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Tour Diary: 1998 > Page 5

The Butcher of Lyon

We tore through Cote D'Azur, Cannes, Monaco, and St. Tropez where that damned song kept haunting my waking moments Ban De Soleil for the St. Tropez tan. Our entire reality is formed by American tv commercials. And of this we are ashamed. They are gearing Cannes up for the soon to be arrived film festival where people dressed in black from LA will show up and ruin everything. Having renounced modern motion pictures I hold forth again about how though movies are art, actors are simple craftspeople and not artists since artists create something from nothing and actor's just reproduce what writer's have written and we should punish them anyway by not seeing their movies. Titanic pushed me over the edge though I haven't seen it. The idea of it was enough. The City of Angels pissed me off as well since it was a better Wenders film. And the cherry on top was, of course, my self-loathing for having a speaking role in Bill Cosby's Leonard Part 6, it must be said, one of the worst movies of all time. In any case we make it through to Lyon where luck and circumstance had us finding the elusive Nazi war criminal cleverly disguised as a butcher having a cigarette break in front of his butcher shop. The proper authorities have been notified.

� M. Liebeskind

But in Lyon we play in a club called Pez Ner. The name is not connected to the candy at all, but to some quote from Antonin Artaud who, all of my best sources say, is some dead French guy. But this place is a great space, so great that it seems to be the kind of place that they show in the movies when they want to show a place that cool, wild people go. We played their first show ever as a club in 1996 and we're glad to be back. Greg, our drummer, in what is to become a recurring theme looks around and says "Yup. THIS is the one. Not a person in the house tonight. My prediction." Drummers it seems are universally negative about this kind of thing. Maybe it is having to watch the audience. I have to watch the audience too and I don't have a whole drum set to hide behind but I don't complain. Possibly because I'm dissociating badly enough to believe that I'm playing a stadium every night, who knows? But not only will this show be videotaped and professionally recorded, they are also running a live simulcast on the Internet, so if we die tonight, it will be a death that will echo thousands of miles.

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� M. Liebeskind

There is a band called Bedhead opening for us. They are on a big and cool label in the states. Our label in the states, SST Records, is pretty big but every time I mention their name some wag will invariably say something like "are they still around?"

This annoys the fuck out of me and is probably payback for when I met Tommy and Pamela Lee at Hustler Magazine's 20th Anniversary Party and told them that "I liked the new Motley Crue record and I don't care what everybody else says!"

But Bedhead suit their name and listening from the apartments above the club where the bands stay I'm drifitng off when Dan, our bassist, walks in and says casually, "The club is packed." And so it is. William Rage, an American friend of ours, is there and the show is rocker-rific. Watching the video later I watch myself doingthe fuck walk, screwing the air, and jamming audience members faces in my crotch. This, I believe, is no way for a grown man to act.

After the show we are back upstairs and dinner is served: big medallions of pork, pork, pork. I'm talking to the genius artist Marie-Claire Cordat, a French painter, collageur, photog, and performance artist in the Karen Finley mode. My French is bad to nonexistent but her english is good enough for it to make sense that we're talking to each other. She tells me a story about her mother drowning kittens and the lateness of the evening, the medallions of pork, and the red wine I am consuming are causing my eyes to get caught in her eyes leaving me quite sure I'm on the verge of being killed. Nothing she's actually saying mind you, but I just start thinking, "well, you know, she could kill me." and from there to "well, why wouldn't she kill me," and finally on to "well, I'd kill me if I had the chance." William Rage breaks the spell as he and his girlfriend Annalisa who I'm predicting, regardless of how hopelessly in love with her he is, will end up destroying him, asks me to sell him something. I go to sell him something, pass out, and wake early the next morning. Marie-Claire Cordat is gone, I imagine she is pissed off at me but for what I do not know. It is a beautiful day and we are off to Lille, where as our luck would have it, their is a citywide strike. Hurrah for socialism and the 13 hour work week!!!