June 29 Versailles

The sun is blasting, so we make grand plans for Mz. Antionette’s royal gardens. We carry our things down 111 stairs, but before we hit the road, we help this dude jump start his mini.


Instant Karma. And so we weave our way out of Paris. Alas, Versailles fails us. It’s prohibitively expensive to get in, so instead we press ourselves up against the gates for the closest view possible and tromp alongside the barricade looking for a weak point to sneak in. No dice.






Frustrated and irate, we started some fires, piked up some heads, and continued on to Alençon. After our show last week, we were told to come back and stay anytime. And so here we come. On the way we stop at a water closet, where they sell "fweets". I was worried Leatherface was going to be manning the stand, but we made it past unscathed.


Turns out that we didn’t actually play in Alençon the other week, so when we show up, we recognize nothing. Imagine our surprise when we arrive at the address we thought was going to be the venue we stayed at, and instead a cute man arrives on a bicycle sporting a bowtie and asks us if we are from New Zealand. This is about to get rad. Or Blue Velvet-y.

He invites us into his home and gives us water and a menthe aperitif, which is to be mixed in with your water. It explains the crayon green beverages that we’ve seen people drinking in bars everywhere since we showed up in France. It’s, mmm, okay. I’ll chalk it up to acquired taste.

We are led down the street to an empty home. Its got beds. Its got a kitchen. A washer. Wifi. I don’t know who’s house this is, I don’t really know who this man Terry with the bowtie is, but I like it. We thank Terry and mentally prepare to make our way to another random destination. Our friend Romain texted us and said to come to his friend’s house. Rumor is that there is a Pool. SOLD.

Turns out there’s a wee tennis court too. I don’t know if there’s a proper name for this type of tennis, but the court is about half the size of a regulation court, there’s some additional strange markings, and you play with racketball looking rackets. This simple game of tennis is soon BBEized into some bastard version of Assault.

We swim. We eat pizzas. We use bad French. A girl arrives that everyone is chiding and teasing. Turns out she slept with one of their friends last night and then told him in the morning that she’s not interested in pursuing things. I try to give her a high five, but I think she thinks I’m assuming she’s easy to bag and hitting on her. Ah, the joys of not knowing French.

We make a new friend, also named Guillaume. We’ll call him G2. BBE explains the story of the Rainbow Warrior, a GreenPeace vessel that was bombed by two French agents in the Auckland port. France apparently never apologized for this terrorist attack. So Guillaume apologized for France. It has been done. Basically, the eight people at the party are some new best friends. Especially the girl that drinks Smirnoff Ice and laughs like a pig.

June 28 Louvre pt2

I wake up and make it out for an afternoon on my own. Even though I keep being told that I can't take it all in, I want to see as much of the Louvre as possible. So I jump on the Metro and get cracking. It's starting to prove to be another alluring day in Paris, complimented with a relaxing breeze. People of all shapes and sizes are lounging about on benches and picnic clothes as I stroll through Tuileries Gardens. Right before the gaping mouth of the Louvre, this guy was renting sailboats. Once again, I'm thwarted by my dismal Frenching skills. Next time, I will make sure I know how to say "Cute French dude, I would like a sailboat, please."


Yesterday I noticed that the gate attendants didn't so much as glance at mine or James' ticket as we entered the galleries, so I take yesterday’s ticket and flash it to gain free entrance for the second day in a row. Perhaps I’m adding to the problem of there being so many strikes closing the museum, but I doubt it (I feel even less worse about my actions when I leave the museum hours later- beneath I.M.Pei’s pyramid, the two level museum gift store is flanked by a sprawling mall, with everything from a Starbucks to an Apple store). Of course the dude in front of me in line gets stopped and asked for his ticket. In the confusion of him fumbling in his pockets, I scoot pass him and in. Score. Of course my overactive, paranoid imagination starts to get a the better of me, so I scoop up a discarded ticket bearing today's date off the ground (these people are notorious litterers) just in case I get asked for proof of purchase at some point.


So, one of my favorite iconesque pieces of art is Martorell's painting of St. George slaying a dragon (it's in Chicago). I'm not sure why it appeals to me, but I think it has something to do with the combination of gold and wry chuckle it puts in my belly that people actually believe(d) in these stories.


Apparently, it's part of a pentych, and the Louvre has the other four pieces. I'm not sure what slaying a dragon has to do with being judged, dragged, and decapitated, but I'm sure religion has a way of making it all make perfect sense.


Here's another St. George that I pieced together.

The Venus de Milo proves to be more interesting than the Mona Lisa, but nowhere near as grand as Nike of Samothrace. I guess like all art and music, half the popularity is the hype.




This guy snuck up on me.




I love when pieces of art like this survive. I wonder how much art existed depicting harmless human nature, only to be destroyed over the years by puritanical regimes and mindsets.

I wonder if Jim Henson came here before coming up with his idea for the Skeksis.



Meandering thought the Louvre is a bit dreamy. You see massive amounts of art that I've only seen before in books. There's even a couple pieces that I'm seeing for a third time in person, after catching the touring Louvre show in Atlanta and Minneapolis. These are two of my old friends from those exhibits-

I make it to the last seconds before closing time and head home. As the train doors slide open and I step onto the platform, I have a vague déjà vu state of mind. I figure is just the "I've seen this painting somewhere before" line bouncing around in my head. But I feel like I know this place. Turns out it's the Metro stop that some of the scenes from Amelie were filmed at. Man I love that movie. Someone go home and brush their teeth with foot ointment for me.

Later that night, our French booking agent, Guillaume, invites us to check out another one of the bands he's taken under his wing. So we excitedly make a trip out into the depths of Paris to survey the nightlife. Maybe I should have had the foresight to realize there might be something slightly amiss when we made our way out of the underground and the Metro sign was made up like an Alice in Wonderland prop.


Things at the l'International seemed pretty normal. It's a sweet bar that puts on free shows in the basement almost every night of the week. We catch a couple tunes by Sarah W Papsun and when they finish, and another guy started setting up his amps and keyboards on stage. Totally normal. And then I turn my back for one minute...


Speechless.

June 27 PRIDE and the Louvre, pt1

It's Pride weekend! But it’s not quite as exciting and extravagant in France, probably since A) everyone here seems to be quite proud to be at least a 1 on the Kinsey scale, and b) most people are constantly acting more homo than they actually are. It’s great. Go France!

During a more thoughtful moment of my day, this article about Storme in the NYT made me excitedly weepy. There’s always a swell in me that, without fail, manages to blindside me when I read about people that stand up for truth, beauty, and goodness with the entirety or his/her mind, body, and soul, especially in the face of disgusting, overwhelming, myopic opposition. It made me want to revisit Stone Butch Blues and go find a theatre with the new Stonewall Uprising film. I’ll probably have to wait til I get back to the USA for that though.

And I'm off for my day of photo album restocking. The Louvre is actually open. The last time I was in Paris (which was also my first time), it turned out that I chose my one day to visit unwisely, and the place was closed. Not this time, even though the website announce that “ due to a strike, the museum may or may not be open” - how so very French.

So we got in line to get in (James tagged along), and while we waited, a girl leaving the museum gave us tickets to get in. Score.

The main entrance to the Louvre is through I.M. Pei's pyramid. Which looks cool, but is like a huge greenhouse. And here I was thinking I was going to escape the sweltering 91 degree day that it was in Paris into a nice, cool museum. Instead, the first few galleries were sauna hot and smelled like armpits. I was literally about to start crying.

Luckily, the deeper into the beast we crept, the cooler it got. And this place is truly a beast. People will tell you that you could come here every day for a month and not see everything. Sure, it's harmless hyperbole, but with James and I getting lost every five minutes, it doesn't seem far off.

That's the Mona Lisa back there in the distance. Color me unimpressed. The Mona Lisa experience the museum allows you to have is muted and cold. It is a piece of art in a police state (I suppose ML has a lot of perceived and cultural value, but does it really warrant two guards and a barrier to keep you 20 feet away in ADDITION to the two panes of bulletproof glass? The Pieta says yes, I say, probably not.).



This reminded me of a James Ensor's "Vase with Skull and Flowered Hat"

This painting was bigger than the short side of most people's homes. That girl is a normal sized girl that I didn't shrink in Photoshop. Man, Napoleon must have been a huge dickhead. This is a painting of his coronation.

This is me trying to take a picture and getting punched by a security guard. Then I got thrown out as they yelled "no cameras!"

Actually, I got through the Louvre without getting yelled at or kicked out. Finally.

These guys tried to entertain us on the way home. Behind the bench is a cart with an amp bellowing a midi accompaniment. Man, no one can play without backing tracks these days.

We made it back, but didn't think about buying some food before trudging up the 112 stairs to our flat. How many stairs in a mile?


The trip down is a lot fast than the trip up. In the French grocery we shuffle around, not really sure what to get. Everything is so expensive in Paris, so just buying with French printed all over it and hoping for the best is a bit more of a dubious experiment, since it requires some financial backing. I end up with a can of cassoulet and crossed fingers.

It definitely wasn't the Haute Dish duck-in-a-can I was dreaming it'd be.

June 26 Solidays

At yesterday’s festival we were discussing who were the biggest music personalities in the world? Like, who did people know everywhere? What artists have that elusive appeal to become objects of adoration and intrigue across the globe? We’re wondering because there are a lot of names at these festivals that we don’t recognize, but at the performances, thousands of people are going batty and singing along. Rodrigo y Gabriela? Leftfield? Who are these people? We decide Shakira and U2 are the two living, performing bands best known across the planet. Then we put on SheWolf and promptly stopped talking about Shakira.

We roll into Paris for the Solidays festival. It’s an enormous affair, but it’s meticulously run and beautifully set up.

BBE is playing mid-afternoon, and until then, the organizers have everything from Shiatsu massage to breathing exercises set up to distract the bands while they wait. I get frustrated with the line for the massages and just wander around in the blistering heat listening to the ocean of French swirl around my ears. I go to get a drink and figured tequila flavored beer was a good idea. It wasn't.

Unfortunately for us, the festival is so well organized that they recycle the dressing rooms. Which means we get kicked out for another artist. Fair enough, but annoying. Coincidentally, Jamie Lidell, one of the only artist’s names I recognize and the only artist I want to stick around to see, is the artist we get kicked out for. Maybe that’s why I didn’t’ find his set later in the evening to be as inspired as I was hoping.

With all our gear and nowhere to hunker down at the festival, we make our way into the city to find our accommodation. We’ll be staying in the flat of our French booking agent (yay Guillaume!). Finding the apartment isn’t a problem, but finding parking, that’s another story. I got a bit dizzy circling the neighborhood over and over again in concentric circles. I did feel like quite the superstar after parallel parking our car on a hill into a spot 8 inches longer than the vehicle though.

And so we lounge away the rest of our night up on the sixth floor of a Parisian apartment complex. We sit around in our underwear as the temperature continues to hold strong at about 85 well past midnight. With the windows all spread wide open, you can hear cars singing between gears below as you mindlessly stare into the neighbors’ flats, which are formulaically graced with baguettes and pottery. I imagine crawling out through the dormer onto the narrow ledge and shimmying up the tiled roofs, where I’m sure there are hundreds of black cats demonstrating perfect posture as they look out over the city. And as I sit searching the Internet for what time the Louvre is open this week, someone somewhere is playing Leonard Cohen on the stereo. Suzanne sashays softly into the room. I get it already. I understand why people love Paris. Teach me French already.

June 25 Evreux a gogo

We unfortunately have to leave the cocoon of Alençon and make our way to Evreux for the Rock Dans Tous Ses Etats festival (I don’t care if you’re French or not, that’s a mouthful). Just as well roll into town, we pick up our booking agent Shane at the train terminal. We’re conducting a small exploratory test to find out if it’ possible to squish six people into our Renault for the 12 hour drive to Slovakia that’s coming up soon (for everyone’s sanity we end up ruling against it).

So we show up on a huge field in Evreux dotted with tents and little stands to buy unnecessary wares. Much to my amusement, Brother Ali is performing. I know the world is a small place, but I didn’t expect to see another Minnesotan involved with these festivals on this trip. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. After he performs, we joke a little bit about how it’s frustrating that we persevered through the entireness of Minnesota’s bitter winter, and then we don’t get to enjoy the usual reward that is the Twin Cities’ amazing late spring and blistering summer. Instead we have to come over to cold, rainy Europe (it’s actually beautiful out at that exact moment, but the moist trial of Munich is still fresh in my mind). Poor us.

BBE plays on a stage sponsored by some ubiquitous sponsor. All those logos with block letters in muted fluorescents on top of toilet swirls all start to look the same to me. For some reason, the stage is enclosed within a fun little cage, as if there might be an Ultimate Fighting match held later in the evening. It turns out to make a lot of sense, packing people into the space that sounds the best, instead of letting them sprawl all over the place the way you normally can at a festival. A sick part of me wants to let a tiger loose in there and see what happens though. After BBE is done with their set, or course.

Right after BBE, I got to watch part of the flummoxingly strange excitement that is Babyshambles. It’s been a murmured question all day, found in every corner, and snaking it’s way though the crowd “Is Pete going to show? Will Babyshambles play or just get in a fight” (maybe that’s what the cage stage is for). The crowd swells in front of the stage, and at the appointed time, the show begins. Just like it should. I remember seeing Cat Power years ago, and as she started to have one of her panic attacks on stage, I remember wondering if I would feel shorted if she DIDN’T have an episode. The same type of question runs thought my mind as I watch Pete strut around the stage. I’m glad things go according to the script. A meltdown seems like it’d have to be contrived at this point.

Right after their set, I left for the production office under the guise of collecting our fee, but I just wanted to see if there were any good tales of the fears and potential lunacy/disaster of booking Babyshambles as a headliner. The stories were flaccid compared to the obvious relief on everyone’s face that Babyshambles actually 1) made it on site and 2) performed a whole set without someone walking off stage. No matter what I thought of the band, I’ll say this- BS were the only performer with a smiley face next to their logistics schedule posted to the office wall.

June 24 Elysium

France is not letting us down in the nice weather department. We spend a bit of the morning strolling around Besancon’s music stores looking for some auxiliary equipment, and are confronted with a load of funny fliers concerning the French team’s pathetic behavior in the World Cup. I’m not a diehard futbol fan or anything, but the French team’s whinny, juvenile behavior being answered with an embarrassing defeat was pretty entertaining.

I make a bit of a miss-step on the road by suggesting we duck into Ikea for lunch. They don’t have Ikea in New Zealand, so this is the bands first foray into the Scandinavian labyrinth. But the cafeteria ends up being closed, and I get yelled at for taking pictures. FAIL.

And we’re off into the French countryside. Maybe all these fields of van Gogh yellows and ochre’s will get tiring, but for now it’s completely taken me into its cadmium calm. Things just get better as well roll up to our venue for the evening. Le Labo Sonore is literally out in the middle of nowhere. Up until 2 seconds before we arrive, I’m convinced I put the address in the GPS wrong. This is farming country.

I can’t even tell you exactly where I am, but it’s about 10 miles outside of Alencon (there’s a little hook on the bottom of the “c”, but I don’t know how to type a cedilla), somewhere in Normandy. The club is a compactly contained sanctuary with a bar, venue, and a full apartment for the bands. It’s surrounded with grass fields on every side. There are some stately, grand trees interspersed among the shafts of grains, and I feel a little bit like I’m in the that scene of The Shawshank Redemption when Red finds Andy’s box planted in the oak roots (you know, under the obsidian stone).

I tell the band that there’s been a change of plans and ask them what they’d like to do for the rest of the tour, because I’ve decided I’m never leaving this place. I stake out a place on the patio and alternate between flailing through learning to use my Euro store watercolors and reading Mrs. Dalloway. The sun gets a bit too intimate with my shoulders and leaves me with a slightly sore sensation of Sunshine clap.

Perhaps the French countryside is actually a Siren for the soul. I would probably end up destroyed if I gave into its enchanting calls. But for now, my will is strong and my soul is content.

Not only is this place transcendental, it sheds a bit of light on a question we’re been asking out selves for weeks. Every time we look in a host’s freezer, there’s no ice trays. What exactly do Europeans do for cold drinks? Well, tonight we learned how to make French ice cubes, and like a lot of things European, it involves wasting as much plastic as possible! Yay! You fill the bag with water, freeze it, and then pop out individual cubes. The excitement?

June 23 Besancon Caverns

The day starts with Great Shreds. I don’t know how you could start your day any better.

Now, after all this time off, we’re really slow at getting moving, and at this rate we’re going to be late for our first French show. I can’t believe it. I won’t have it. So of course, the fuzz caught me in a French speed trap. Our unheroic duo of do-gooders busted me going 140km/hr in a 110. I thought the speed limit was 130, and they explained that the fast zone started in another two kilometers. BOOO.

Eventually, we crawl into the town of Besancon. The roads are windy and spidery, creeping through the city down every crevice between buildings. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be driving a van right now. The roads veer wildly, and not only left and right, but up and down steep hills. It’s like I’m stuck in a nightmare version of San Francisco.

The club is a quaint bar where the shows are held in the basement cellar. The cellar door has been replaced by the front half of a corvette, and you have navigate your way through its hood to make it to the show. It’s pretty cool, even though there’s that Tour Dad part of me that’s scared I’m going to hit my head and end up with tetanus.

After the sprawling madness of big city Munich, this small town is so nice, if a little surreal. There are men drinking a bright, mint green beverage at the bar. The walls are decorated with unholy amalgamations, like pheasant dog pirates. There are two kids, no older than 10, pouring beers- they have to get up on a stool to serve them. Then we slink down through rough, stone walls to play in a 18x45foot crypt. The part of me that’s not Tour Dad feels like I should be pounding absinthe.

Our host for the night turns out to be the proud mom of the two kids that were serving beers at the bar. The flat is appropriately decked out in the interests of kids who don’t have money to waste on “official” fan club gear. Hand scrawled GREEN DAY banners hang from the ceiling. And I keep hoping the painting on the wall is a take on Broken Social Scene’s artwork.

June 22 FRANCE! (Strausbourg)

We're doing it. We're getting out of Germany. Deutschland, I've loved you so much in the past, but this time through, you've been positively melancholy (that's a funny word combo, but it's proper, I swear). Despite our best efforts to sneak out during the food-coma lull after lunch hour, the vindictive soul of Munich has figured out that we’re leaving, and it does all it can to keep us there. At least that’s my explanation for getting stuck in some horrific traffic on the way out of town (a semi truck caught on fire and we got drive past the remains of it’s smoking skeleton. Can’t say I’d ever seen the husk of a completely burnt out truck before).

As soon as we get near the French border, the skies start to open up. The sky is blue, who knew? It’s more than just clear skies, it’s genuinely sunny out. When we arrive in Strausbourg, the French girls are all doing what they do best, running around droopy faced with big sunglasses and tight sundresses. Maybe I'm biased, but the town's seems pretty enchanting.

I came here for two reasons. 1, to get out of Germany. 2, to see the cathedral. It's one of those structures where you wonder how it was build before the age of Caterpillar, and then you wondering evolves into questioning why we don't build such magnificent things now that we have better technology.

Charlie is scared to climb the 330 or so stairs to the top. If he only knew that there was going to be a nice squawking seagull to help him find his way down.

We visit the museum as well. A lot of Europe has this awesome policy that if you're a student of art, you get into the museums for free. You're supposed to have some special Art Student card, but we look and smell like artists, so we usually end up getting waved in.

I got my brother some nazi zombie shooting targets for his last birthday. Maybe this was the original inspiration. Well, I think Wolfenstein 3D was the shooting target inspiration, but....
Ah Duchamp, you cheeky bastard. Selling dollhouse versions of your art. It's cute. I want one.

Monkeys make sushi all wrong.

And this is the retaliation for Freedom Fries I suppose.