreographer called Pontus Lidberg. I see my friend Tracy who says “wherever the days takes you, that’s New York”. I go to dinner with a school friend whom I have not seen for twenty years. We go to see the New York City Ballet. The Balanchine piece Who Cares signs, seals and delivers this as one of the best days I have had since I got here. And as we walk out into the summer’s night crossing Lincoln Center, taking in the fountain, we turn to catch the eye of two Chagall paintings. On my way home, I cast my mind back to Lidberg who talked about not being too rigid about deciding which music to use when you work on a piece of choreography and that you need to be where “things can happen”. I take out my keys and open my door to a place that is not quite how I left it. Or is it me?

A few months ago, a man wearing a straw hat toying with a glass of wine asked me why I moved to New York. Words failed me as silence reigned, the memory of which is a life sentence. What I should have said was this: “Maybe I need to sing it.  And after that? I’ll dance it. And then I’ll film it as I take its picture. Thing is, I don’t know whether I have enough of whatever it takes in me. So that’s why I am here. New York is my need to know.”

Because wherever the day takes you, things can happen.

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Via Guido Reni, Flaminia, Roma, June 4, 2010

During the last ten minutes of Roberto S’s class, I manage to gather some footage before finding my way to a car which awaits, the engine still running so that we can make a quick getaway to a destination unknown, that is, Rome’s attempt to claw back a sense of the future, the MAXXI.* I discover Gino De Dominicis. I mistake a woman posing with her son for an installation. I marvel at Luigi Moretti’s architectural sketches. I occasionally take in the silhouette of my partner in crime, Stefano with whom places become timeless and who is right here even though he is over there.  Afterwards, we steal away for an aperitivo before we are forced to resume play and retreat to pick up where we left off, separate yet related. Days later, as I sit in the plane bound for New York, I wince as I nurse the wound of the realization that this also applies to Rome – New York and that sometimes it is a joke that wears a little too thin. I begged only to differ, not to choose. Then again, there was no choice. No need. I am here as I am there, in a similar – though not the same – vein. As I marvel at Rome through a lense of twilight hours, I mutter those words that give way to a feeling that is itinerant: tu ci sei. We have been here before. I was on stage in Harlem, riffing with Pablo while William had my back and there’s Fredi to my left* and I am alive as you looked on.

* Pablo Masis (trumpet) – William Catanzaro (percussion) – Fredi Meli (bass) at the Shrine, Harlem NYC on April 27, 2010.

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Corner of 87th and 3rd, NYC, May 22, 2010 

A man throws himself out of a window on the Upper East Side. That’s supposed to be my opening line? It can’t be. The aftermath – the cops, the onlookers, the yellow police tape and the men hosing down the sidewalk merely slowed the pace; they did not break my stride. Shivering in the subway? The air-conditioning. The jumpiness before a live set in the Village? Stage-fright. The tension in my neck the next morning? The way I curl and cave in around my guitar when I play. Walking a block over before finding my way home last thing at night or first thing? Variety as a spice of life. The mind has a habit of slipping. I run out to post a letter and as I withdraw my hand, I look up and remember, not the act but the omission. Take note and bear in mind for the next time I file a return as a humanist. "Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow".*

If no two minutes silence, then at least a moment's hesitation, a hiatus if you will, even if it necessitates a momentary lapse of whatever reason has you running to catch that train, plane or automobile. Do not run that stop sign. And every so often, remember to check for a pulse or any signs of life that testify that you have not succumbed to indifference nor the arrhythmia of self-importance. Just checking.  

* T.S.Eliot The Hollow Men 

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Returning from Redhook, Brooklyn, March 27, 2010  

“Mais un matin, je suis allée me ballader dans Central Park, juste après l’aube, et j’ai senti une nouvelle liberté.”

I wrote this one morning in a letter to a friend, Jossia C. as though she were sitting opposite me after an early morning walk. To behold a city as it awakes is that moment of grace that heralds the beginning or the end of an affair. This being New York, it invariably feels like both, all at once, daily, on the hour, every hour. As I skirt the edges of the Upper West Side, I think that we should do this more often. We won’t of course; there will never be enough time, to my mind. Whether we live each day as our first or as though it were our last, what becomes of us during those days that lie in between? Where do we go, during the affair? How is it that we dare to sleep? As I stopped to buy a paper I turned to see a stack of mattresses on the sidewalk on which someone had scrawled BECOME YOUR DREAM. I took a picture. A few days later, I start to wonder. What do you do when you are your dream? Where do you go from there? There will be others, of course. You gotta believe. But what if you are just the one?

I met Mariliana Arvelo* at a Flamenco Workshop given by Rocio Molina at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last February. A few weeks later, we booked a studio for three hours and capitulated to a place where dance, music, photography, theatre, ideas flowed with such speed that my sense of time escapes me even now. I edited together some of the footage though the film is but a passing glance of the art of our conversation that day.* There is a photograph that Mariliana took of me which will come back to haunt me in my twilight years. I am airborne. Do not ask me how I got there nor do I remember what happened next but I still feel the warmth of the embers of a fire that burned so very brightly in an instant where I was Blake’s tiger, defying the camera to frame my ‘immortal symmetry’. When I look at that photograph now, I know that she caught me as I was but no longer am. I was free to be my dream. In that moment, there is a happily every after, that is, until the ground rises up to reclaim you from where you must begin again to search for your next opening line. Later, I am walking through Red Hook in Brooklyn with Giovanni B. speaking about duende. I do not mention that I have been reading Lorca. I want to hear what Giovanni has to say. On the way back to Manhattan, I emerge from the subway listening to a saxophone player who plays, seated, further down the platform. This is what I realize and it is all that I can come up with, for now: that we become our dreams time and time again and so we should, and so we must. For it is an act of defiance through which we never cease to exist.

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Corner of 85th and Broadway, NYC, February 2, 2010

Ce Rouge n'est pas Noir

The first page of a new notebook upon which my hand rests before it reaches for a pen. Memento mori of what happened next, who stayed on and who we left behind. Snow begins to fall as I leave the bookshop on the Upper West Side. I pause and balance my bag on a raised knee so that I can fish out a hat as I heed my mother's advice. She did not mention gloves which is just as well seeing as I can not find them. As I make my way to the bus stop, I catch myself smiling at this act of rebellion. Rejoice! The notebook burns a hole in my pocket. I chose red this time. My blood is red. My wine glass was just so last night. And my lips? Blue. Although they too will turn to red. As though my life might depend on it, I will and must write. As I sing and as I shall dance, whilst there is still time. And whilst there is still a measure of breath left in my lungs, that can emit the cries that followed the first.

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Union Square, NYC, January 15, 2010



will You Look at that ?

 Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of a boy on a skateboard just off Union Square with his hood pulled up over his head with a violin in one hand whilst the other swings with a nonchalance that has me all choked up with envy as he flips his board up, uses his loose hand for leverage so that he can clear the curb before landing on the sidewalk as the lights change. His timing is impeccable. So is his sense of space. With all of the people who are hurrying on by to his left, to his right, not to mention to all 360 degrees of him, it is a miracle that he did not hit anybody. Will you look at that! Reminds me of watching Benjamin’s Millepied’s Everything Doesn’t Happen at Once at the edge of my seat at Avery Fisher Hall last october, where a collision amongst the dancers seemed both logical and inevitable. 

I have been cooped up all day, reading books on regulation and the cabin fever has me headed for Central Park where I walk around Jacqueline Onassis Reservoir which is partly frozen over. Every so often, I stop to marvel at the birds huddled together in transit as the ice melts ; others take off, to join other groups, or simply to soar on up high before coming into regroup. Who needs to see Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera and thereby risk bankruptcy, even if Christopher Weeldon is choreographing? Before me extends a universe which transforms into something, which only days later I am able to name : mandala. I think of Bejart’s Bolero , or Nijinksy’s Rite of Spring.  Even if you don’t get the picture, take a look anyway. And while we’re at it, someone put a call through to Alastair Macaulay* and tell him that we have at last found Balanchine’s heir.



Later, I stroll into the Neue Galerie where I have words with one of its founders, Serge Sabarsky (1912-1996 ) who tells me that, " If art is worth looking at, you do not have to make a study of it to understand it. You just have to look, look and look ".* I am familiar with Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Kirchner but I have never been up this close and I start to see them as I saw the mis-en-scene out on the lake with no assumptions or diktats other than to witness beauty, the ephemerality of which is eternal. I am unable to recreate the melodies I heard whilst I watched the birds at the Reservoir, nor do I recall the chords that were struck by the paintings of the exhibition From Klimt to Klee. I was, however, paying attention, and it is in that state, from which I am all too often exiled, where music flows. I think back to that boy on the skateboard and wonder whether the musicality I saw as he crossed the street was real or imagined. You might say the phrasing was all his whilst the music was there only for me to hear. 

By the time you read this, I shall be gone. I shall be wherever it is that I need to go so that I am able to make sense of what Bejart said to me in a dream I had last week. That in the last piece I wrote, I had not heard all of the counts and as he danced before me, counting it out, I saw that a piece of music can contain beats that are unaccounted for in the time signature. 

I had another dream which came back to me when I saw an old photograph of the Egon Schiele museum in the Czech Republic at the exhibition at the Neue Gallerie. In the dream, I stood in front of a building with a windowless grey facade which I began to walk past before Baryshnikov appeared by my side and stopped me by taking my arm and turning my attention to an archway which contained a doorway, the beauty of which I had seen but overlooked. "Look !", he said, "Venice !". And I saw.

* Senior dance critic of the New York Times. 

* Serge Sabarsky : A Full Life (2002).

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The A57, bound for Nice Airport, France, January 6, 2010

Mme Bovary, ce n'est pas moi, non plus!

I had intended to write about the christmas lights that I admired whilst walking through the old town of Hyeres shortly after midnight a few hours shy of new years eve. Or the lights which mark out the main street in La Capte, which is a border town just before you reach the peninsula of the Presqu'ile de Giens. I'll save the story of how I once danced a pas de deux at the behest of an imaginary cavalier beneath those very lights for another occasion. The mood is not festive nor was this much of a holiday and so, as the French say, passons, not because I fear that I might turn to salt but because there was a gorgon's gaze that caught my eye. I knew better. I asked for the bill, l'addition s'il vous plait! and headed for the nearest airport leaving those Mme Bovary's too weak to resist the adultery, the anti-depressants and the anti-ageing creams to cat fight it out amongst themselves. Spare a thought for Charles, but just the one. And remember, if he does come knocking at your door, ain't nobody home.

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Corner of Eldridge Street and Rivington,* Lower East Side, NYC, November 30, 2009

For those of you who missed the Happening...

I see what you

HEAR what

YOU saw when I

HEARD

Ladies and Gentleman, the purpose of this intervention is to explore and to pursue an approach to composition which is mediated through movement. My songwriting has been transformed by dance which has enabled me to see e.g. handshakes which strike chords. Not so long ago, I remember seeing a dancer walk across a room to ask for a glass of water and I realised that if I could no longer hear then I would listen with my eyes. Of course, this revelation is not confined to dancers as if someone has a certain presence – call it ‘aura’, if you will – I hear it. I like to think of it as visual and relational counterpoint. We* will be performing three songs off of my first album ‘We’re Inside Out’ so that you might see what I mean when I say, " I hear you ".

* The Salon, Live Arts Collaboration/The Performance Project at the University Settlement

* William Catanzaro (percussion) Lloyd McNeill (flute), Gessica Paperini (dancer and choreographer) and Marjolayne Auger (dancer).

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ATTITUDE at the Corner of Bleecker and Perry, NYC, November 22, 2009

Here’s one for ya. So it’s sunday morning and suddenly it’s sunday lunchtime and how did that happen. O.k, so I’m not latelate but lets just say that I’m am not even going to make the tail end of the express train to 14th Street. I shower, I put out the trash, I lock the door, walk down the corridor and then walk back cursing because maybe I left the stove on and maybe I didn’t but definitely, I don’t want to be the one to burn this house down, so I unlock the door and the stove is off, so are all the lights, the milk is in the fridge and we’re good to go. I hail a cab and the guy starts to tell me about a citizenship application that he’s making on behalf of his sister who is a millionaire in India. He’s telling me about all the money her husband makes and how she doesn’t really want to move to this country but she’s doing it for the kids and there’s traffic coming at us from all directions or maybe that’s us and everyone else is standing still, it’s kind of hard to tell and the guy is still telling me about his sister and I suddenly start to wonder whether it’s me he’s talking to because with some drivers you can’t tell because they start talking and you start to say, "Hey, I don’t speak Hindi/Punjabi/Korean/Tasmanian… " and then you see the earpiece and you realise they’re on the phone and your cue is when it’s time to hand over the cash before you check the backseat to see whether you left a glove or a stray dollar bill behind before you slam the door with a " Haveagoodday ! ". Anyway, I lean forward and I see that there is no earpiece so I am out of luck because I am going to have to make polite conversation and I really don’t want to because this is a ride that I just want to sit back and enjoy, you know, like a small present to myself instead of an avoidance issue because yesterday some guy killed a man with a steak knife in the D train for not giving up a seat where he’d put his knapsack. So the driver is still talking about his sister and I say could you put some music on and he says that he doesn’t have any CDs and I say what are those just above your radio, and he says, yeah, they’re CDs but they’re not music. It turns out that a lady sent them to him. O.k, he says, lets try number 14, that’s the last lesson. Lesson ? Yeah, lesson, and he slides the CD in and this woman starts to talk in a very warm, youknowyouwantto voice about stress and about how you have a choice about how you react to stress, you can react negatively and that makes you anxious and that will probably give you a strokeheartdiseaseorcancer. Or you can embrace the moment, detach and not allow yourself to be dominated by the stressful moment, like being caught in traffic, the death of a loved one or working for a boss who bullies you but you really like your job and you don’t want to quit because you have bills to pay and kids to feed.

We’re still evil knievelling towards Union Square and I am kind of edgy but I don’t dare put my seatbelt on and anyway we’re almost there and the lady is saying that it is all about ATTITUDE ! 

O.k, so if this was a movie, this is where there would be a flashback to my last ballet class where we were supposed to do a promenade in the Adagio in attitude and I kept falling and that made me late for the music and I hate it when that happens and anyway, being a musician, I should know better because it looks like I am messing up the counts when really, I just can’t dance. O.k lets drop the negativity and just say that I have some Adagio issues. So I am thinking about how to work on my attitude knowing all the while that this was not the ATTITUDE that the youknowyouwantto stress lady (hereinafter referred to as the "stress lady") is talking about but hey, maybe not, because you dance as you live, and even if I have attitude, I don’t seem to be able to sustain it, at least not in the promenade which I hate anyway, and everytime we get to that part of the class I can’t wait for it to be over. Where were we…let me see, Union Square, stress lady, attitude…oh o.k, so we arrive at the Village Vanguard and I say thank-you very much, that CD really calmed me down and it did. Me and my friend E., we decide to go down to the High-Line as it is still nice out and so we walk around the Village and up and down the High-Line and E. tells me that I should come here with my guitar to play and maybe I could sell my CDs and I think why not, I mean it’s not like all roads lead to Williamsburg or anything. A little later, we’re walking through the Village and at the corner of Bleecker and Perry we see this line of people waiting outside a Marc Jacobs store and we start to get up close to the windows and E. asks these two blond haired girls with French accents clutching large white paper shopping bags as though their lives depended on it, and who am I to say that that ain't so. So anyway, E. asks what’s going on and they say that they are waiting in line to shop and as we look in through the glass door I say , " You’re waiting in line to shop ?! Get a life ! " and we move on, back up towards the Village Vanguard and E. gets on my case and I say, yeah maybe I shouldn’t have said it and then she shows me the house they used as a facade in the tv series « Sex and the City » and I groan and I think back to those two girls and I want to go back and say READABOOK, WRITEAPOEM, SPILL WINE ON YOUR MOTHER IN LAW'S FAVOURITE WHITE EMBROIDERED TABLE CLOTH THIS THANKSGIVING AND WATCH HOW TIGHTLY HER FACE DRAWS IN AS SHE MANAGES, IN SOME KIND OF CRAZY VENTRILOQUIST THING SHE’S GOT GOIN’ ON, TO SMILE AND HOLLER OUT TO HARRY WHO’S IN THE KITCHEN TEXTING SOME OTHER WOMAN TO GET THE SALT AND WHADAYAKNOW, HER LIPS NEVER MOVED ! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T HAVE A MOTHER IN LAW ?! WELL GO GET ONE, WHILE STOCKS LAST !

I decide to take the subway headed for the Upper West Side, trying to keep my mind off the steak knife subway guy and I catch a bus cross town which cuts across – o.k, bad choice of word, lets try, makes its way across the park, yeah that sounds a little better. Anyway, the park at night is kind of scarey and suddenly the subway doesn’t feel so bad but if I start my deep breathing exercises I learned in yoga class, it’s going to look kind of weird so instead I focus on a conversation a super size lady is having on her cell phone about having over stayed her welcome at sunday lunch at a friend’s place " I know, I know, but I started talking about the Yankees to Mike and you know how Mike loves to talk and, yeah, that’s right, he was the one who moved to Chicago and who used to fly back for a game…I bet he never missed one ". I get off the bus and I’m thinking about nevermissaYankeesgame Mike as I walk back and I cross over to the other side of the street. This is a rough neighbourhood, full of diners which serve mean and nasty milkshakes. I do the right thing and come home and eat an apple.



So I’m home and I get to thinking about the High-Line and the remains of piers of days gone by and the light and how I cursed for having forgotton my camera, how the light over New Jersey was orangegreyyellow and how excited I was to see Julian Schnabel’s house ; how on my way back in the subway, I started to run through yesterday’s Adagio to understand where I went wrong, and I start to think about a performance by the Bill T. Jones Company I went to see at the Joyce Theatre a few weeks ago (Serenade/The Proposition) and how when I was introduced to one of the musicians, I mumbled that my style was " Acoustic Cinema " and the guy says " What does THAT mean " and I say, "Well you know…it’s like, a soundtrack, you know like when you walk and you hear things and so you write them down in notebooks and then you start to compose and…well actually, it’s the way some people move because if you pay attention, you can hear them and…". I kind of let my voice trail off and I start to look for an ashtray to put myself out in and he’s smiling, he’s being nice, you know like you are to a great uncle who drools over his plate during Thanksgiving dinner but nobody says anything because it’s not nice and your mother is kicking your brother under the table because he hasn’t yet learned that it isn’t polite to stare but what do you expect, Charlie's only seven, deep down in that 50 year old beat up body of his. Anyway, I’m thinking, ATTITUDE, ATTITUDE because THIS PLANE IS GOING DOWN AND THEY DIDN’T TEACH ME HOW TO LAND IN A FIELD AT THE PILOT SCHOOL I WENT TO and the stress lady who is now this IT- Guru in my head is shrieking like some crazy long-haired, green tartan wearing banshee, "CHOICE, CHOICE, NO NEGATIVITY, NO NEGATIVITY" and is it me or is it suddenly too hot in here and there are beads of sweat on my brow and I just about manage to hand over my card before I take the heart attack I’m having outside, where it belongs.

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Corner of West 22nd Street and 8th, NYC, November 12, 2009

Happenings and Housing Policies

Yet another store for rent. I could do with a place to practice. I imagine rehearsals, the countless takes, interrupted coffee breaks, with dancers lounging around, texting, as they wait for their cue, yawning, stretching into improbable poses, offering half heartedly to go out for donuts and all the while, people outside on the sidewalks, hurrying by. Given the fibre optic speed at which New Yorkers walk, I doubt that they would notice except for a crazy lady with two plastic bags and the heels of her shoes worn away who presses her forehead up against the glass and starts to sing a litany of abuse ; it is only when we take five, that we realise that she carries quite a tune. How about that. On my way home late one night, I step over a man sleeping under a blanket outside a subway station in Midtown, just two doors down from another empty space which used to pass for a shoe store. My eyes stray beyond the padlock towards where the cash register used to be. There's a sign. Everything Must Go ! Is that an order ?

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 East 23rd Street, NYC, November 9, 2009.

There is something hauntingly evocative about moving figures on a basketball court after dark. The first time I noticed them was on the edge of Midtown and the upper east side. It was after a concert at Lincoln Center. Haitink ushering the LSO through Mahler’s 9th to its ultimate decrescendo which not only fortells the demise of the dream that would be the 10th but also that after much, but not all, was said and done, Mahler would go quietly. I heard the players move before I saw them. I thought I heard a woman’s voice calling the boys home to get ready for dinner. "Just 10 more minutes, ma !" The second time I saw them, it was out of the corner of my eye from the back seat of a cab on its way to the lower east side to a place by the river which serves fish soup that deserves to be induced to Zagat’s hall of fame. A group of kids sat on benches whilst one boy, unmarked, dribbled the ball with enviable nonchalance before taking a shot. This time, it was not back to childhood that I was transported but to a place where I was the figment of someone else’s imagination and the ball players were gods. The cab turned into 23rd street. That was why I turned away, and not because of the ricochets of the question contained within : is it too late to join in ?

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 West 37th Street, NYC, October 24, 2009.

Here’s a confession for you. On wednesday morning, I took the morning off. I went out for a short walk, bought a newspaper, some fresh rolls, came home and made myself a good cup of coffee and read the paper in one sitting. I know. Shocking. The feel of the paper between my hands, spilling onto my lap and over the side of the chair,… a reminder that the thrill has not yet gone, for newspapers, books, nor for vinyl. My memory is curated by my hands. As I watched the film, "In Search of Beethoven" earlier this week, I flinched as my hands were reminded of how caressing the spine of the complete set of the symphonies actually feels. I had forgotten. Beethoven was already in the future. He is as eternal as the beautiful being that was Merce Cunningham whom I saw as part of a video tribute by Charles Atlas at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) earlier this week. That evening, I had received unwelcoming news. I found my way to an Italian Delicatessen in Midtown and could not hide the tears in my eyes as the owner treated me to coffee, italian biscuits and wise cracks that snapped me out of my momentary conviction that nowhere is where I’m headed. Her voice still stinging in my ears, "You gotta make it happen !" was enough fuel to get me to West 37th Street where I was rewarded to an experience that embraced not only those people in the audience who knew, worked with and loved this wonderful man, but all of us who were present. There was a discussion after the film between Atlas, the Director and Patrick Bensard, the Director of the Cinématèque de la Danse based in Paris. We clapped and clapped; I had to stifle a cry for more as I frowned at those who seemed a little too eager go to the reception up on the 6th floor. I relented and decided to join them, albeit grudgingly. I looked out over the Manhattan skyline and felt as though what I had seen was a gift for Everyman, a feeling that I also had whilst watching "In Search of Beethoven". We must be reminded of our basic humanity ; if we are too distracted to notice, then let us rejoice that there are others who will go to great lengths to ensure that these messengers do not pass through our lives unnoticed. I am drawn to the BAC’s activities. Then again, I have a weakness for places and people who provoke me into paying attention, which is so central to an artist’s vocation, or indeed any vocation for that matter, even one as simple and as gravity defying as staying alive. I am not going anywhere, I am right here.

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547 West 26th Street, Chelsea, NYC, October 17, 2009


Resist to Exist



It is bitterly cold which makes this a good day to linger in nearby Art Galleries whilst waiting for the doors of the Cedar Lake Theatre to open. I have come to see a panel chaired by Sasha Frere-Jones on the Music Business as part of the New Yorker Festival. This is a field-trip for a research project I recently began working on at New York University Law School. I am also here to understand whether the music industry is in ‘free fall or in transition’, as someone referred to it during the discussion. The music industry is dead, long live the music industry ? As an academic, I’d arguably like to know the answer to that question. As an artist, I shiver at the thought of an answer which might turn artists like myself to stone. Although that might be because I have been bulemically reading my way through books on copyright these last few weeks which should, in my opinion, be issued with a public health warning given the sleepless nights that they have provoked. Then again, it is almost Halloween. Or perhaps I have trailed this early cold spell around with me for too long and it has finally hit its mark, having gnawed its way to my bone marrow.

Once inside, I take a look around the room. Are we onlookers, or merely innocent bystanders ? Or simply voyeurs who are slowing down on a high-way squinting our way through the flashing lights, straining to get a closer look ? Ushers police the aisles, buoyed by an air of self-importance that a tag around your neck marked "New Yorker Festival " undoubtedly inflates. I covet the tag and envy their easy gait, which is not so much as to say that ‘I belong’ or ‘Don’t storm the stage all at once’ as to declare ‘STAND BACK !’. Someone forgot to fence off the seating area with yellow and black tape.

I can hear people laughing backstage. What do they know ? Once they pick up speed, will we be able to tell what it is that we don’t understand about The Music Biz ? I take notes. (I left the white coat and the stethoscope at home). I can already predict the critiques concerning methodology that lie in waiting in academia. I also know that my musician friends will mock my note-taking during our next studio sessions. As the discussion gets underway, there is much banter about the changing business model and I wonder whether we are in fact dealing with just the one…Frere-Jones says that perhaps it is a good thing that no-one is entirely in control anymore to which Danny Goldberg, President of Gold Village Entertainment responds, " But there never was… ". As an academic, I pause briefly to consider whether it is safe to say that we are dealing with varieties of capitalism.* As an artist, all I really want to do is bid a hasty retreat, back to those High-Line Art Galleries which seemed to be centrally heated by the words in neon lights which spell out « Anything Goes » in morse code. Or so I like - and need to - think. 

Jace Clayton a.k.a. DJ/rupture spoke the least yet, in my opinion, had the most to say. Having had a look at his blog* and listened to his mixes together with those few words that I was privileged to exchange with him after the panel, I came away with a resolve to continue to preach in favour of diversity, by which I mean diverse career paths. I handed Clayton my business card which also has this to ask of itself : « Are you an Artist ? ». He smiled as he read out the question. I thought back to a six year old girl at a dinner party years ago who excused me from the dinner table so that I could draw with her. She took a look at my haphazard doodles, accomplices in a concerted effort to spell out her name on a scrap of paper lifted surrepticiously from a pile stacked by the phone ; as she began to decipher her name, she asked in a mixture of admiration and accusation, « Hey ! Are you an Artist ? ». I still do not know, Ida. All I have to go in is this incessant need to create which is cluttering up the basement as well as clogging up my arteries. There are days when the urge is a condemnation, not to being an artist, but to living up to being Miriam, or lets be perfectly honest, to just being. Supporting diversity amongst artists is central to what I do and in so doing, I suppose that I am trying to do not only what I say, but be who I am, at any and indeed every, given moment. A six year old version of Ida would probably not understand this and would no doubt dismiss me, sentencing me to a return to the dinner table she sprung me from. If she still does not understand, practically grown up as she should be by now, then good for you Ida. 

I think back to the lyrics in " Letter Home " off of my debut album We’re Inside Out. "Can you hear me now, am I loud and clear ? So you don’t see me now, we’ll I’m still here !". That song was inspired by versions of the film « Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner » (1967) with Sidney Poitier and Spencer Tracy that I have experienced, as my parents did before me. The link here is not one forged by colour but by difference. Resist to exist, I muttered to myself as I edged my way through the crowd towards the exit. « Resist to exist, you know… », I said to the people from Revolution Books.* Resist to Exist I blew into my hands as I waited at the bus stop. Resist to…– o.k you get the picture. But are you getting all of it ? Fade out to strains of « All of Me »…




* See P. Hall and D. Soskice Varieties of Capitalism : the Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford : University Press, 2001). 



* http://www.negrophonic.com.

* http://www.revolutionbooksnyc.org.

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 1071 5th Avenue (at 89th Street), NYC, September 30, 2009.



Remember Paris and the Kandinsky exhibition I missed at the Pompidou Centre ?* I caught up with it at the Guggenheim, where I walked up and down the inner spiral, marvelling at the pictures, and the production line of people with headsets from which I could faintly hear a voice that sounded like a bee trapped in a glass turned upside down as they moved obediently from picture to picture. Comparisons with Rorschach tests were unavoidable. After seeing an I-Pod at the centre of one painting, I bid a hasty retreat. A woman drops her cup of coffee onto the white, spotless floor of the café and I start to see the head of a horse emerging at the edges of the spill. Later, I leaf through a book in the museum shop and Natalia Goncharova catches my eye: « You can understand the most abstract of things only in the forms that you see most often, and also through which whatever works of art you’ve seen – that is consolidated within some kind of material, through an understanding or, rather, recapitulation by previous artists. Of course, within all that material you perceive only what resonates with you. »* 

Someone walks past with their headset with the volume turned up so high that the bee trapped under the glass sounds mildly hysterical. I see a terrace on a mid-summer’s night and a dinner with friends ; the nerve-endings in my body twitch as they remember leaning down to pick up my napkin as I shoo away the mosquitoes circling my ankles looking for their next hit. Later, I stand overlooking people with headsets who move from painting to painting and I am reminded of Lucy Guerin’s piece « Corridor » that I saw at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) on September 19th. I imagine being able to interrupt the recording that they are listening to so that I too can play a game of ‘Simon says…’ ; I wonder whether they would obey. Do you know what unburdens me the most in that instant ? I start to hear the opening lines of a piece of music that my fingers itch to transcribe. I have not lost consciousness. I am fully aware of this moment as a kiss of life and I am grateful for all that I am about to receive. I can not hear the paintings, at least, not yet ; instead, I listen to the movement of the people studying them, some, at close range, others, nervously pacing from one to another, to each other, onwards, then backwards, as though they embody remote-controls zapping through Kandinsky who is on all of the channels. If you need a commercial break, all you need to do is slip into the shop where you can buy the t-shirt or make do with a set of magnets. An old couple walk past me with matching raincoats and even though their headsets seal their ears, I can still hear the bees buzzing away. This is what it might be like if you were able to hear other people think. 



* See below.



* Amazons of the Avant-Garde edited by J. E. Bowlt and M. Drutt (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2000) at p. 310.




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Greenwich Village, NYC, September 25, 2009.




"Did I tell you about the time I was in Greenwich Village, in the North part of Washington Square, listening to some jazz and this boy with a clipboard comes up and asks whether I want to be interviewed for a documentary on water ? I didn’t ? Really ? Wait, let me get this. O.k, so it’s my first day in New York, and I’m in the Village, sitting on a bench with my paper nursing a so-so coffee and this kid comes up to me, no really, he’s just a kid, he could have been my kid brother, you know the afterthought kind, that come way after. So, the afterthought kid, says he’s kind of like an actor and I say, « what’s that supposed to mean ?» and he says, that o.k he’s an actor but right now, he’s working for a producer who’s filming a documentary on water and he asks me whether I’d agree to be interviewed and I say sure, why not so he hands me a pen and I sign a piece of paper which he says is a waiver, which I don't actually read. Is that bad ? Yeah, I know but you know, it’s kind of like, well,…anyway, so I’m in the Square and there’s the kid and I have just signed the form and I have to wait for the person before me to finish up. So I am waiting and the kid is talking to a guy with a guitar and I say this is not going to work for me, but I’ll do it if… « what’s your name ? Mark ? O.k Mark, here’s what we’re going to do, you play, and I sing and that’s the interview otherwise no deal. »

The kid gets all excited and says this could be pretty cool…and Mark, well he starts strumming a few chords in D-Major which as you know is my favourite key and we’re starting to jam even before they start to point the camera in our direction. Finally, they’re ready for us and there’s this guy with the microphone who’s asking us all these questions about water, is it safe, do we drink bottled or tap water, what kinds of minerals does water contain and I’m like calcium and…er…potassium ? And he’s like potassium ? And I say well I eat bananas with my water... and he looks a little pained, he says « So you guys…how long have you known eachother ? » And the guitar player says that we’re best friends and that we were just hanging out in the park, and I say yeah, we were just hanging out, jamming, you know and the interview guy says « Jamming ?! », and starts to snigger and I don’t know whether he’s making fun of the word or my accent, and then I start to worry that maybe he knows that I only just met guitar park boy, but before I know it, guitar park boy saves the day and starts to play, and there we all are, you know, Washington Square, the Village, it’s New York and there's me, a camera crew, a guy with a microphone asking me dumb questions about water and guitar park boy who’s getting into it and he’s taking no prisoners and I’m singing, « Talking about water, like you know we awtah, you should speak with your daughter, about drinking the water, keeps you awake at night, when your chest gets all tight, worrying about water, talking about, crying about, screaming, shouting about…waaherh’terrr.. », and we forget where we are and who we were and planning on being, it’s all right here and it's all right now, you know what I'm saying, and we’re not ready to go,…and I'm like closing my eyes and I'm singing, « …talking about, laughing about…waaaherterr… » over and over.

I had that tune in my head for days. I was like hey, this could be something, you know, it could be something and in that something there’s someone that I can really, you know, BE…and afterwards, guitar park boy and me, we exhange cards, trying to stay out of sight of the camera people because for all they know, guitar park boy and me, we go way back, before junior high or something, and so he’s telling me that he’s doing an open mic session later on that evening with his girlfriend and I say maybe I’ll drop by until he tells me that it’s in Brooklyn and suddenly I have a meeting that I just remembered I mean, I haven’t even been in NYC for 24 hours and I need to go to Brooklyn already ?! Give me a break ! So I give guitar park boy my email address and later when I check my email, I mean it can’t have been more than a few hours but you know how a few hours in New York can feel like a life time ? No ? Are you serious ? How long have you lived here ? 10 years ? And you have never had that feeling, you know hey where was I at 10 am this morning, I mean in which of my nine lives was that, because you know, it feels like it happened to another you, I mean this city moves so fast,…anyway, I’m checking my email and there it is, you know, this message was sent to you from my blackberry kind of thing and I’m like what the…and then I am like, oh ! NOW I get it, Mark from the Park, yeah, Mark…from the Park and I think that’s so cool, you know, Mark from the Park and I’m thinking about it on the bus later and the craziest thing happens ; the bus stops somewhere in Midtown and the doors open and there are people coming and going, you know and it’s rush hour and I’m thinking why didn’t I just take the subway and suddenly I hear this saxophone and there's this guy playing along to our song, you know the water song, it is so freaky because I had forgotten all about the song and Mark from the Park but the sax man, he’s feeding me my lines, and the song starts up again in my head, as though the quarter in the juke box got stuck and somebody just kicked it which starts the song all over again, or after a power cut, you know, when you leave a record on the turntable and the song’s in mid fl—…and boom, the lights go out and you curse because you’re all out of matches and you don’t know where you left the torch, and you’re cursing even louder because you just stubbed your toe and it hurts like hell and you’re mad as h---….and woooooeeerriiihh…. « staaaa---y---nnnndd biiigh..yourrrr MAN… » or whatever it was that you were listening to before the lights went out. The doors close and I’m like « No, wait ! Mr Sax Man wasn’t finished…and I’m thinking maybe I should get off, and go and hear what Mr Sax Man has to say about our song about the water because it’s like he’s giving us all that we can eat, you know…and so anyway,…where was I ? What ? I don’t know…anyway, that’s my story about Mark from the Park, yeah, good old Mark from the Park.

Yeah."

(Pause)

"Speaking of parks, did I tell you about how when I was walking through Central Park last Sunday I stopped to watch some people throwing a frisbee around and there’s a man clapping and singing to his grandchild who’s in a pushchair and he’s doing, you know 4/4 and there are a bunch of kids on the swings which aren’t oiled or something because they’re making these squeaking noises, no not the kids, I mean they’re laughing and chattering but they’re not squeaking, it’s the swings that are squeaking, and people are swinging baseball bats, and people skate past, and there are little kids on little bikes, and there’s the whupwhupwhupwhup of a helicopter overhead, there’s the traffic that you can hear through the trees from way beyond, a voice says « dad, can we go shopping now ? » and then there’s the thhhwaawp sound that a ball makes in a baseball mitt, you know like when you were a kid and you spent all those hours breaking in your new mitt sitting in front of the tv and your mom yells at you for spilling glove softener oil on the sofa or was it the cushions, I don’t remember. What ? Oh, yeah, well, here’s the thing, I’m standing in the park, and I can feel the breeze breaking out the goosebumps on my arms and I’m like closing my eyes and everything I hear, I mean everything has a place, or maybe it’s me, I don’t know but I can place every sound, I can find a logic to everything I hear, it’s like they’re related or something you know, like a symphony, I swear, it’s a symphony because they’re linked and I can hear them in…what’s that thing called, we read about it in class the other day…what ? Counterwhat ? Counterpoint ? Are you sure that’s what it’s called ? You know when there are these different lines or voices…counterpoint ? Well, ok, counterpoint. So I was like hearing everything in…you know, counterpoint. And it was. Well. I can’t say awesome, not now I’m college. But it was. Awe. Some. Awesome. But hey, this is New York, right. And anything goes, right ?! Even counterpoint ! Thing is, that’s the problem. It goes, I mean, it doesn’t actually stay. It’s too fast, I can’t keep up, it's like it creeps up on you and suddenly it’s all there and you start to get all excited and you’re struggling to put down your bag to open it up and find the pen you swear you left in there somewhere if you could just find…and then it’s gone. Wooosh! No more counterpoint and it’s like it never happened. One time, I almost asked this woman sitting next to me on the subway, excuse me, did you hear the…what was it called…counter-…yeah well, whatever, I wanted to ask her whether she just heard what I heard…I know, I know, it's a little crazy. Of course I did not ! But I did say to this other woman who was in my way this morning, I mean I was late for work and she’s like standing right in front of me, bending over, looking for something and I have to get to a meeting and I already got held up picking up the laundry so I say…ok so this is bad, you swear you won’t tell anyone… you promise ? Ok, so I say « MOVE IT, LADY !» And I’m wondering who just spoke, you know. Will you stop looking at me like that ! But you know what was even worse ? Almost immediately afterwards I started to laugh and I’m walking up the steps out into the sunlight and I’m like, this is New York, baby! And I’m swaying my hips from side to side right down the street with my head held high, and I can hear that song, you know, no, not the one about water, who cares about the water song and the guitarparkboy, I’m in New York and I’m walking down the street and I’m hearing « …ain’t no stopping us now…we’re on the MOVE ! ». Yeah, it was like... well whatever. I have to go."

"Excuse me, ma’am? Hello? Excuse me, can I get these to go ? Thank-you!"

"Anyway, see you later. Hey ! Are you sure it’s called counterpoint ? It doesn’t sound right…I'm not sure whether that was the word that I was looking for..."

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Upper East Side, New York, NY, September 12, 2009

"He's going to rip you oawff", says an elderly man in a baseball cap with a walking stick, and a wife as I cut through the line for yellow cabs at JFK and accept a ride from a man with his sun glasses perched just over his forehead who is pointing towards an unmarked car whilst still talking to someone in spanish on his mobile phone. "See that man over there?", I say. "He says you're going to rip me off. What do you have to say about that?" He laughs and we negotiate a flat rate. "Is this Queens?" I ask after a few minutes as he's taking backstreets that the yellow cabs tend to avoid - or so he says. A few minutes later, he says "Still Queens". And twenty minutes later we're leaving Queens as we edge over a bridge with subway trains rumbling overhead, a woman in sneakers carrying shopping bags who is overtaken by a cyclist who perches up over the handlebars of a racing bike that has seen better days as he coasts his way home through the rush hour. We make it to the Upper East Side for the appointed time to pick up a set of keys and a list of instructions and an impressive collection of take-out menus. I can hear the city closing in around me as I sip a glass of water in the garden. A walk around the block reveals drycleaners, a hardware store, a convenience store where the owner tells me that she's from Indonesia and says, "Where you from?" and "We deliver". There's a Sushi bar round the corner, a coffee shop where you can buy Italian mineral water, another drycleaners, and oh look there's another. The newsagents sells lottery tickets that I do not understand and a stone's throw away, there's a movie theatre. A week later, I'm there, it's a full house on a rainy saturday afternoon when they have shut off the midtown for the labor day parade. I am watching Mary J. Blige singing in Tyler Perry's film "I can do bad all by Myself" and the audience is whooping and clapping, and by the time it's up to Gladys Knight they're raising their arms and we're singing backed by the gospel choir and the reverend and we're in this together. We're swaying from side to side and nodding and this is a good place to be; sing and you breath right, sway and you move better. Later, I unlock my door and heed Berberova who urges me to read Pushkin. Should have bought some popcorn. Eugene Onegin is another film, or several. As I reread the verses that I find the hardest to follow, I wonder what he would have made of the Twitter generation. (though seeing as technology moves so fast, that will probably be replaced by another gimmick tomorrow. I'll update...). From what I can tell, I think that they are all going to have neck problems by the time they are into their sixties the way they are hunched over their phones or computer games in the subway or in the buses. I even saw a senator texting during Obama's health reform speech. Yet the media went for the senator who shouted, "You lie". He apologised but there was no mention of the texting senator in the papers the day after. I must have imagined it. While we're at it, why don't we try to imagine what he wrote. Answers on a postcard please.

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Oslo, August 14-17, 2009



"There is life beyond the suitcase ", says Nina V. as we sit in Malika Makouf Rasmussen’s flat. I have arrived to perform at MELA, the world music festival which takes place in Oslo every summer with the essentials, namely a guitar, a notebook, my laptop and a bottle of whisky. My suitcase is still in Nice. I am tempted to keep the whisky and head for the bus station to make my way North, performing circus tricks with guitar and vocals along the way. I decide to hand over the whisky and suggest a toast instead : « Viva la vida ». Sara Bertoglio, who is going to dance with us, arrives and comes to the rescue ; I live out of her suitcase all weekend.

There are a host of festivals going on around Oslo ; you hear music wherever you go and it is mostly for free, which is another example of the value that Norway places on culture and diversity which is accessible to all. It rains all saturday and there is still no sign of my suitcase ; Sara and I spend all afternoon having lunch after our rehearsal with Malika, Froy Aagre and Oystein Bergsvik in a pre-production unit with graffiti walls and a funky chandelier you itch to take home with you. We complain about the coffee, but other than that Oslo is a warm welcome. Down by Radhussenplass, where MELA is taking place, there are people from all over the world. Beautiful people, great food and a feast of sounds that I try to take in all at once. A group of boys run by holding the Pakistani flag singing « Pakistan, Pakistan ». Meanwhile the Dhol Foundation are doing their soundcheck and all I want to do is dance. Sara and I skip around a bit as the other artists check one another out or pointedly ignore eachother in the hospitality tent back stage over curry. We meet Abiji and his dancer Nawaal and their agent Guillaume, who joke with us in a mixture of French and Italian. Abiji says in French « This is a wonderful life, to be able to travel, to meet people, to play music together, isn’t it ? ». We all stop and smile for a moment ; he’s right, this is a wonderful life.

We play for 30 minutes and as usual, it is over in the blink of an eye. I recognise a few friends in the crowd. As we were tuning up, I could hear musicians playing on the second stage and others tuning up on the third stage, and I remember a piece by Stockhausen which is written for three orchestras who perform on three stages. It is an eerie moment and enticing too as we start to play along with the musicians who are doing their set and I have to strain to withold my voice. Afterwards, we meet up with friends and a photographer, Knut Utler* shows us his pictures which are stunning. « Ma, questa, sono io, sono io… ? », asks Sara, the dancer who rarely watches herself in the mirror in class. They are pictures that I can hear and I tell him so later. We’re by the port, there is a cool breeze and there are seagulls overhead. That night, we celebrate and after all is said and done, the suitcase arrives. At the airport the next day, I hear a voice which awakens me as I day dream my way through the queue to get through security : « Miriam ? Miriam ? We really enjoyed your concert yesterday ! ». I smile sheepishly and quietly enjoy the moment of having been recognised at an airport for the first time. Later, I run into the Dhol Foundation in the departure lounge and have a conversation with one of their engineers that is worth missing a flight for. At one point, he says « Tell me, what did the Fortune Teller actually say ? ». I laugh and say, « Someone was paying attention... ». I think about this afterwards as I run through the set again in my mind’s eye and sense that during our set there was a communion which was played out between the music and the dance, separate yet related…separate yet related, and four words come to mind, four words, two people who also breathed as one. Merce Cunningham John Cage. Separate yet related. Music and Dance. There is a drawing board that I need to get back to.

* http://picasaweb.google.com/knututler

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Paris, August 11, 2009



Writing in a café in Montparnasse. An elderly man gets up to leave from a table nearby and pauses to read over my shoulder. Says that it is rare to see someone writing by hand. He thanks me, says that little time remains, that he is on his way out, another three weeks perhaps. Says that the image of me, right there and then is an image that he will treasure. His brown eyes are slightly milky, his gait unsteady, though his heart is young, at least momentarily so. He leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. I laugh a little nervously and look at his friend who stands behind him with an expression that is both troubled and tender. I hesitate, smile and say that there is no need to exaggerate. That whenever I sit and write, people tend to observe me as though I were an exotic side-attraction at a circus. « Merci, en tout cas, merci !» he gushes and he is gone. I take a moment to look out over the square and I remember the tightness in my chest a few weeks ago when I thought that I had lost a bag which contained a notebook which I had almost finished. The terror I felt, thinking that I could replace the credit cards, the ID card, and cared very little for the mobile phone, but that the thought of losing a notebook was unbearable. Tu te prends pour qui?

Just over twenty four hours in Paris, and rarely a dull moment. On arrival at the Gare de Lyon, I make my way towards the Bastille and amble through the Marais over the river towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. Most of the bookshops are closed. It is August after all. There is less traffic than usual. There are alot of tourists. Should I complain, as someone did the other evening over dinner : « Ah…mais il y a trop de touristes maintenant… ». So stay home and watch DVDs instead, I think. And anyway, I continue to muse silently,it means all the more for us...


 I feel uncomfortable feeling superior over the hordes of tourists who queue up for hours to see Notre Dame or the Musée d’Orsay. At 5, Rue de Varennes I pass by a woman in red shorts, a white t-shirt with purple flowers, white sneakers, and a map. Her husband is trying to get her to look up so that he can take a picture of her standing in front of Rodin’s statue of the Thinker with the Eiffel Tower in the background. He is a little impatient. She seems not to notice ; or is it an opportunity to take revenge ? I picture this woman working all hours with a postcard which says « I love Paris » tacked to the wall of her cubicle at the office. Or perhaps a magnet of the Eiffel Tower holding up a receipt from the dry-cleaner’s on the fridge. I can’t place her husband’s accent. « Honey…honey could you just… ». She’s still fixing the map as though she has been ordained to read somebody’s palm. I wonder if the arteries of the Paris metro reveal any tall, dark, handsome strangers… «Honey… », her husband persists…and I wonder as I look at the woman, which of them is in fact the statue…As I pace around, anti-clockwise, hearing the gravel beneath my feet, I marvel at the play of light on the Thinker’s back which seem to show that he is alive and well and that at his feet, stands a ‘Statue of a woman from the Midwest contemplating a Map’ (2009 – Currently at the Iowa Museum of Modern Art). Either that, or she is trying to decipher the number of a beautiful boy in a Brasserie who leant over after her husband had gone to pay the bill to talk to her. She will not call him; instead she savours a moment when it is the thought that counts.

The woman in the cloakroom of the Musée Rodin says that she enjoys working here. As I film her, she tells me that becoming Rodin’s mistress was Camille Claudel’s downfall. She carries a light inside, this woman, a brightness which transpierces her eyes and flows from her hands which accentuate what she is saying, as though she is conducting an orchestra with careful modesty. She is graceful, and I would like to tell her so. She is a little overwhelmed by the fact that I want to talk to her and that as I do, I film her. I had to ask permission from the head of personnel. It occurs to me that I do not even know her name. 

Later, as I walk past the Panthéon, I notice that one of my favourite bookshops has been replaced by a clothes shop. I am a little stunned and start to look around me and notice the fast-food shops, the gift shops, the mobile phone shops, the clothes shops, shoes, glasses, accessories, clothes, fastfoodpizzacaféinternetWIFImoreshoesmoreglassesTWOFORTHEPRICEOFONE.. !! Where have all the bookshops gone ? Don’t people need to read anymore ? Later on, Clint Eastwood says « I’m old school » in the Gran Torino which I go to see in a nearby cinema and I squirm a little in my seat as I wonder how did I get here ? How did I become the woman who identifies with an Eastwood well into his 70s, a woman who inscribes notebooks, who loiters in stationary shops and lingers in second hand bookshops nursing the desire that one day I too shall buy heavy art books that cost a fortune, and I shall say over dinner… « Ah yes, I was in Paris last week, but I just missed the Kandinsky exhibition at the Centre Pompidou….yes of course I bought the book…but it does not have my favourite picture…what is it called…I always forget…ah the memory really is not what it was… » I can’t really talk about my favourite Kandinsky ; I am not yet on intimate terms with his paintings. I did miss the exhibition though. I was too busy enjoying the sense of homecoming as I walked through streets at random. I also savoured the fall after the moment of puffed up, self-important pride, when I finally surcumbed and bought myself a sweater which was on sale near the Bastille. I could have bought two novels by Nina Berberova instead ; she has become my latest obsession. I cursed a little on the train back to Hyères afterwards as a new sweater is not as entertaining as novels when you have a four hour train ride before you. You can not direct those films in your mind’s eye as you read, not even as you pause to look at yourself in a reflection of yourself in a tunnel and notice that the colour matches the lipstick you hastily applied after meeting up with a friend for lunch before catching the train home. Though you can smile a little and know that whereas you may be a little lost, you are not yet gone forever. Go on, the next time you find yourself at dinner, say how Paris was insufferable, that there were too many tourists…that there should be a law against them, you know, quotas, that sort of thing…and then, the first thing you do when you get to New York ? Wake up one morning on one of those double decker busses and catch yourself complaining bitterly about the woman who suddenly gets up and walks right into the picture you were painstakingly composing of the Empire State building…If you are perfectly honest, the next thing you will do, and the next thing you must do, is laugh. At yourself. A little bit of self-irony goes a long way as a saving grace…I love Paris, I love Nina Berberova’s novels, and yes, I have also taken a fond liking for that sweater, which has the sort of French allure that I was aiming for as opposed to the Espadrilles that were also on sale…although I expect that those would go well with Citronelle, our 2CV…

I think back to the man in Montparnasse who said that he had three weeks to live. « C’est rare de voir quelqu’un écrire dans un café de nos jours. Moi, qui ne serai plus de ce monde d’ici deux ou trois semaines, j’emporterai un merveilleux souvenir… » There was an empty bottle of rosé on the table where he had been sitting with his friend, who had looked on benignly whilst he spoke on his mobile phone over lunch. Was he being honest ? Does it matter ? I will remember the kiss.

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Rome, July 30, 2009



« Il pìu bello viaggio che puoi fare è verso te stesso », I muttered to my friend Simona whilst sipping a Campari and musing about the Leitmotif of the third album just off Viale Eritrea. I think of Jules Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre and wonder whether all creative endeavors can be regarded as an archeaological excavation to enable the worlds within to see the light of day. The second album Trànsito has yet to be released, so how come I am already thinking of the third? There are so many experiments yet to undertake. I must work on my technique so that I can rearrange the furniture in the rooms for manoeuvre and repaint the margins within which I can observe the errors of my ways. « Noi siamo sempre allievi » says Giorgio De Bortoli, the tap dancer at the IALS, in the Via Fracassini. 
How strange to be thinking of the archeaology within and then to come across de Chirico's painting Gli archeologi at the Modern Art Gallery a few hours later. How comforting to witness yet again that somebody else's actions speaks louder than my words.

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Rome, June 1, 2009

Feast or Famine? 

A feast of performances*, though a famine of inner creative spark. The former enables the latter to be navigated, if not con calma, at least with a sense of the impending return of the muse who has been in absentia these last few weeks. I will not cross check my diary to confirm that those weeks may make up a month, or several. I have yet to persuade my muse to keep regular hours. I am not exactly thinking in terms of 9-5 but the odd appearance would be comforting, or even a post-card every now and then, to say that everything is all right and that she will be back, and if she can't make it, if she has other designated victims to entertain, at least to let me know that a substitute is on her way. I am learning to savour these moments of, if not peace, at least a measure of tranquility.

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*Three Solos and a Duet starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna at the Auditorium Conciliazione;

The Anti-Christ, by Lars von Trier;

Classical guitar concert by Eduoardo Catemario, Tiburtina;

Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting Beethoven's Grande Fuga (op. 133), the Fantasia Corale and Walton's Belshazzar's Feast at the

Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

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Florence, April 26, 2009

Posing for Zoe

I used to work with Zoe Bray* in Florence in 2003-4. At the time, we were both fully immersed in academia but were slowly coming round to the idea of owning up to our artistic drive. We did not talk about it then. In fact, we hardly talked to eachother at all, though I do remember a reception where she looked across at me somewhat quizzically with a raised eyebrow and I caught myself thinking that there may be life on mars after all.I came across Zoe's work after I had left Florence and was so inspired that I wrote to her and asked her whether she would be interested in working on a portrait. We finally got round to naming a date, though it was in fact years later that I finally found my way to her flat just off Santa Croce in Florence for the first sitting. I haven't yet found all of the words I need to be able to recount the experience. Lying still for hours, except for the odd break for lunch or a coffee was extraordinary, punctuated by the sound of birds singing in the courtyard, the church bells from Santa Croce presided over by a statue of Dante, the sound of her flat-mates in and out of the kitchen, the paint-brushes caressing the canvas in rhythms I could sometimes syncopate with the music I could hear within; the quizzical, at times impatient sighs of Zoe as she tried to capture the colour of my skin. I can not remember the sound of my own breath, safe for when I stretched out in between sittings. I can still feel how stiff I felt, though I don't remember how I sounded. I remember how my breathing became more shallow the more I started to worry or become preoccupied. I could see it in the way my chest contracted. I allowed myself to wander, to race, to stumble, to circle ideas, places, people I have known and loved in a series of meditations, at times entertaining a gallery of portraits that I fixed with my gaze in the corner of the room. In Zoe's portrait, I seem to be asleep. In fact, my eyes were open and I was wide awake.

After the first sitting, I drove to France, along the Ligurian coast for 8 hours, savouring the moment of communion, which lingered long enough for me to compose two pieces of music that are quite unlike anything I have written so far. I recorded the songs in one afternoon, breaking away from my habitual approach to 4/4, which had come to feel like a straightjacket. Instead, I teased out different accents and beats with each instrument underlined by logic that I was aware of, though could not name. My instinct also tells me that at least one of the pieces needs to be choreographed to, as I could see a dancer I know as I composed. I marvel at how layered a piece can be, and at how those layers sometimes make sense with the benefit of hindsight. Yet what seems to be a benefit one day, can become a burden the next, either because you may not like what you see or because the light changed, and that what once seemed to be so clear, suddenly becomes trapped in the corridors of a maze where, hidden away in a corner, you spy out the red thread rolled up into a ball of wool.

I went back to Zoe's in May for a second sitting. It was supposed to be the final sitting but we both realised that we might continue to work on the portrait at intervals. We mused about how to continue, in so doing entertaining a host of ideas and projects that we might work on. These are the times when a life does not seem to be long enough for all that remains to be done. And there are times when the eye of the beholder seems to see sides of you that you were unaware of. It is when that beholder acts on that perception of you that you start to realise that you are unable to fully realise all that you are in solitary confinement. This may be why I am drawn to such encounters, though artists by no means have a monopoly over this capacity. There is a word for this in Italian, Scintilla. This is how, for example, a sculptor can create a sculpture from a piece of stone or how a dance teacher can extricate a dancer from a body and if they are particularly gifted, they can liberate the artist trapped within. That's what they mean when they say tirare fuori il talento.

* www.zoebray.net

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