Thursday, January 22, 2009



I woke this morning in Leipzig after the first decent nights sleep I've had in 5 days to the first blue sky I'd seen in 5 days. Before I got out of bed things were already looking up from yesterday and the day before. I spent my time in Leipzig in my room, incapacited as I was by a day long headache, travel fatigue and the early phases of rapid onset winter depression. I joke about the reasons I had for moving to New Orleans; I was young and trying to distance myself from my parents and my past, it's the only place in north America where more than 12 musicians can make a living at once, my boyfriend had dumped me for the last time and I had nothing left to lose, 24 hour bars, a torrid love affair, so many reasons to move to New Orleans. They were all valid reasons to move somewhere and, in my case, every one of them true. But, in the end, I suspect the real reason I HAD to move to the south was because one or two more winters in the cold and dark and I'd probably have done myself or someone else in. That depression sets in on me like a heavy fog, like a thick blanket full of disease and poison. 5 days of gray skies and I'm hiding in my room feeling physically ill. It's just that quick. Then, the mere sight of sunlight got me out of bed with the promise of seeing more. And the promise was not a hollow one. Through the morning and into the afternoon the sky has been a bright winter blue, almost as if the sky were a giant luminescent screen lit from behind, so clean and uniformly blue it looks like a paintjob on a new car. A German sky if ever there was one. At the late hour of 3:45, the shadows grow longer on the streets of Berlin and the naked linden trees stand like giant broken umbrellas in the tangerine-tinged light of late afternoon. This is my favorite time of day because, no matter where I am, in this golden hour, every city suddenly looks like Paris.



The train from Leipzig to Berlin was less than an hour and a half and before I knew it I was out of the unknown and in to the familiar. Instead of languishing in the heat and humidity of a New Orleans July, I spent most of last summer in Berlin. For almost 6 weeks I lived with my kids in the Charlottenberg neighborhood, frequenting playgrounds during the day and doing a show with the Pfisters by night. We came to know where to eat breakfast, where to go on rainy days, who sold the best bread at the open air food bazaar in the church square on Wednesdays and Saturdays and which vendors at the flea market gave little gifts to good little boys and which ones yelled at you for looking at things too long. We went to Legoland and the zoo and by the time we'd finished our stay every waitress at the restaurant around the corner would put our order in to the kitchen before we even sat down at a table. Ben, Henry and I were the three amigos and, during daylight hours, we were inseparable. If there was someplace I couldn't go with them, I didn't go. At the time I felt strongly that I be there for them whenever it was physically possible so that, in this strange place under new circumstances, I could be their constant that made all the weirdness seem normal. Only today, walking around this town that we called home for over a month, did I realize that it was they who provided this service for me. Spending my days with them, doing what we pleased with no phone to answer, bills to pay, car to drive or schedule to keep, was my salvation. I'd have gone crazy here without them. It was a mleancholy day for me. I can't see anything here without missing them and I feel as though I don't belong here without them.



My day of reverie and simple pleasure was cut into by an hour to accomadate a rehearsal before sound check to add some new material to the set. Since the last performance is being recorded for the purpose of releasing a record with the results, no one reminds rehearsing so much. It's one thing to fake your way through a gig or two in front of an audience that doesn't know you and will, probably, never see you again. It's quite another to have your clams, stupid mistakes and half-assedness documented and distributed. Nothing haunts a musician quite so much as a recording for which he was unprepared.



SO we rehearse. It's only an hour but, in many ways, it seemed endless. Everyone has a different method by which they prepare and when divergent opinions on how to do it arrive at the same rehearsal someone always feels like they're not being listened to or having their time wasted. This rehearsal proved to be a saucy melange of all of the above. I've fought to control my temper and impatience with others for years. Even as a little kid, I remember being infuriated by kids who bitched when their mudpies fell apart, even after I'd told them they were using too much mud and not enough sod. As inclined as I may be to tell people, no matter what they are doing, that I know a better way to do it, I'm trying to evolve into the kind of person who will, if not let people do things their own way, at least come around to doing it my way on their own. And so, especially this early in a tour, I'm inclined to pick my battles, watch my tone of voice and walk away from anything that is more than I'm willing to handle diplomatically. This might be a good strategy to employ on a permanent basis but I'm not there yet. I kow that in the end I will be an easier person for other people to deal with and that patience is a virtue, but it the trade of is that rehearsals will take a lot longer when I'm holding my tongue. Which is, in itself, another frustration.




The hotel is big and beautiful, the most lavish so far in my opinion. Once again, I'm reminded of how to what extent I have slummed it where accomadations are concermed. I'm certain I will again, at least if I ever want to travel again, but it's a nice change to not just see, but to live like the other half lives, even for a little while. It's also a nice turn-about from the digs I had last time I was in Berlin. The apartment we stayed in was okay, not ideal, but livable. However, the conditions under which we lived there were almost more than I could bear and I still have moments of anxiety if I think about my run-in with the management by way of the housekeeping staff. Their lack of willingness to actually clean my room and accusations of damages to nearly the point of vandalism have forever colored my memories of that trip and made me vow to charge more whenever I work in Germany. It got so bad that I planned my entrances and egresses at the apartment with care to avoid meeting up with any staff member besides Peggy at the front desk. Every time I went into our room it seemed smaller and colder and every time I left I always hoped that, somehow, we wouldn't have to go back. It was, therefore, a spiritually redeeming experience to be greeted at my taxi this afternoon my a bellman who not only insisted on opening the door to the hotel but also closing the door of the taxi. After checking in and on the way to my room, I passed one of the maids and her cart in the hall. Before I could avert my gaze out of sheer habit, she smiled and chirped "guten tag!" as if she saw me everyday and was delighted to see me yet again. My first thought was that she must have missed the housekeepers union meeting where my picture was circulated amongst them so I could be placed on the "do not clean" list and recognized as the enemy, should I ever return to Berlin. Then I started to think that maybe her friendly demeanor was just a cover and that she was on her way to report that she'd spotted me and to convein a special meeting of the chambermaid gestapo immediately to decide a course of attack. Then it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the people at the ArtAppart were vendictive assholes and that this was how I was supposed to be treated. Of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't always mean that people aren't out to get you, but I'm pretty sure that, in this case, they were just a bunch of douchebags who happened to be out to get me. It happens.