Bunuel Vs. A Heat Apocalypse Now!

Heatwave, SchMeatWave...as long as we're RICH (apologies to Daffy Duck)!

Urine trouble now! (Photo by Sonocosindieche)

"No one wants Eugene S. Robinson to carry a gun." — Der Standard

There was a truism to touring Europe that we long heeded. Unlike America where college students out on summer break might find themselves open and prone to playing out, or at least attending shows where you were playing out, if you had planned to do this in Europe also plan to have depleted audiences.

Why?

Because those populations of audiences would be decamping to beaches on the copious amounts of vacation that workers believe they need to reconnect with their families, or recharge, that’s why.

So Americans, from America, the land of fuck-your-vacation-values as it were, knew enough to try to avoid touring Europe in the summer because of this. However, schedule is the master of us all and we, BUNUEL, took what we had when we had it and as a consequence I find myself touring at least one summer month later than usual. In very real calendar terms this means that previous tours only went as late as mid-June, this one started in July and this exposed us to, yes, depleted crowds (Brighton, you should be ashamed of yourselves), but more significantly a HEAT APOCALYPSE!

Which is fine if you’re driving around in an air-conditioned van, which we were. NOT so fine if you’re driving around in an air-conditioned van that is all BLACK. Kind of like a toaster on wheels. Or a microwave. Or a way to catch every single drop of death dealing solar roasting misery on your way to Paris, which is where we’re going and where things get…heavy.

I see a landscape of crack pipes firing like fireflies.

Because of the heat, well, yeah. And the drive from hell on to and off of the Irish Ferry, a kind of wreck of Hesperus, where everything was broken, and then across the English Channel, sure. That’s not what I mean though, and here I pre-apologize for dragging you into conspiraversy land but I’ve been following global trends and the one that’s gotten my nose as of late is the issue of the unhoused.

Specifically the tendency of civilian populations to willingly drift rightward in places where homelessness becomes a noticeable visual issue. The French venue, Glazart, is a great multipurpose art/music space. In a much less than great neighborhood. And that was five years or so ago, when last I played there with the OXBOW orchestra.

Now, the surrounding “parks”, are jam-packed with the indigent, collecting under cardboard lean-to’s and ramshackle blue-tarped tributes to France’s glorious colonial past. And something else. Despite a conversation I had 12 years ago with a drug dealer in Amsterdam where we philosophized about why crack had failed so miserably to capture the Euro imagination, like it had the American one, I see a landscape of crack pipes firing like fireflies.

Cops are lazily shaking down the few stragglers out at club front, and Marine Le Pen won 41.5 percent of the vote in their April presidential elections. From country to country there is nothing short of a direct correlation between visible homelessness and rightward swings. And in America the headlines scream about the depredations of the homeless, like homeless people don’t also transgress against other homeless people, while Joe Rogan says the quiet part out loud when he jokes that maybe the solution is to shoot the homeless.

In California where there is a 97 billion dollar budget surplus, the Governor, who was also the former mayor of San Francisco, sends comic videos to Floridians urging them to come to California while he postures for an eventual national run at the presidency all while not being able to figure out how to HELP. It’s clear the homeless have become a cat’s paw for some fairly horrible shit coming down the pike, and watching people sleepwalking through it, despite the eventual “told you so” moment I will be afforded, is still appalling.

And this is the point, this is the quietest I’ve ever been on tour. Not only was I mired in silence for four weeks prior to the tour, courtesy of an empty household and cats who speak no version of English that I can speak, but tactically on tour I can’t talk a lot. I have to rest my voice between shows. Besides which when BUNUEL discovers that I am serious about abandoning the American dream and hear me practicing Spanish and displaying an interest in Italian, I am aswirl in Romance languages, which when I concentrate, I can follow. But when I can’t concentrate? Morbid self-attentions. Which are glorious luxuries.

However, PARIS was completely and totally redeemed for me by the presence of Andrea Stillacci. In a stunning example of no matter where you go there you are, I met Stillacci in a pool at a hotel where my Mother likes to stay in Palo Alto, California when she comes to visit. We start talking. Turns out he knows OXBOW. Starts following me on socials, digs on BUNUEL. His company kills it at Cannes this year and he says he wants to come to the Paris show, based in Paris as he is, and on showing up realizes he and Xabi, BUNUEL’s guitarist have friends in common and when he had been doing punk radio in Turin he had played Xabi’s old band, A Short Apnea, all the time.

Life’s meandering crossroads or destiny straight up? Unknown: but much more than compensated for everyone in Paris having gone to some place other than Paris that night. Did we play well? We killed it. Like Chuck Dukowski once said and it’s become Holy Writ: it’s not the fault of the 50 people that showed up that no one else showed up. Plus, the above bit about morbid self-attentions? My head is aswirl with thoughts unsettled and this is just the most perfect place to be so.

Me + Muzah Van Tricht

BRUSSELS plans to be, Brussels which, if history is any guide, great. Especially if by great you mean me slapping the audience, kicking cellphones across the room and listening to Vikings explain to me how Belgium is a problem, not for the reasons I suspect — total inability to find Belgian waffles as a breakfast food — but for language-based reasons. This is how it went down the last few times I played here with either OXBOW or with Jamie Stewart from XIU XIU in our SAL MINEO side project.

Hope springs eternal though and the assembled members of BUNUEL — Xabi, Franz, Andrea — are all so relentlessly optimistic and just plain ol’ nice and decent, I am predicting positive things. Even if up against all of that optimism I am the captain of a very dark and dirty ship in my head, seeing their smiling faces I believe change is possible.

Or at least I did until Muzah Van Tricht, tattoo artist extraordinaire and singer, made his way backstage. Not only is he playing tonight BUT he’s also been taking Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and so on seeing him? I ATTACK.

The staff at the wonderful BAMP club ignore us. He pulls guard and grabs my lapel, we get winded and stop and make plans for the scant 30 minutes I have before we begin another long drive the next morning to get some more tattoo work done. Specifically finishing out my kids’ name project, adding KORA to my neck and to balance it out at the start of GRACE, a bullet.

The show? Well attended and fantastico. Not a face was slapped and the next morning I got to speak the last words you ever want to speak to your tattoo guy: “HURRY UP…I got places to BE!”

But he does a genius job, we chat about JENNY TORSE, a cool project we have in the works, his bass/sitar player shows up, with fingers still bleeding from his last nine-hour sitar rehearsal, and I learn the only way possible, that finger tattoos hurt like hell.

Next stop: La Grenze in STRASBOURG, FRANCE, and a crushing realization that this is all coming to the end. Complete with the end of tour sorrows. This is a thing. Sure I’ve been able to power through these shows, all 16, no break, held together by anti-inflammatories, CBD arnica ointment gifted to me by NATE from OLD MAN GLOOM — his gloom is STRONG…and he wears knee braces on stage because, dammit, we’re going to get through this or die trying — and insoluble emotional difficulties, but there are subtle glories to this. And I am sensing I am going to miss them all.

So when Annapaola, tour manager, tells me we’re all going for a walk I don’t demure and sleep in the van, I walk through Strasbourg, to note and take note of the day, the people, the band, the sun, the time. So it is not forgotten. Ever.

The show? Packed and smoking. The complaints? Can someone please explain to someone on the catering crew how to, perhaps, catch a fish. So that I, a pescatarian could have something to eat other than uncooked rice and highly suspect “curry”?

BASEL? I’ve been trying to play Basel for the better part of 25 years now and keep waiting for it to get good/better. But the very definition of insanity is at work here: Basel was bad, we knew it was going to be bad, and we hoped despite it being bad for 25 years that THIS year would be different. But it wasn't.

The height of Basel comedy? When I take a shower post-show, get locked out of the building in just a towel and while I wait to be found with someone who has any idea where my clothes are, me attempting to take a seat on a wooden bench swing that gives way tossing me into the accumulated beer bottle caps, cigarettes butts and, I imagine, used condoms. Naked. My balls are appalled.

And off in the distance I hear a woman laugh. I believe she is the very spirit of Basel.

Can’t wait to play here again next year with OXBOW.

And then finally, BOLOGNA, which will not only feature the last show of this portion of the tour but the debut of my novel A LONG SLOW SCREW in Italian on Double Nickels as PATERNOSTRA. So bookstore reading, then show. And the ever-present HEAT APOCALYPSE, the fact of which means I am wearing a bomber jacket: because.

95 Degrees + Bomber Jacket. Me, KORA, the publisher! (Photo by Kasia Meow)

But we have like 30 people at the bookstore. Plus the publisher, a translator and an interviewer and in the middle, when I look up to see my wife and youngest daughter have also made it to Bologna and into the reading, I am filled with ineffable delight. The audience questions were good, the translator carried along the essence of my interest and attraction to crime all the time, and books were sold and autographed.

The show at the Freakout Club later? Fan-fucking-tastico. Some of the cats from Unsane were there. All now ex-pats, fucking off to countries where they can get older and not be bankrupted by health “care”. And it’s a packed and stifling sweatbox of a place that leaves us drenched and soaked for our post-show drive to the airport in Venice where we’ll manage to not sleep for another two days.

It’s the last show, but thankfully, in mid-October we’ve been invited to a big festival in Porto, Portugal and we will do likely four shows around it, short time, before returning. So this is not goodbye/so long. This is just see you later.

And in San Francisco, things are delayed because a homeless guy stabbed someone at the baggage carousel. That and the bomb threat that had shut down the terminal for a fair amount of time.

Yeah. No place like home.

Now we’re going to be heading back to our regularly scheduled programming. (Photograph by Annapaola Martin)