The Pitfalls of Guerilla Warfare

I went to Amanda Palmer's "ninja gig" in Warsaw tonight, and it was a fascinating experience. It took place at Powiększenie, which is a club near Nowy Swiat, in downtown Warsaw. It was basically Amanda passing time - until Neil (Gaiman) finished his book signing and took her out to dinner - by rambling hilariously about anything and everything (including Lady Gaga, her visit to Australia, and her attitude towards drugs) and playing some songs on a ukulele.

(Cue the story of the ukulele, which I need as foreshadowing: she bought it just for laughs, but then it turned out to be very useful, because she didn't have to lug around a keyboard everywhere, and could just do these gigs with a ukulele. She can't really play it, only knows 7 chords (but not what they're called), and refuses to learn more because then she would be a "ukulele player", and nobody wants to be that. Also, even though she got it 2 years ago for 19 bucks, and it's always a bit out of tune, she won't buy a proper one "the same way really beautiful people sometimes insist on staying fat so no one will love them". She only knows how to play about 4 songs on it, including Radiohead's Creep, which she learned for a corporate showcase of her album, because she figured people would find it charming. And they did.)

I had a great time, laughed my ass off throughout, and wished she would just sit there telling stories all night long. She actually made a comment about Henry Rollins doing just that, deciding at some point that he's just gonna do tours being Henry Rollins, and people going "yeah, ok". Apparently there's already some footage up on youtube, so here are her musings on Lady Gaga in song format (she meant to write a blog entry about it, but couldn't make it work, so she wrote a song instead. She hasn't memorized it yet, so she's reading the lyrics off her iphone, which is being held up by an audience member - hence the "scroll..." plea towards the end):



And now for the part where I try to wrangle my - still quite nebulous at this point - impressions into some sort of cohesive... thing. Basically: Amanda Palmer doesn't really have a stage persona. I'm not saying she's not charismatic - she oozes charisma. I mean it in the sense of a filter, a screen separating her from the audience. She essentially wears her heart on her sleeve, and seems to telegraph everything that's going through her head, either consciously or subconsciously, and in this case - mostly self-consciously. It's a bit tricky when you're a performer, because you're relied on to shoulder the show, to put on a brave face and soldier on, no matter what. And that, in turn, is tricky when you're doing a spur of the moment, guerilla gig, and the audience doesn't deliver the requisite spontaneity. There's a real fragility to these transient, unscripted moments, and I suppose it's very easy to suddenly find yourself sprinting in place, several feet off that cliff, cartoon coyote style, desperately trying to keep the illusion going.

Well, this time the audience did not deliver, as people verged from non-responsive to embarassing, and the place seemed to put her in a different mindframe too. From what she said, the way these ninja gigs usually work is she posts online that she's going to be at a particular location (usually al fresco), people show up, she fucks around with the ukulele, and everybody has a laugh. This was the first one organized in an actual music venue, with a stage, an audience, and proper sound equipment. As time wore on, she seemed to grow more and more self-conscious about fucking up chords on the ukulele, and not giving people a "proper" musical experience. She kept saying how now she has to come back and do a proper show, because this way she can't show us what she actually does, which is play the piano well and perform her own music. And that this was just her being charming. The real "moment of truth", in my opinion, came at the end of the show. She reluctantly did a request (cringing about butchering the song on the ukulele), and after the applause died down, she said it was a really weird ninja gig ending, and probably the most anti-climactic one ever. Then, as people were starting to get up, she asked if she could just do one last, short song. And played Creep - i.e. one of the only songs she actually can do on the ukulele. And she really belted it out, gave an awesome performance, as if trying to say: "Look people, I really know how to do this. REALLY. Ok?"

Feeling complicit and co-responsible for a performance is a rather odd, and not entirely pleasant sensation, especially when you have nothing to bring to the table (I was too inhibited to ask what her attitude towards slaying vampires was during the Q&A session), but at the same time, I left the club adoring Amanda Palmer to bits and wishing there were more people like her in the world, so hey... maybe that was the plan all along?

Jumping bones

I was reminded recently of Dead Man's Bones. Apparently the record's out already. Will give it a listen once I get over the photo. To balance things out, the other guy is a complete uggo:

Fucking genetics.

She takes off her clothes, brushes her teeth, limbs wooden with exhaustion and vibrating with caffeine, turns off the lights, and crawls, literally, beneath the stiff silver spread on Damien's bed.
To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as the last wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.

I've started reading Pattern Recognition and was surprised at how easily I slip into Gibson's prose. Brisk and concise, with sleek, cleanly executed flourishes. I find it strangely comforting - instant insulation in a perfectly accessible pocket universe. 

Days of begging, days of theft

I went to the Florence and the Machine concert last night, and it was an interesting experience. The place was dreadful, the audience - young. One of the first things I noticed was the seemingly universal understanding of the (English) stage banter. Literally the whole room - around 2000 people, give or take - laughed when she said she'd only been on a "quiet tour of Poland" so far, so she'd seen a lot of Polish churches, but hadn't sung in a Polish warehouse before. Lingua franca, no two ways about it.

As for the performance itself... let's put it this way: the audience delivered, and the artist quickly caught up with it. She opened with Howl, which is one of my 3 favorite songs of hers, and it was very disapointing. Sounded really lackluster, almost phoned-in. She didn't even try to hit any of the high... well, I don't even know if you can call them "notes" if we're talking about four full verses of the chorus. Then went Kiss With a Fist which really got the audience going, and I think over the course of the next few songs it dawned on her that these people were really responsive, and really into her. By Between Two Lungs (#6) she was belting it all out to the point where I was actually awestruck - and I don't even like that number. The absolute turning point, however, was The Drumming Song, which was just balls-to-the-wall awesome, and drove the audience into a bona fide frenzy. To wit (unfortunately the clip cuts off before the best part, which can be found here, but with shitty audio):

I think it was after this one that she suffered a mild sensoric overload and started just walking back and forth along the edge of the stage, staring slackjawed at the audience, hand on her mouth. I doubt I'll ever get tired of seeing musicians' first reaction to Polish audiences. The requisite declarations of this being the best gig of the tour followed, and kept resurfacing throughout the rest of the show. Which was from then on stellar, in a very frantic, heartfelt, no holes barred kind of way (I could almost feel her vocal cords fraying as she charged through Dog Days Are Over). Awesome, awesome stuff.

My only gripe is subjective: 2 out of 3 of my favorite songs were disappointing live. I wish she had opened with something else, so I could have heard Howl treated with the sort of reckless abandon she tapped into during the 2nd part of the show, but Blinding was actually the last song before the encore, and it still did not work. Once it's stripped of the gothic, spatial studio trimmings, you're left with just drums, an overwhelmed harp, and flat, militant vocals.

My last impression, as I watched her dart around the stage in that flowy frock, singing about Midas, bloodied feet, and the walls of Dreaming, was feeling really grateful that the current musical Zeitgeist actually allowed this sort of sensibility to enter the mainstream, because I can't wait for next offerings.

Slow

The thing I'm translating now is literally so stupid that I can't get through it. I lose my grip and fall off into the Interwebs every other sentence. Gruelling, low-paying, ridiculous shit.

So maybe it's time to write that I saw The Ghost Writer last night, and loved it. The cinematography, the color themes, the grand, classical feel of it, the way the threat was always only implied, the fact that I was actually constantly engaged and kept wondering where the plot was going, the way some bits were included only to build and enhance the mood (the constant phone conversations behind closed doors, the "false alarm"), and how seamlessly they were woven into the general story.

But I think my favorite element was the sense of deliberate containment, as the story unfolded in that isolated island manor*. I felt as I were watching some sort of intricate clockwork ballet, with various players fading in and out of the center stage spotlight in ever more intriguing configurations.

Oh, and they actually used the International Criminal Court as a plot device! The international law nerd in me rejoiced.

* I actually tried to find one of the shots showing the study, because they were so exquisitely framed, but no luck

When it falls

So yeah, not really of use in any sense that matters, but when it comes to party tricks I'm a very deft monkey indeed.

The Scotsman appeared out of the blue saying he's visiting Poland with his boyfriend and asking if I could maybe show them around Warsaw. I was ready to reply that I'd love to, except I'm having a nuclear charge detonated in my eyeball around that time, but it turns out I'll be in Wroclaw then anyway. Still, the mind boggles.

I think the hardest part is being stuck with the thought that you could have somehow done more. As for the other 54 hard parts, I imagine I'll get acquainted with them pretty well in the coming weeks. Hey, maybe I still have the roadmap lying around somewhere.

Memento Whori

I never expected cliches to start crawling out of the woodwork so soon, and yet here they are, in all their prosaic hilarity. I guess all I can do is laugh and be thankful. God knows I need all the reality checks I can get.

I like to think so too.

Parenthesis

I finally watched Up in the Air last night. At first I felt it was another case of a movie not really living up to my inflated expectations. I wasn't bored while watching it. I liked the structure - how the city names, popping up randomly at first, became gradually infused with meaning, providing a nice dose of foreshadowing. The dialogue is really good, with a few choice sit-back-and-go-huh moments. There was even a scene with some serious emotional impact (when the girl has to do the remote sacking for the first time), and I really liked the ending, but it seemed like the movie as a whole didn't quite connect with me.

The scene I mentioned before actually seems exemplary of that - it's well crafted, there's real substance there, but the "message" somehow gets underdelivered at the last moment, that final hammer stroke just glancing the nail. And I'm not sure if that wasn't intentional.

The thing is: when I sat down to pick out a screencap to go with this post, and flicked through the whole thing all over again, I found myself pausing and going "oh, this bit was actually good..." at almost every scene.  Which leads me to believe that if I had let it set and wrote this note in a week's, or a month's time, possibly after a second viewing, I might have gushed. Then again, I might have not.

Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and screaming kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they'll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over.

Idoru

I've never fully embraced the whole Gaga phenomenon. I find her utterly hilarious at times, was somewhat content to learn that she seems to be very articulate and thoughtful, and for a few weeks I couldn't get Paparazzi out of my head, but that's about it. Enter this performance:

I'm still not sold on the music, and I suspect I might never be. But the truth is, I was completely hypnotized, especially during the 2nd part. It's like a scene taken straight out of The 5th Element, or some other over-stylized vision of the future. So completely otherworldly and performance-oriented... It's like she fast-forwarded a couple of hundred years and reached a point where showmanship is the substance.

I'm not saying there weren't great performers before her, that she's one of a kind, or anything like that. I'm not making any universal claims. But try watching the 2nd part of that clip and imagining the darkness beyond the stage is filled with extatic aliens. Wasn't difficult, was it?

Dead ends

My kingdom for an anonymous, hermetic, or at least dedicated landfill.

Credo

It was a week filled with the sound of tethers snapping and fans getting pulverized by fecal meteorites. I sat down a couple of times to chronicle it, even if only in obfuspeak, but then remembered a handful of people still actually read this thing.

You can't change me. I'm a gypsy. I'm a seacow. I know these motorboats are going to hit me, but THIS IS WHERE I FUCKING SWIM.

Mortar

The curse of Brick persists. First I bought a DVD without English subtitles (which makes the film all but impossible to decipher for non-native speakers), then I got the US version with subtitles but lent it to someone and have been unable to recover it since, and now I ordered another copy from Amazon and the package got lost in the mail.

In other news - apparently handsome nerds attract Asian spambots. Hence the deleted comments 2 notes down.

Trying to muster up the will to go out and:
a) buy a new USB storage thingie, as I've lost mine yet again
b) buy some... air in a can, I guess. My DVD drives have completely stopped reading CDs and DVDs and I was told it could just be the lens getting dusty
c) collect my Florence and the Machine tickets
d) grab some DVDs for work

It's not going well, mostly because Zlote Tarasy irk me.

Oh - for some reason blogger started treating breaks (hitting the Return/Enter key) as starting a new paragraph. In other words, hitting it now results in a BRACKETpBRACKET, as opposed to BRACKETbrBRACKET*, which is really annoying. I basically have to micro-manage the editing in HTML as I write. Anyone know if there's a way to fix this?

* no idea how to write this thing so that it doesn't get interpreted as code

Disappeal

This winter is wreaking havoc on my housekeeping regime. I have to clean the floor at least once every THREE DAYS, and it's taking its toll, people. Snow begone.

My parents had to take on a lodger (cashflow problems), and it's a Russian physicist lady from the Ural. No joke. She only moved in yesterday, but mom says she's really nice and quiet, so hopefully it won't be too weird. They both seem in good spirits, but chemo's starting to take a toll on dad. Theoretically he's only got two sessions left. I really hope they leave it at that.

As for me... I'm watching the world in powersaver mode, feeling a bit like some kind of petty princeling, plucking randomly at strings of power that isn't even mine to give up. It also happens to offer absolutely no protection from errant Thurn und Taxis moments, which sting as much as they ever did. So yeah, fading fast.

There's work, there's films, there's the Angel finale, but unfortunately, there's absolutely no will to continue writing this thing. Maybe later.

Hunky dory

I don't really have a valid reason to post this - sometimes you just have to share a hunky dork. Who apparently earns his living looking for balloons on the Internet.

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G'night.

White Dune

I just went out for Grownup Groceries (toilet paper and bread, as opposed to Chinese take-out and gummi bears) and realized why the pizza place lady had to consult the driver before accepting my order yesterday. There are literally mounds of snow everywhere. Whole embankments along the roads, as if the car people are preparing for a siege.

Still, life goes on. Unlike in Britain, which I hear is completely paralyzed because they actually got some snowfall this year. It's a full-blown crisis, with headlines like Death Toll Rises, Salt Supplies Dwindle! I imagine my compatriots must be looking around scratching their heads and going "Ale głupi ci Rzymianie."*

Actually, I read somewhere recently that during Napoleon's ill-fated foray into Russia, the Poles were the ones to cover his retreat, because they were the only ones not really all that surprised by the cold. It might have been in a collection of essays on the 19th century by Stanislaw Mackiewicz which my parents lent me. They're quite interesting (the essays) (well, my parents too), but I don't really care for his style. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to share that opinion with them a couple of days ago. I think they're still recovering. I imagine it must have been quite the Tracey Ullman moment: "I just read The Book of Revelation, and I have to polemicize with God..."

I went to Cracow last weekend and was reminded that most of the time composition is key. It was a perfectly enjoyable break from work, but that turned out to be neither here nor there, as the focal point of the trip became learning that my host watched the most fun episodes of Firefly without me (thus robbing me of my vicarious/parasitic joy), and then having to sit at some club right next to quite possibly the only person in the world I never ever want to see again. So that ended up being the snapshot.

Also saw W. recently. At long last. We've really drifted apart, but we're both quite intent on reversing that process. She saw 500 Days of Summer and thanked me profusely for recommending it. Said it fit perfectly into this particular moment of her life, and that she totally identified with the character. There was this weird intensity about the way she said it which made me ask, just to make sure: "The guy, you mean?". "The girl, of course!" she replied with matching certainty.

* "These Romans are crazy", the Polish translation of Asterix wins in this regard

The new one

The end of the year song has been something of a tradition of mine. It's usually simply the thing my mp3 player lobs at me as I'm making my way home in the morning that for some reason resonates the most.

This year it came a bit early, around 10p.m., on a tram bound for Filip's place. Felt right though, as it's been following me around for the past several weeks.


Happy New Year.