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Tour Diary: 2002 (Eugene) > Page 5 |
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But pretty soon the great man with the great name Mirko Spino, which I like to use interchangeably as in Spino Mirko, shows up and we're off to the club called BLOOM (www.bloomriot.org/live/oxbow.html) where we meet Niko and St. Elisabeth.
The club is cool, Niko and his patron saint make it there alive, and I sit at a table and enjoy the food, the drink and suffer through soundcheck. Later at dinner that night they ply me with grappa and in my joy I start smashing my fists on the table causing the red wine to stain me, the table, the cloth, our faces, my eyes, and it seems to me that this is just the beginning.
BUT FIRST: Practice. Jesus. Practice makes perfect but who gives a fuck about perfect. I mean we occupy that place in space anyway. We own perfect. Why bother acting like things are any other way, but Niko won't be persuaded otherwise so instead of staggering around the club where I belong and using my little bit of Italian to embarrass myself I'm back stage practicing with Niko. I mean my hopes for this show aren't great as: *we're 15 minutes outside of Milan *our host had never heard of the club and *who the fuck wants to hear OXBOW songs sung acoustically (as one wag noted "that's like seeing SLAYER unplugged)?
But St. Elisabeth drops a local weekly paper on the table in front of me and it has the show announced (right under Ronnie James Dio's concert announcement) in the datebook and she says also, "it's packed." And she sure as shit is right. The show opens with Manuel's soundscapes, then Niko and I come out and bang out 4 tunes, I break into a spoken word piece about discovering that my girlfriend had been a hooker, we finish with 2 more tunes and finish with a Niko and Manuel soundattack. Spino/Mirko/Mirko/Spino is ecstatic and says "280 people." I'm shocked and after an encore even more shocked. And then finally as shocked as I could be when hearing it described by various and sundry as great and intense. It dawns on me at this point that probably what the deal is, with Switzerland and a lot of other places, is that OXBOW is just too much. An old girlfriend of mine used to delight in the fact that her subsequent boyfriends found her "too much. Too big, too smart, too beautiful, too sexy..." "What about 'too crazy'?" Yeah, well, someone had to say it. But yeah, the amplitude, the frequency, the fucking noise, spectacle and danger are just too fucking much. Maybe the acoustic thing is just right. Maybe. But there he is, looking for all the world like Mark Barsotti, the self-proclaimed stupidest man in my high school. "Fuck. That was great. You were great. America is shit but you are great. I went to America and wanted to watch Willie the Fresh Prince. You know that show? And I wanted to watch the Houston Rockets and my host family said 'fuck that nigger shit!' Can you believe that? 'Nigger shit'." "Well..." "But I study philosophy here..." He swigs off of his bottle of beer and through misted glasses, he stares at me like he's trying to find me, though I'm standing, of course, right in front of him. "Well philosophy... like who?" "Who?!?! Well the great philosophers." "Like who? Like what are you reading?" "Bukowski!" "Ahh..." And he trundles headlong into EVERY thing... but he ends up, as is growing disturbingly consistent with this trip, on hookers. "There are NO Italian hookers." "What?!?! I can't believe that." "No. None. They are all Ukraine. Or African." I laugh and laugh and laugh pretty sure that the 6'3" tranny hooker who lives and works downstairs from Olivia's IS Italian but I drop it. Let him keep his fantasy about the perfection of Italian womanhood. We're finally interrupted by Mirko/Spino/Spino/Mirko and he says "yes, Eugene, my girlfriend will drive you home." And he looks at me and I look at him. And then I look at his girlfriend. And then I look back at him and he says... "MY girlfriend." Hahahahaha... "That's your fucking problem my friend. Anyway, let's go baby. The night is fucking YOUNGGGGGGGG!!!!!"
He watches us fretfully and as me and Manuel and Mirko/Spino/Spino/Mirko's girlfriend pull away from Niko and St. Elisabeth who he's taking home, I give him a wave that tries to say "don't worry. I like you. I won't fuck your old lady," but due to the unexpected nature of my solicitude perhaps this did not reassure at all, I imagine, but did the exact opposite. But they drop us off and Manuel gets out of the car and surprises the shit out of me by going all Italian and kissing both of the girls goodbye, on both cheeks, and so of course it seems I must follow suit but while the first kiss and the first cheek go okay it's just getting past the mouth to the second cheek that requires A WHOLE LOT OF FUCKING CONCENTRATION. I mean, for ME. And amazingly I managed it and we're off to bed. And I wake the next morning to thumping and bumping noises that seem to indicate that... YES... Manuel has locked himself in the bathroom. I yank the door open for him with the few words of advice, "never underestimate the transformative powers of violence," and I go back to sit blear-eyed on bed edge and watch Milan rush below, below me.
Staring across the street into apartments below I can see the outline of a guy who I imagine is cooking eggs. His hands are furiously scrambling them and it seems he's watching TV when he's doing it and this I buy until it dawns on me that he's in his bedroom and not the kitchen and he's not cooking eggs but jerking off. Genius. An analogue for how I'm spending/wasting my life. I watch him disinterestedly for a bit and realize with no small amount of sardonic shrugging that I'm looking into a goddamned mirror. ITALIAN HOOKERS? WHY, NO! And so cruising over to the train station with Mirko/Spino/Spino/Mirko we drive past scantily clad women "waiting for buses" and we ask him about the existence of Italian hookers and he confirms that they don't exist. "So those women are really just dressed in their underwear waiting for a bus?" "Yes. Or they're Ukraine." St. Elisabeth queries, disbelieving, "but what about Nights of Cabiria..." "Well that's a movie." "But yes, but it must have been based on fact, no?" "No." I believe he is insane. But we wend our way through the city and over to the train station and he tells us that Mussolini sucks (a contention I have a very hard time believing as well), that his friend Maurizio who called me a "nigger" is an okay guy (well to his credit he never did so to my face, but in a discussion with a friend of mine), and that when he quizzed his girlfriend about the ride back she said "oh nothing happened." So I left him with words of reassurance. "When your lover says 'nothing happened' it means 'you're goddamned right something fucking DID happen. But when your friend says it, it means almost the same thing. Lucky for you we're not friends." So I hug him and I feel like I'm going to miss him like a brother and we make plans to meet again in the spring with the full band and we're on the sleeper train to Paris, our date with destiny with the rest of OXBOW, and seven shows of near apocalyptic perfection. | ||||||||||||
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09/23/02: Zoo Bizarre: Bordeaux, France
We play with the Boston hardcore group CONVERGE. We're supposed to headline but we were late and we never fight about that shit anymore. Fine. Fuck it. I mean whether we fuck you NOW or LATER makes little difference to us, as long as we, and this is important here, GET TO FUCK YOU, we're fine. But I stumble headlong into a rock and roll pouting match when I discover that the contract has not been followed and the poison-free men of CONVERGE have, along with my vegetarian band mates conspired to keep meat off the fucking menu. I dream of stabbing the promoter in the face with a fork and my mood grows darker and I grow more morose as I sit like a stain at table end and glower at the fucking straight edge fucks that ruined my meal. And I, in total puerile fashion, refuse to eat. But I'll drink goddamn it and whatever fucking happens, will HAPPEN. Trying to head off a Bradford before it becomes a Bradford (see Euro Tour Diary 1 under "BRADFORD") Manuel tells the promoter that it is absolutely necessary that I have meat and the promoter makes the mistake of asking me if this is true and I stare at his face for what feels like a minute before saying, "well of course not. Don't bother yourself about me. I'll just sit here and eat wet cigarettes like a dog, if you don't mind." But I do insist on going to the hotel first and we do and on the way through the streets I ask our guide. "So where are the French hookers?" "Oh. There are no French prostitutes." A familiar refrain at this point. Either the male populations of these countries are totally in the dark about this or we're just confronting the kind of xenophobia that's made Thailand and Lagos such great places to visit. "And the mayor of this town, is he a fascist?" "Yes. He cleaned all the buildings." "Good." But by the time we get back to the show it is packed. As in sold out. As in people having to be turned away, 400 people plus inside. We are in shock and backstage we go where we move around the dressing room with CONVERGE and I search for a mirror.
I find it and wander back into the poison free room and sit on the couch between two members of CONVERGE and put the mirror down in front of me and it dawns on me that this looks like I'm about to start cracking and cutting up lines and I feel them waiting for their straight edge moment, a moment that's only broken when I pull out my mascara and eyeliner. I stared humming Lou Reed songs and the irony is all over the place. But we play, it's great and because these guys are under 30 when they played after us instead of folding they racheted things up and it was a great show, they were great and had me longing for SSD and 1983 again. Afterward in the post-show glow they tell me who they're friends with (the guys in Isis who we like as well) and we promise to stay in some kind of touch and I'm surprised that an experience that I thought was going to be so fucking shitty (Anarchy signs always put me in that mood), actually did not suck at all very much. But there's something else disturbing afoot. Something brought about by the meat pout earlier. And that's that while the rest of the band is fresh and new and strong because they just got here, that I am soiled and old and weak because I've been here sitting around, thinking,, thinking, thinking and getting morose about my place in space and almost everything else attached to it. In the face of 10 reasons to the opposite I'm feeling suicidal. The realization of which, unaccountably, I find cheering. |
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