Bunuel Tour Diaries?
Yes: because it can't be misery and suffering every Sunday of every week.
There are clear cut parallels to the state of aviation and commercial travel and how we comport ourselves politically. Of this I am convinced and proof positive seems to be that at the nexus point of Internet outrage culture and whipsawing political ideologies you have something that exists in its own category right now: airline assholishness.
Internet video after Internet video of people behaving so badly that you have to imagine that the only reason that they bought the tickets in the first place was TO behave badly. Add to this the fact that I believe every single flight I’m on to be destined for a Movie of the Week that starts with “The Ill-Fated Flight 454…” and you might understand that while I have a good sense of humor I’m absolutely not joking about believing WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE from the moment my ticket is purchased to now, in a hotel in Padova, well after landing two hours ago.
Which is another way of saying we’re going to give Trump Terror a rest, unless he schedules another coup attempt, same with Supreme Court abrogations, the Marilyn Manson Depp monkey-see-Depp-monkey-do stratagem (which will fail), and any and every mass shooting for the next few weeks of which we are guaranteed a few. Instead the focus will be on the presently occurring BUNUEL tour.
[Y]et another negative side effect of global climate change: the likelihood that everyone you see will be wearing shorts even though it’s been scientifically proven that not everyone should ever wear shorts.
Which means a hastily reconstituted tour diary, something that was a routine OXBOW occurrence, especially since it might not be very easy to get that much of this oeuvre is undergirded by humor. A very dark humor but humor nonetheless. So much so that August will see me doing my first stand-up show. With Laurie Kilmartin, a Conan O’Brien writer, no less. But that’s a different story for a different day.
Today? It’s all about why putting carcinogenic mosquito bug spray on your forehead is, generally, a really bad idea (especially as you start sweating first song of the set and it flows into your now-flaming eyes which, I’m now sure, will not be bitten by mosquitoes).
Something that I had wished I had grokked as I flew into Venice, not my first time in Venice, but the first time noticing that the water-logged city itself is also surrounded by water. Non-moving, brackish water. The kind favored by mosquitos.
Something I hadn’t factored in at all but touring, given how many people have died doing it — Buddy Holly, Cliff Burton, D. Boon, Alexander the Great — is inherently, or seems to me, about dying. In your hunger to leave an impression that lasts you do so in order to help the memory of you last. You remember Leo Sayer? Yeah: I didn’t think so. So, so much for that theory.
In any case I find myself wolfing down tuna fish-egg-salad sandwiches that had been in the sun in our dressing room at the venue in Padova, first show of the tour, like I had flown 6000 miles specifically to get food poisoning. So I had to have a theory to justify that colossal act of stupidity. Something I could blame on the jet lag, which is also, and always, terrible going from West to East.
How terrible? So terrible that in the first five minutes of being in the hotel room I not only flood it, but fall asleep on the toilet, my feet ankle deep in water that would under now almost 100 degree heat steadfastly refuse to dry fast enough that I don’t almost crack my head on the nice Italian marble floors no fewer than three times, both coming and going.
The show? Great. But being a New Yorker I expect the worse and think I am not-so-secretly saddened that the show didn’t end with the stage in flames and every one sobbing.
“EUGENE?!?! WAKE UP!!! IT’S THE DOLEMITES!!!”
While the Dolemites, Rudy Ray Moore notwithstanding, are great, it’s 2 in the morning the time I am used to, and it takes me about 1.9 seconds to take in all the beauty and grandeur of these classic mountain ranges before my eyes closed again. We were leaving the hot and humid climes of Padova and heading to Vienna so, yes: the Dolemites. And tunnels. And truckstop food in Austria that I decline to wake up for, falling asleep in the van that I refused to open the windows of as I didn’t want to die in my sleep because: murderers. Of course, I almost die in my sleep anyway because: extreme heat. So it’s a wash.
But Vienna is not. Beautiful as always I have my first, and very distinctly not my last, temper tantrum. We go to a restaurant called, near as I can remember: Asian WOW! I had developed an unreasonable hunger for shrimp-fried rice and I was thrilled that they had it. They had it listed as “chicken-fried rice” but they also had shrimp so, for sure, this would work.
“I’ll have the shrimp-fried rice, Bitte!”
“No shrimp-fried rice.”
“Do you have fried rice?”
“Yes.”
“And do you have shrimp?”
“Yes.”
“Can you not put the shrimp in the fried rice?”
“No.” And she looks at me with a look that recalls nothing if not the look General George Custer must have seen when he looked at the eyes of the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes that spelled his doom.
“Great. I’ll have shrimp, and separately, fried rice.” I was wanting desperately to actually consume the food there so she could watch me pull off the stunning act of legerdemain whereby the shrimp was added to the fried rice when I figured out that that wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was: how to get the chicken OUT of the existing fried rice, all of which had been fried with chicken and hence the menu offering: chicken fried rice.
Didn’t stop me from wanting to burn their restaurant to the ground. Fire: WOW!
But I am mollified by the best thing I’ve seen in Vienna up to and including our show. And sitting outside of the club on the edge of the park I hear the loudest of some sad boy hip pop coming from a boom box and I watch with interest to see who is rocking BTS or the Jonas Brothers at that volume and emerging from the crowd of people were five Turkish 17-year-olds. Some holding hands, some with their arms draped across each other’s shoulders as they walked along, smoking, bopping and mouthing the words to the weakest shit I have ever heard like they were listening to the Geto Boys.
Next stop: Slovakia. Which I am hoping will be more enjoyable than last time I was there when I wanted to stab everyone who was there.
They see me smiling from where I sit and try to hit me with the ice grill and I just laugh. Right up until I see a sign in the park prohibiting guns, knives and alcohol, which confuses me. I hadn’t realized guns were a problem here and had relaxed into the idea that they weren’t. However, contemplating being shot by these Ricky Martin look-alikes, changes the entire picture. As does the fact that the real-life Ricky Martin just got a restraining order against him (no lie).
So I stop smiling, and nod, and they nod, and then I get the call to come and do soundcheck and as I do so I note yet another negative side effect of global climate change: the likelihood that everyone you see will be wearing shorts even though it’s been scientifically proven that not everyone should ever wear shorts.
Making Vienna somewhat bittersweet.
But the show is good, Kon, the guy from Trost Records shows up and gives me the test pressings of the October release of the OXBOW-Peter Brotzmann double live record. Another friend shows up and gives me his book. The opening act is a guy that’s a dead ringer for a hipster Hitler and he sings Klaus Nomi-esque runs while his table of effects plays a twisted kind of techno while I have to poop but lack of a toilet with a toilet seat that is not jagged porcelain marks me as the American luxury lover that I am.
Next stop: Slovakia. Which I am hoping will be more enjoyable than last time I was there when I wanted to stab everyone who was there.