The Welcome Inn Time Machine

In conjunction with the Pacific Standard Time series of events organized under the leadership of the Getty, a performance and public art festival took place over the last couple of weeks in various Los Angeles institutions.
Now, performance art and public art are, IMHO, way too trendy in Los Angeles right now, and clearly not my cup of tea in general, so I wasn't planning to attend any of it. The only exception being the Welcome Inn Time Machine, organized by SASSAS on Sunday. If you don't know SASSAS already, their main focus is sound art and experimental art linked to music.
They've been active for a while and operate at a level where I'd love to see most non-profits work in Los Angeles: they're trying to do pioneering and experimental events while being linked to the century-long tradition of sound art, and they are also very conscious of the archival aspect of what they do, meaning they document all their events. The meeting of sound, music and visual art is really a fringe interest in contemporary art, unfortunately, because if you study its history it is not only very rich but also epoch-changing when it comes to historical movements such as Futurism or Fluxus, and I'm not speaking about the happy meeting of the Velvet Underground and Warhol, etc.


The Welcome Inn Time Machine took over an entire motel on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock on Sunday, January 29th, from 4 to 10 PM. It was a rather successful event, as evidenced by the difficulty to park in a 4-blocks radius.  In accordance with the PST theme of SoCal artists in the Mid-Century (roughly), the events staged in various hotel rooms were re-creation of sound/dance/musical experiments originating in and around Los Angeles between 1965 and 1978, many of them influenced by John Cage who, incidentally, grew up a couple of blocks away from the motel. Kudos to the organizers because they had to coordinate to keep the motel empty, organize security, etc. Their hard work clearly paid off because around 1,400 people attended the event (and maybe more, it wasn't easy to keep track). It certainly was packed when I was there, between 5 and 7.30 PM.

 Here you have a musician from I believe the Calder Quartet about to set up for Bruce Nauman's Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.

 During the performance of the piece, the bow's horsehair started to come loose and untied. I have no idea if it's the result of the way the piece is played* or if it means the violinist hadn't tightened his bow enough, but he valiantly played on throughout. I tried to catch a picture of the horsehair starting to form loops around the bow but was unsuccessful.

 Here in the center is Scott Benzel performing John Cage's Variation IV in a bedroom located on the balcony, while downstairs Dave Muller was doing the same piece, but this being Cage, in a different way.

Pyramid Headphones from the Los Angeles Free Music Society. It was really fun to look at, the music/piece you could hear in the build-in headphones kept on skipping, and we wondered if it was part of the piece or an accident? If anybody from LAFMS reads it, please let us know!

 The Calder Quartet, a gem of a contemporary music ensemble, played and interpreted an unfinished piece left by Arnold Schoenberg after his death. This is the lovely graphic score.

The cello and score left by the Calder Quartet after they played on the balcony. Earlier I had seen someone carrying an LP of the Calder Quartet playing Terry Riley, but I couldn't find where it was sold.

I missed a few things, like Anita Pace performing Merce Cunningham, not that I totally missed it but the space was so crowded - the balcony was at capacity - that I could barely see anything of it.
The one thing I didn't enjoy was the Something Else! ensemble freely performing Ornette Colman, because unfortunately Jazz is totally impenetrable to me.  They performed on the balcony and they nearly drowned what was for me the highlight of the evening, James Tenney's Postal Pieces. I wasn't aware of Tenney at all - he did perform the Satie Vexations with John Cale, David Tudor, John Cage and some other in 1963 - and I was blown away by Cellogram. Here's somebody else performing the piece at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I was so enthralled by it I've spend some time looking for Tenney pieces on YouTube, and I leave you with my favorite piece of his below:




Enjoy!


*if you've been following FBC! for a while, you must have noticed that not only I like music very much, but I actually know nothing about it. Yours truly has zero musical abilities, is tone deaf and cannot sing to save my life. Ergo, everything you read on this blog that is music-related is totally amateurish, and I am not proud of it. But hey, what can you do?

A Happy New Year And All That

Hello, beloved and thinning readership.  Hope you had a great holiday season last month, and greetings from yours truly for the New Year. I know it's almost the end of January, but in France you can say "Happy New Year" until  the 31st, so please bear with me. Here's to hopping 2012 will be better for everyone, with crossed fingers no nation will be earthquaked, tsunamied, nuked, engaged in war,  or anything that catastrophic.
I'm also wishing we're going to see people put their money where their mouth is and support "content creators" (i.e. musicians, visual artists, writers, filmmakers, etc.) by actually buying their work, and big corporations such as Google not only pay their fair share of corporate taxes but also reverse a fair percentage of their enormous advertising revenues (that they get through all those file-sharing and streaming platforms) to the artists. Hello Google, I'm talking to you, you bitch. Nice to be against SOPA - so am I - but there's no reason you should be the only one to get rich while despoiling people who actually make the content in the first place, you big hypocrite, you.

So, what's going on with FBC! in 2012, are you going to ask? Quite a few things. I've been skipping the various local art fairs because, frankly, in Los Angeles they are always lame. I wish tons of success to our local art dealers, but this ain't a great collecting town and it shows. I'm happy for everybody that this year, for the first time in at least half a decade, we didn't have any torrential rain during the fair.
Likewise, I've been skipping the performances related to the Pacific Standard Time series of events, mostly because I'm not very keen on performance art in general (ditto public art) with some exceptions, so I wouldn't be the best person to report on it.

As I was traveling a lot last year* and on various deadlines, I'm slowly catching up with the PST exhibitions. Expect a report in the next few weeks. Alas, since many are closing right now, it means I'll only have a fragmentary vision of the lot. I've heard the California Light and Space shows in San Diego were spectacular and scholarly, unfortunately they're closing this weekend.

In the next few weeks I'll also tell you about Andy Alexander's new project, werk.by - something I believe could be revolutionary, and is community-oriented in a way few artists projects genuinely are these days. Check it out and please be gentle, as it's still in beta. It's for artists only and you have to register, but it's worth it. You can see it demonstrated currently at the Glendale College Gallery, by appointment only as the college is on a winter break.


Musically 2012 will be super interesting for FBC! has Leonard Cohen has a new record out in just a few days, John Cale's new album should be out I believe in May, Scott Walker is said to be recording an album as well, and there's this Beach Boy reunion thing that could be terrible, or very moving. Speaking of reunion, Belgian-Israeli band Minimal Compact is reuniting and playing in Israel shortly. Hopefully they will tour more. And closer to us, Psychic TV is playing at the Echo on February 26th.

Politically, 2012 will be, ahem, interesting, one hopes. Sure you know all about the US upcoming elections, and no matter where your political allegiances are, there's only one way to make your voice heard: vote, vote, and vote. Better yet, once you're done occupying and voting, if you really, truly want to see things change... run for office. As a dirty foreigner and all that, yours truly cannot vote in the US - I can just pay my taxes and hope for the best.
Do you know the French are voting, too? Every 5 years or so, they manage to ruin my birthday by staging one leg of the presidential or legislative election on that day, and sure enough, they're doing it again this year. Good thing Record Store Day happens the day before to soothe my mood.

Stay tuned for more art and music related posts here at FBC!. As for the picture above, it's a Meyer lemon and rhubarb trifle I've made recently. Have a great year everybody.


* I suffer increasingly from jet-lag when I travel and I almost always get sick when I get back, so the catching up on non-FBC! issues takes precedence over the blog, in addition to the meeting-deadlines-of-the-kind-that-pays,  hence the paucity of posts last year. Sorry about that. If you'd like to see more FBC! posts, send me some hard $$$ to support your dubious addiction. It will be deeply appreciated.

A Few Things To Look Forward To In 2012

Among the many things to look forward to in 2012, aside from the incredibly shrinking, dwindling numbers of posts on FBC!, and  the upcoming mega-meta-recession-depression-explosion-implosion-end-of the world-we're-so fucked-and-maybe-the-plague-if-we're-lucky [just kidding. I wrote this to see if someone here was following], here are a few coming to my mind:

- some reflections on the Pacific Standard Times manifestations.  To whet your appetite, I'm globally positive about the whole shebang, but I haven't seen enough of the shows yet. Only concerns for me so far are: 1) quantity ain't quality  and 2) let's not rewrite too extensively art history as it didn't happen. I'm all for rediscovering some art/people, but there's a thin line between art, historical documentation, and social justice.

- This will likely be my very last year living in Los Angeles, for a while at least. So expect some non art-related, non-music related posts about what is so great about the city.

- We love old legends at FBC! and you know what? Next year, John Cale, Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker will all have a new album out. I just cannot wait. I also hope they will tour and preferably all play in Los Angeles while I still live here and can attend their shows.

- Speaking of touring: I'm told there are chances The Monochrome Set might tour the US next year, with dates in Los Angeles and New York. It depends on them getting their visas, which I hear are increasingly difficult and expensive for foreign musicians to get.  It's a shame because we're being deprived of great music, and it's not as if musicians were making much money outside of touring these days. I also hope that The Fall (whose new album Ersatz GB is out) could tour here, even though each time they did tour in the US some disaster ensued. Let's cross fingers that it won't be the case if they come play here in 2012.

- Second to almost last, but not least. The Beach Boys Smile box set (see picture above) is easily the greatest thing I've heard this year. It is otherworldly beautiful, such as that I cried when I first listened to it. If someone had told me one day I would be so moved by Pop Music I would have never believed it. If you used to think Pet Sounds was the best thing ever made, you won't believe how amazing Smile is. If you can't afford the box set, buy the double LP or the CDs now so you don't miss it in 2012. You won't regret it, and it would be a crying shame to miss it. You can buy it at Book Soup here in LA and I'm sure at most record stores, such as Amoeba (they did carry the John Cale Black Friday version of Extra Playful, worth calling them to see if they still have some copies).

- DID YOU HEAR THE SURVIVING BEACH BOYS WERE REUNITING NEXT YEAR WITH BRIAN WILSON??? They are. New album coming out (?) and new tour. This will likely be ruinous for us at the FBC! headquarters as I can foresee really expensive concert tickets (I'd think they would play the Hollywood Bowl, at least, if there's some logic left in this world), that plus all my favorite older musicians above, I can wave bye-bye to my savings.  This reunion could be really horrible or it could be truly great, but there's only one way to know, it's to see them play.

- And as a bonus, you know what's the truly greatest thing that will be happening in 2012? The Metallica- Lou Reed collaboration will be a thing of the past.

That's it for now, beloved and faithful readership. Have a great holiday season whatever the holiday you're celebrating, and a wonderful 2012. And, no matter what you do,  please don't hurt anybody.

Extra Playful - John Cale's Latest Effort Is Tons Of Fun

John Cale's EP Extra Playful has been out for a couple of months now, and in November the US has been graced with a Black Friday edition containing a couple of bonus tracks. Of course we had to procure one copy at the FBC! headquarters, with a bit of trepidation since I wasn't really fond of the new songs when I heard them live or on YouTube. Lesson learned, one shouldn't rely on live videos posted by concert attendees nor on one live iteration to judge music, but wait for the official recorded version to come out.

Extra Playful comes with 5 songs, Catastrofuk, Whaddya Mean By That, Hey Ray, Pile à l'Heure and Perfection, plus Bluetooth Swing and The Hanging if you managed to lay your hands on the Black Friday issue, which I STRONGLY recommend you do. With all 7 songs you almost get a full-length album, and one that augurs really well for Cale's upcoming 2012 LP.

The opening line of the fist song "it's catastrophic, how the money goes" will have a strong resonance for everybody but maybe the 1% . On the other hand,  "you can't take it when you go" is directly addressed to them, I guess - that is, if the 1% had musical taste. Judging by what they buy in art, I strongly doubt it's the case. It's a solid rocker that has lots of energy but lacks the subtlety and the elegance of Whaddya Mean, a very catchy song seemingly about love fights and subsequent sexual reconciliation. I really, but really disliked this last song when I heard it on stage, because I couldn't get over the opening lines "teach me how to love, teach me how to hate" which I found (and still find) incredibly weak.
But then all I had to do was wait for the chorus for the song to be stuck in my head for days on end. I find myself humming it to myself all the time now (but fear not, I only hum or sing when no one is around). You can watch the video clip below, but if I were you I'd just listen to the music without watching it because it's one of the most incredibly boring clips ever made, unlike Catastrofuk (scroll down to the bottom for the latter).  Catastrofuk  was directed by Cale's daughter and it's full of little visual inventions, lively and fun to watch. I hope in the future Cale will continue in this sympathetically nepotist trend and manage to get  his daughter to direct all his video clips. Whoever did the "Cale walking in a field with Instagram-like effects" below severely lacks imagination and should consider a career change in accounting or in the insurance business.





The next song on Extra Playful, Hey Ray, refers to the late Ray Johnson, an artist associated with Fluxus and credited with the invention of mail art. Aside from the postwar art reference that I would of course totally dig, it's a hell of a fun song, with back-up singers shouting out sentences variously related to the Cold War atmosphere "The Russians are coming" (to which Cale retorts "No they're not") or the British Invasion of the 60s (Cale: "not again!"), equating both menaces with the same level of bullshit. From what I've read on the Web it seems regular music critics who take themselves super seriously have trouble with this song, finding it "cringe-inducing" and labeling it "a lyrical misstep". To which I can only say: have you guys really listened to Loutallica? You want cringe-inducing, I give you Lady Gaga. Or Justin Bieber.

Apparently, if you're the unpredictable John Cale whose career has encompassed the musical avant-garde, the invention of alternative music, soundtrack composition, and pop jewels like Paris 1919 as well as the bleak masterpiece Music For A New Society, you're not allowed to have fun  even when you're almost 70, or else you're wont to disappoint  every normative, predictable music staff writer whose musical culture doesn't go back deeper than 5 years ago. Oh well, I guess one can't have everything.

The next song, Pile à l'Heure, was a bit disconcerting to me as it is sung in French,  with some electronic vocal effects that made the first couple of listen difficult to understand (someone told me it was via auto-tune. It's possible, I wouldn't know).
The title means "right on time" in colloquial French.  Cale had sung one super funny song in French before, Honi Soit on the eponymous album (hey, boring critics above, something tells me you never heard of this one. Or of Ski Patrol.), but unlike the perky Honi Soit,  Pile à L'Heure is a rather melancholic if vigorous electronic ballad. Cale explained somewhere that this song came from a soundtrack he was composing for a movie about dressage. That's when the lyrics started making sense to me, with sentences about someone dancing on a saddle, etc. I heard it live in mid-October and really liked it better then, because the live drumming  and the vocals sounded much warmer than the beats on the record (speaking of, hi Michael!). The very last song on the regular version of the EP, Perfection, speaks about someone trying to be desperately perfect, an attitude that inevitably leads to failure. It's also very catchy in a subdued, plaintive way, with once again a very strong chorus. Cale may be 69 going on 70,  but vigorous and inventive are really apt adjectives to describe his music.

If you got the Black Friday edition there are two more songs on it, Bluetooth Swings for which I unfortunately have no use whatsoever as it is for me the one song that is generically a filler, as if Cale felt contractually obligated to deliver a bonus he doesn't really believed in because he might not have had enough time to work on it; and The Hanging. The Hanging, in my opinion, is the true  masterpiece of the EP, with some particularly chiseled lyrics  - which seem to mix a historical imagery of medieval battles, of the revolt of the oppressed, which could  been interpreted as Cale being bullied as a kid and fighting against it,  or as  the current mass movements of revolt in the Middle East and the West (or maybe I'm just imagining a ton of bullshit because I'm in pain and on meds right now. Who cares? I particularly enjoyed the "haemorrhaging history" part, and so should you).
There is a truly beautiful and magnificent trumpet throughout, which reminded me of the great trombone solo during Graham Greene when Cale played Royce Hall last year.
It's no accident that the two most beautiful songs (Whaddya Mean By That? and The Hanging) on Extra Playful seem to deal with personal history, or at least to be inspired by personal events elevated to something more general.  I can't get enough of The Hanging even though the chorus goes "enough's enough", and that trumpet, my God. When was the last time you heard someone being truly innovative with a trumpet in pop music or rock'n'roll? Anybody else is working with great horn sections, these days? Maybe Brian Wilson for the forthcoming Beach Boy record next year?

The EP would be well worth buying just for The Hanging and then Whaddya Mean? as they float well above all the otherwise very solid and catchy songs. If the upcoming album is in this vein, I can't wait for it to be out, and I also hope they'll put The Hanging on it for everybody to enjoy*.


* If anybody in the Cale entourage ever read this and could convince the man that doing some new versions/arrangements/orchestrations of Empty Bottles and The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group Of All  on a record one day was a fantastic idea, you would do a great service to humanity. Or something like that.

A Is For Zebra - Charles White Elementary School

 Stripsody, cartoon onomatopeas sung by Cathy Berberian

This Fall in Los Angeles, there's the mammoth series of exhibitions organized under the aegis of the Getty for Pacific Standard Times (PST), and there are all the other shows loosely disarranged under the imaginary heading "life continues". A pretty remarkable one such show right now, A Is For Zebra, was organized by José-Luis Blondet for LACMA at  the Charles White Elementary School near McArthur Park.

 The exhibition is open to everybody but is really meant for the school children at CWE,  who were having a ball (and a great one at that!) during the opening. Where hot chocolate, cookies and ice cream sundaes were served, something LACMA should do at all their openings, I think (hint, hint).
How better to learn the joys of reading but to see how artists have been having fun with language and the alphabet, whether in videos, artist books, cartoon form, opera singing, experimental music, sculpture or installation?

Stephanie Taylor devised a charming story based on a character whose name is derived from 'Los Angeles", and which by sound association becomes some absurd anglophile narrative*. Her installation featured several objects associated with London, and a soundtrack that I unfortunately didn't manage to hear (they were many children having the fun of their life there!)

 One of the great things in the partnership of LAUSD & LACMA for the school is how works from the permanent collection are being brought to the school. Here's John Baldessari How To Teach A Plant The Alphabet. Proof that conceptual art doesn't have to be dreadfully dry, it can be fun and playful, too.

Because Charles White Elementary is located near McArthur Park, its students tend to be bilingual. A really fun thing in the show was that the didactics were printed in 2 colors, so to read them you had to wear a cool-looking pair of cardboard glasses with color-coded lenses, depending on whether you wanted to read them in English, Spanish, or both. Look how incredibly stylish these cute kids are wearing those glasses. It was really fun seeing kids alternating between 2 pairs of glasses to read both languages.

Stephanie Taylor in front of Mel Bochner's Language Is Not Transparent.

A Is For Zebra is a really fun show to take your children to if you have some, but even if you don't have any it's an interesting and intelligent exhibition to visit, with some incredible historical prints from LACMA's collection (Goya), in addition to the works shown above. And since the exhibition is meant for children to enjoy and have fun with, it's also not overwhelmingly dense. It's a nice alternative to the humongous PST shows if you wish to see some very good art but don't have the energy to tackle a gigantic museum historical exhibition.

*apologies for the picture being on its side. I have a new photo software that I don't master yet.

Mark Dutcher At Latned Astär

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to see Mark Dutcher's very intelligent exhibition at Dental Rasta spelled backwards + umlaut (Latned Astär for those of you who, like me, would prefer if the place was really called Dental Rasta).  It's over now, so here are a few pictures for your viewing pleasure.

 Mark Dutcher likes his surfaces rough and doesn't care for the preciousness of framing or anything that makes painting too remote and untouchable for the viewer. Many of the paintings and drawings in the show were on cardboard,  in this instance stapled directly to the wall. You could see this as just a textural effect, or if you're me as a social commentary on where art is at its most alive, i.e. in artist-run spaces outside of the commercial arenas where Artforum.com 'social diary would want make you to believe things happen.

This is a frontal view of the first room. The large striped and layered piece in the back is made on cardboard packaging coming from Fine Art Stretcher Bars, on which are quite a few felt tip graffiti drawings and sentences made by artists Juan Capistran and Eamon Ore-Giron, so it's a collaborative piece, if you will, anchored in local Los Angeles art community practice. The layered humble material is here to counteract the outwardly minimalist aspect of the stripes, and the graffiti add a humorous take on Dutcher's careful meditation upon a modernist vocabulary that isn't so much quoted as simply dealt with a gritty series of painterly hand gestures.

Dutcher's work could at first glance seem deliberately abstract, but if you pay attention it rapidly emerges that he uses a lot of symbols, many of them with historical resonance such as the pink triangle the Nazis used to force homosexuals to wear,  and later on appropriated by Act-Up and the gay community during the heartbreaking years of the Aids epidemic.

While Dutcher was working on the paintings and drawings of his exhibition, he was listening to a lot of music, including Joy Division's Decades whose chorus "Where Have They Been?" served as a reminder of all the loved ones lost to the Aids epidemic.  Some of the lyrics are inscribed on the wax paintings like this one. I tried to take a close-up but it came out all blurry, so you have to trust me on that one.

This last painting gives you an idea about the way Dutcher is interested in creating surface and texture variation in his paintings. I particularly like this one because under the sophisticated, unified silver layer of glitter you see those crude symbols made I suppose with either cardboard of construction paper, and the contradiction of the two processes make the final object look like a very ancient, primitive archeological artifact or like an extraterrestrial, indecipherable object sent to us by an advanced life form.

We're Vaguely Baaaaaaaack

above, John Cale, Catastrofuk

Hello, beloved and cherished and thinning readership!

I hope you had a great time during FBC!'s latest hiatus. I've been asked yesterday what was going on with FBC! (Hi Jennifer!) to which I answered "nothing". Basically yours truly has been on a lot of deadlines over the last few months, then traveling a lot, then getting rather sick. The "meeting deadlines" and "traveling" were art-related, for some forthcoming publications, etc. but I in fact have seen very little art since the beginning of the Fall opening season in September. For one thing, I've missed all of the PST-related events here in Los Angeles, and I do intend to go see Under The Big Black Sun at MOCA, the shows at the Getty and LACMA, and also the Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken shows before I travel again in late December. If I have the time I'll write some recension of the shows, but I am currently drowning in paperwork so we'll see.
I shouldn't even be writing this post, but I haven't written anything since mid-October and I'm starting to miss it. It's likely I won't resume any Your Social Life posts until early next year, if only because this blog is an unpaid labor of love and I'm starting to have trouble to keep up. I mean, I just have to turn my back 5 minutes and twenty new galleries pop up in LA (while a dozen other close or merge).

So,  I haven't seen much in Los Angeles recently except the opening yesterday at anotheryearinla, You Are Me which could be relabeled "Stephen Kaltenbach and friends". As you may know I am a HUGE fan of Kaltenbach's work, and the show last night was a mini-survey of sort of his early work, with other lovely works by, among others, Cathy Stone,  David Stone, Peter Coffin, Mark Rodriguez, etc.  I forgot to take my camera with me, so you'll have to trust me on that, but it is a lovely, lovely show of conceptual art that underscores the humor at play in Kaltenbach's work (and the others). Don't miss it!

Outside of LA the only art I've seen was at the Tate Modern where I had the luck to see the Gerhard Richter retrospective, as well as the very beautiful Tacita Dean film in the Hall of Turbines.
A Gerhard Richter retrospective looks like another Richter retrospective, that is a beautiful winner, but if you've seen a half dozen already like I've done, there won't be anything much new save for the white abstract paintings, which are as gorgeous as the gray ones. But, you know, he hasn't started making ugly, "Picasso-at-Vallauris-rediscovered-60-years-later"  vaguely figurative paintings, he's still the supra elegant Richter of old.
The Tacita Dean movie was very short, very beautiful, and also basking in nostalgia. Her struggle to find 16 mm film is well-documented, so I won't say much about that. The movie itself I thought was yearning for the golden age of experimental cinema, and even included the clichéed shot of a moving escalator. It was all about a descending movement (waterfalls, etc) and a little bit sad, with references to modernist images (I thought a bit about Rodchenko). What really struck me when I watched it was the very peaceful atmosphere inside the Hall of Turbines, and the very sweet,  smothered atmospheric quality of the acoustics therein. There's a certain softness to the way sounds don't reverberate much inside such an enormous  and crowded space, which made me think about how interesting it might be (or maybe too challenging?) for composers or musicians to stage something there. Maybe Tate Modern should commission some composers to do live events there? Have they done it already?

The other art I've seen was at the FIAC art fair in Paris, a fair I remembered as really provincial when I was living in France and which has come a long, long way since then. It is now very blue chip, with many NYC galleries (Metro Pictures, Paula Cooper, Chaim & Reid, etc), a few LA ones  like Marc Foxx, etc. I was delighted to see some Analia Sabans at my old friends Praz-Delavallade, and some beautiful Matthew Brannons at a Belgian gallery named after a Matta-Clark piece, Office Baroque. But, aside from this, it's just yet another art fair.

Outside of the art stuff, I also went to two concerts while I was away, and missed another one by The Monochrome Set, because the suburban venue that hosted it moved their gig back to midnight, knowing full well the last subway was at 1.15 AM, and yours truly had to get up at 5 AM to catch the Eurostar to London, so alas it was not meant to be. I'm very happy to hear that they will likely tour in NYC and LA next year, hopefully I won't be traveling when this happens.
The two concerts I went to were John Cale in my hometown, and Pat Fish at the 12 Bar Club in London. I was delighted that Cale played in my hometown, as you would imagine,  but after what happened there I'd be ready to bet he will never, ever play again in Caen.

The thing that first disappointed me was that the venue didn't advertize at all for the concert, no posters, no nothing, no more than one reminder on their Facebook page, not even on the morning of the concert. This, in a  (very provincial) city that boast  of an independent rock radio station (which didn't do much itself in terms of John Cale airplay before the concert, though I may be a bit unfair there because I didn't listen to much radio during the 4 days I was there). Cale played two sold-out dates in Paris in the following 2 weeks, and my hometown is only a 2 hours train ride from Paris, so a bit of advertisement wouldn't have hurt the venue.

Anyway,  in the afternoon before the concert I had the great pleasure of meeting Cale's drummer, the very talented Michael Jerome Moore, who's also a very cool guy in person. It was very gracious of him to spend an hour with me, when he could have had a nap instead, since Cale and his band had spent the night on their bus traveling to my hometown. It was also a bit surreal because Michael and I live in the same city, so it was strange meeting in the small town where I grew up. And where, in my youth,  could have never imagined Cale to play.

That evening, only 150 people had come to the concert. Before Cale and his band came onstage, the local contemporary art center had Guitar Drag projected in the adjoining room, a video by Christian Marclay that is far more superior, IMHO, to The Clock. I overheard a couple of dickheads saying "Oh, contemporary art is so lame, and it cost millions". Fuck you, dickheads, and shitty hometown, I know why I have left you forever.  You sure don't deserve John Cale.
Cale came on stage with his band, and despite the small audience proceeded to deliver an extraordinarily good gig, the second best of his I've seen (best one was Paris 1919 at Royce Hall last year) out of 4, with an incredibly varied set list that mixed old songs ("Big White Cloud", "Captain Hook") and the newest ones from his last EP, (available in the US on CD on Black Friday) as well as that charming and funny oddity, "Satellite Walk".
He seemed to have tons of fun on stage, told us he did, came back for an encore (Chorale, one hell of a beautiful song), and came back after the encore to inform us that while he was playing, someone had stolen his computer and phone from the dressing room. Apparently "someone" had forgotten to lock a back door, which, given the amount of security guards at the venue sounds like a load of bullshit to me, so my money's on a couple of assholes working at the venue taking advantage of their cushy, local-government-supported jobs to rob Cale blind and take off with his possessions (and his manager's). Of course the local police hasn't recovered anything, not a surprise given how they recruit their best and brightest in my home country (you don't need to even have finished middle school!).
I was so very sorry and still am that this is the way some goonies chose to welcome Cale in my hometown. May the Holy Mother of Belphégor punish them with anal cancer and much worse, and my most sincere apologies to Cale and his manager for what these people have done to them.




Later on, I missed The Monochrome Set in Paris, but was rewarded with the very lovely Pat Fish in London, who did a really good short solo gig,  playing some of his own songs,  some covers including one of Max Eider's, and played the song  I was listening to when my train was coming in St. Pancras that very morning, Shirley MacLaine. I owed the gentleman a beer, so I had the pleasure to meet him after his set. I was very shy, so apologies to Mr. Fish for my lame conversation, but really it was lovely to meet him. I recommend my wide and varied readership to hunt down some Jazz Butcher, Wilson and Pat Fish songs and better yet, buy his music and go see him play live whenever possible.



Lastly, this weekend in Los Angeles there are lots of openings, as usual, and I'll miss all of them because I'll be at the Great LA Walk trying to cover the almost 20 miles from downtown to the sea, as I do every year. If I weren't,  the one and only opening I'd attend tomorrow would be the Destroy All Monsters one, so if you go, please pass on my regards to Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw.
Have fun everybody, and thanks for following FBC!