Making Friends. The BUNUEL Way.
A martial art based solely on SLAPPING? Working on making it happen!
Saigon. Shit.
Wait. No. Rotterdam. I was once being questioned by a Federal authority regarding my whereabouts during a prior touring engagement and he was baffled and unbelieving that on any given day I couldn’t account for my surroundings.
“How could you not know where you were?”
I told him a “funny” story.
“You know I once was in a bar in Austin during South by Southwest. It’s a festival,” I said to calm a confused look. “Anyway, this guy tries to get me excited about his ‘app’. So I ask him what it does and he tells me ‘it tells you what bar you’re in!’”
I laughed in his face, kind of like I was laughing in the Feds face because the reality is while I usually know the name of any venue I’ve walked into, countries are much, much harder. Especially when you’re falling asleep whenever you stop moving. Which I am because I do. Sort of like a shark. But in reverse.
However, Rotterdam, I’m paying attention to. For no other reason than that, well, Holland. The venue is along some rows of old garages and it all feels a bit like basement torture scenes are afoot. Inside though? Well, inside it feels sort of the same but it’s clearly an art space. Art as in Velvet Underground, and the guy who owns it is a jolly guy and the vibe all around is good.
How good? When we return from dropping stuff off at the hotel and walk up, the assembled CHEER. Keeping in step I scream, “DRINKS FOR ALL OF MY FRIENDS!” Only to later say to someone seconds later, “I’m not paying for any drinks.”
Which is a noted point. This is a dry tour for me. I had a choice: being tanked up on anti-inflammatory pills or have my liver shut down over a glass of wine AND anti-inflammatory pills. Too bad the pills, while they make my hips feel better, don’t make me a person less prone to inflame any given number of social situations but there you have it: sober as gopher.
Smoking crack, two crack smokers with a fairly healthy looking pitbull dog, smoking crack like it was the ‘80s all over again.
Theater chairs ring the slightly raised stage platform, with one right on the stage edge where, as luck would have it, an elderly gentleman decided to sit for the duration of most of the show. I have nothing against the elderly, especially as I count myself among their numbers. I do have something against shit footwear and I don’t know what’s happened to Europe since the last time I was here but there is an epidemic of poorly chosen footwear that’s worse than anything we’ve seen with COVID.
So yes…while it should be known that I am footphobic, I don’t think you have to be footphobic to be disturbed at having to watch busted out and failed sandal’d feet for close to an hour. It was like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. But with feet.
If the show was faster and more furious than usual? Credit old dude feet.
LILLE WAS NEXT. We played with Deaf Kids, a band on OXBOW’s old label Neurot. That’s not what was noteworthy to me. What was noteworthy was that they were/are Brazilian and I’ve missed Brazilian Jiu Jitsu — in literary terms? Foreshadowing! — with the intensity that some might miss freedom if they were in jail.
So I track them down and ask if any of them train. Turns out only one guy does/did.
Why’d he stop?
“It’s too hard.” Which made me laugh and laugh. Until I stopped laughing and we just bathed in the uncomfortable quiet.
The stage is so full of their stuff though that we just set up on the floor. A smooth concrete floor that will be head-crackingly slick 30 seconds after we start playing. And it is. A fact that strangely invites me to add spit to the sweat that’s making it a broken leg about to happen.
Something else though: because there is no stage I’m on eye level with the audience. And when I say “eye level” I mean I am looking AT them. Through them. And they do, some of them, what’s become a modern affliction in the face of anxiety: they raise their phones.
Picture me and you fucking and in the middle of said sex, you raised up your phone between us. Sorry for the visual but yeah, it’s that disturbing. I mean it’s one thing to put the phone on the nightstand but…well you get my drift. Plus I am vain and am unsure what 30 seconds of shitty shaky video does for anyone outside of Youtube.
So I work through the crowd lowering the phones. Which somehow amuses this French fella. So I seek him out, singing while doing so, to see what all of the hubbub is about. I get very close to his face, survey the landscape behind him before my eyes come to rest on his. Deprived of his phone it’s now nothing but anxiety and now, eye to eye to eye to eye, a desire to not be so.
And I just wait. For a dharma gate to open. Looking into his eyes, but aware of his hands, and he breaks the gaze, now no longer smiling and turns and leaves, leaving me unanswered regarding his initial burst of comedy.
It is perhaps this type of behavior that’s caused some to call me, let me see if I can remember this correctly…a “low class bully”? But I credit my sunny disposition. If there’s a joke, I just want to be in on it!
The show unwinds as shows do. We watch the majority of Deaf Kids set and enjoy it thoroughly, kids who have been on the road since MAY, so yeah, they sound tight as ticks, before we have to load up gear. Stepping? Right into a CRACK BAZAAR!
Smoking crack, two crack smokers with a fairly healthy looking pitbull dog, smoking crack like it was the ‘80s all over again. But absent any and all of that New York edge that marked the first iteration of crack attacks in America.
They’re so fucking jolly it just…I don’t know…makes you WANT TO SMOKE CRACK TOO! Of course with COVID the last thing you want to do when smoking crack is to take your mask off and put your lips on the crack pipe sported by your crack smoking friend.
But speaking of crack smoking….Can we talk about the quality decline of rideshare drivers in LONDON? On the way to CAFE OTO where tonight’s show is happening the driver is tooling me through the streets of London to Ashwin Street. He turns into a brick-lined alley so narrow that the car doors can’t be opened.
From the end of the alley to the front where we drove in it can be seen that it’s a dead end. A dead end he drives right to the end of before announcing, “we’re HERE!”
I tell him this is not Ashwin Street and he shrugs and begins to attempt a K-turn, a move that’s so impossible that I’m stunned into silence before finally saying, “there is no planet on which whatever you’re trying to do is going to work.”
But back and forth we go. How long? Until I want to kill him, a state of affairs that kicked in after “we’re HERE” if truth be told. So this horrifyingly brainless struggle against the laws of physics continues until I, almost now a broken man, say to him, “Please try to just back out…….Please.”
Advice that seems to work and four minutes later I stumble out of his ride at OTO and into a club where I had previously earned the aforementioned cognomen “low class bully”.
Soundcheck, show start, and on cue the cameras come up and I wade into the crowd, folding them down like Venetian blinds. But one guy views this as an invitation to PLAY. A game called “get Eugene’s attention!” So as soon as I gently fold it down, he raises it again, smiling and bouncing at the sheer joy of it, it seems. I fold it down again. More forcefully and he begins to raise it, again, and my hand latches on to his face like the Alien in Aliens.
Maybe it was the brick alley, I don’t know, but as I am whipping his head around like a tetherball I hear him scream between my fingers, “WAIT…YOU KNOW ME! YOU KNOW ME!”
And, of course, I do. It’s your friends that transgress the worse who should clearly know better. In any case outside of designated film-ers, there are no further incidents and we play our asses off.
But a twist: earlier someone from BUNUEL rushes in and says to me, “there’s a guy out there in a Serao Academy shirt!!!” And while I usually hide before we play, I rush out and find Alec, a former teammate, all 270 pounds of him standing there. His intent? To see the show. My desire? To have him run interference for me if I have audience problems.
Which he totally failed to do.
After the show he’s there, and I say, “hey man! You were supposed to handle things.”
He said “that guy was like 130 pounds. I thought you meant like a bigger challenge.”
And because we had trained together this was exactly the right cue since, as you know, jiu jitsu is something we only do with our FRIENDS.
But I attack.
The attack itself? Uneventful. Much like my jiu jitsu in real life. But the twist? The photo was taken by my friend and face grab-ee in what I could only imagine was a dream of seeing me handled by Alec. An event that, historically speaking, was unlikely. But it was…fun?
Yeah, it was. A development that both angered and saddened me. I mean fun? What am I? Twelve?
But peak experience-wise? The Supersonic Festival in BIRMINGHAM was next and given that we’d be playing with our friends in Old Man Gloom AND seeing Lisa Supersonic for the first time in a COVID age, we were keyed. Up. Highly.
And pulling up the first people we see? Brodsky, Nate, Santos, Tomas, and Aaron Turner. Did I mention that Aaron has started training in jiu jitsu?
Yeah, that’s right: after hugs and handshakes: ATTACK. By the port-a-potty no less. And after we play and after they play I was saying goodbye to Brodsky and Nate and a weird quiet fell, because what I didn’t see was Aaron, creeping out of the port-a-potty, poised for ATTACK, which is just what he did.
The shows? Yeah yeah, whatever. You should have been there. The fights? Well, Alec and Aaron…we will meet again, sirs!
Next stop? QUADROPHENIA. Also known as Brighton Rock. See what I did there? Two film references for the price of one!
Anyways, sorry to rush off. But it’s time to soundcheck, and ask around to see if anyone here’s done jiu jitsu. Or heard of it. Or can spell it. And if so, I will attack them. And if history is any indicator I will get injured. And then say I wasn’t.
I was at the London show. First of all, it was absolutely terrific, the band are completely feral, all muscle no fat ferocious. Your drummer is total machine..incredible. But tightest-band-I've-seen-in-a-long-time aside the cherry on the cake was when, in the afterglow of the last song, you walk up to the guy in the Black Flag t-shirt that you'd earlier fronted up to till he'd stopped filming and said, "Sorry I almost beat you to death." then you paused and looked at him and said, "You any idea how often I say that?".
Sincerely sorry about your friend. I often wonder how much pain someone is in that they take their own lives; it must seem incredibly insurmountable. :'( Offering deepest condolences to his family, friends, and community.