MELBOURNE, Australia – My worldwide open mic journey began in China in 2008 after the Formula One race in Shanghai, and little did I know that it was a journey that would continue for six more years and cover most of the globe, every continent except Africa (where I once lived and played music in an open mic decades earlier) and Antarctica, and that it would spawn a book, a blog, an album, a documentary film, numerous podcasts, music videos and other multimedia projects.
This year, 2014, I have decided to finish all of the projects and tie them together into a consolidation of multimedia. As part of my personal impetus to gather it all together for myself, but also put it into perspective on this blog, I have decided to create a page for each city I have visited on the journey, tying together samples of the whole multimedia adventure linked to that city.
That the story was rejected several times hurt at first, but the payoff in The Star was more than worth the wait. It also ended up being the biggest article about Onfray in the major English-language media to that date, coming out a couple of months before his book on atheism became his first major English translation published in the United States. He was soon to be written about extensively, and I recall seeing one interesting portrait even in the Wall Street Journal.
For me, this Onfray article was another of the stories in what I was hoping would be a series about popular philosophical writers, the first being that on Colin Wilson, that turned into a book. Alas, I did not continue the series…. But maybe I will return to it some day….
PARIS – Back in Paris for the next few weeks now, I did not do any open mics last night as I was flying back from Budapest. So today, nothing to report on the open mic scene in the clouds…. But that makes this a good moment to add another story from my archives to my collection of blog stories, as opposed to posts.
This time, I have selected a story about the world’s most prolific authors of books that could go into the blog stories as opposed to posts category, but it could also fit well into the Brad’s Rejected Stories area, since it was rejected at least 12 times, including from my own newspaper where I worked, before it got picked up and published at the Los Angeles Times in their Sunday Book Review as the lead essay at the bottom of the page.
It was an over-the-transom submission, I did not even have an editor’s name to address it to. Sometimes these things happen, if you get the right story to the right person at the right time. In fact, the story was spotted by the fill-in book editor of the time, Kenneth Turan, who that same year, 1991, became the Los Angeles Times’ film critic, a job he still does today. In 1993 he became the director for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
Here it is, my fifth year in a row of traveling the world to play in open mics and jam sessions. It starts tomorrow with my flight from Paris to Melbourne, then the following week I go to Kuala Lumpur. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have been documenting my musical adventures around the world on this blog for the last three years, and for the year before that I began writing a book about it. This year I will again visit 20 countries in the next nine months, and play in a massive number of open mics and open jam sessions, and I will write about what I find here….
To recap a little, the first year was the book. The second year was the blog. The third year was the blog and a documentary film. The fourth year was the blog and me recording myself playing music with musicians in the open mics around the world, as well as a series of podcasts of people running the open mics and playing in them.
So where does this whole trans-media epic stand at the moment? Another recap: I take these worldwide trips as a journalist reporting on Formula One auto racing for my newspaper, and in my free time I seek out places to play, in these cities and countries where I would not otherwise expect to find open mics – in many cases. And each time I like to have a new project to work on to document it, or do something “else” with it. This year will be no exception. I again have projects in the works. What are they?
First, I want to say that my goal this year is perhaps more ambitious than in all the other year combined. Because my No. 1 goal will be to COMPLETELY finish all of the projects that have accumulated but never ceased to spin out. In other words, I’m still working on the book – it’s written, but I’m now editing it – and I want that finished finally by the end of the year, but hopefully within the next couple of months. I want to work with all the recordings I did and make some kind of CD – ie, the podcasts and some of the stuff of me playing with other people. And I want to finish the film, finally. To that end, I have made a number of very important steps in recent weeks, and I’m very, very excited about them, and I will write about that in the coming weeks.
For this year, I will not simply sit back on my laurels and be satisfied with finishing the other projects, but I will start one or two new ones. In addition to simply continuing to play at open mics and jam sessions everywhere I go, and recording it here on the blog, the first new project is that I will be adding a new page to the blog at every location I go to, which will be a Thumbnail Guide to the open mics and jam sessions, etc., that I know of in those cities. Having now had four years, and this will be the fifth, of accumulated and growing knowledge about each city’s open mics, I finally feel like it is time to put it all up on the blog in a usable form. Of course, my Paris guide to open mics will always be the most up-to-date, since that’s where I live and play the most. But the other pages will, I hope, serve their purpose well, and give a whole knew heft to this site.
The other project I plan to do, but this one may or may not be feasible, is that I plan to write a new song in each country and city I visit, and the song will in some way be inspired by the place. I have no idea how big a task that will prove to be, but I really want to face the challenge and try it. If it produces one good song, then that’s cool enough – the rest will just be a great exercise and discipline…. I will decide whether or not to make the songs heard on the site, but I expect that I will only manage to lay down the melodic idea and write the full text, but not perfect the song at each place – since I’m often not present in the countries long enough to do that…especially given all the work I have to do for my day job.
So that is it in a nutshell: 20 countries in 9 months; a new web of evergreen material for a worldwide open mic thumbnail guide of where to perform; 20 new songs inspired by the places I visit; and finally, all of my previous years’ projects finished and finalized to tie together the entire multimedia, trans-media, worldwide musical adventure. Sound like I’m a dreamer? I hope so!!!!
PS, here is the schedule of places I will visit, and when (although the date usually but not always represents the last day I am in the country – and while there are only 19 countries here, the 20th is France, where I will play in between times):
Mar. 17 Australian Grand Prix Melbourne
Mar. 24 Malaysian Grand Prix Kuala Lumpur
Apr. 14 Chinese Grand Prix Shanghai
Apr. 21 Bahrain Grand Prix Bahrain
May 12 Spanish Grand Prix Barcelona
May 26 Monaco Grand Prix Nice/Monaco
Jun 9 Canadian Grand Prix Montreal
Jun. 30 British Grand Prix Silverstone/Oxford
Jul. 7 German Grand Prix Nurburgring/Cologne
Jul. 28 Hungarian Grand Prix Budapest
Aug. 25 Belgian Grand Prix Spa-Francorchamps/Liege
Sep. 8 Italian Grand Prix Monza/Milan
Sep. 22 Singapore Grand Prix Singapore
Oct. 6 Korean Grand Prix South Korea/Seoul/Mokpo
Oct. 13 Japanese Grand Prix Suzuka/Nagoya/Osaka
Oct. 27 Indian Grand Prix Delhi
Nov. 3 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Abu Dhabi
Nov. 17 U.S. Grand Prix Austin
Nov. 24 Brazilian Grand Prix Sao Paolo
Two completely unexpected posts, but the second part is cooler than the first. First part is just to say that I took my guitar with me to celebrate the birthday of a friend of a friend since I decided I would go to the Cabaret Culture Rapide blues jam afterwards. I ended up playing guitar and singing for an hour or more at the birthday party, at the 25 Degre Est bar and restaurant, outside on the terrace with a cool breeze blowing. I played some of my songs, some cover songs, had an audience, felt great. But here is the more cool post:
Last month I was exchanging emails with someone from the entourage of a very cool American rock musician, Garland Jeffreys, about his then upcoming concerts in Europe. He was about to play in Belgium, and then he would play in Paris. I could not get to Belgium, and as it turned out, I could not even make it to his Paris concert, as I had to go on a reporting mission to Le Mans, in France, on the very day he was playing in Paris, at the Divan du Monde, on 2 June. I returned to Paris from Le Mans too late.
Judging by a revue I read about the concert, I missed something great. Now flash forward today, lunch, in Paris, near the Place de Clichy. I was having lunch with a man I had met at a sports conference in Turkey in April, another longtime Paris expat named Ciaran Quinn. It turns out Quinn likes this blog, and it also turns out that he comes from a very musical family and has music in the blood, but mostly as a spectator. He suddenly popped out that he had just seen the most amazing concert, that of Garland Jeffreys, in Paris on 2 June!
So we got to talking about Jeffries a little. The thing is, Jeffreys is one of those almost cult American musicians on the periphery who has had a very cool career, and was once even considered to be the next big, big, big poet musician to pick up the relay from Dylan – that was back in the 1970s. Jeffreys is also famous for having gone to university with Lou Reed, and befriending him before he even started the Velvet Underground. Jeffreys started out in all those places Dylan did – and where I also tested my chops, in failure – in Greenwich Village, like Gerde’s Folk City, The Bitter End, the Gaslight, Kenny’s Castaways, etc.
He played lead guitar on John Cale’s first solo album, Vintage Violence, of 1969. (That got me wondering if he ever crossed paths with my friend Frazier Mohawk, who just died, and who produced Nico’s album, The Marble Index, with Cale.) Jeffreys released his first solo album in 1973 at Atlantic Records. The album actually had Dr. John on it, and the Brecker Brothers – who later did sensational stuff with Joni Mitchell. (Oh, AND it had David Peel on it, whom I had met at Gerde’s Folk City in 1976 and thought was full of shit in his stories about being friends with John Lennon, until I saw his album “The Pope Smokes Dope,” and other things….) Jeffreys was also in a documentary film directed by Wim Wenders and produced by Martin Scorsese, in 2003.
So we’re talking a real monument here, and a great musician, singer and writer. And he has just recently come out with a new album, called The King of In Between. Oh, and dammit, had I made my way to Amsterdam on 28 May – when I think I was in Monaco – I would have seen him take the stage with Bruce Springsteen, at the latter’s concert.
Okay, so what is the purpose of all of this?!?! It is just about how things come around. So here I was today sitting there in this brasserie eating lunch with Ciaran Quinn, who is an expert in sports-related Internet promotion and other such web related things – he’s got a contract with the Olympics this year – and he tells me he saw this concert that I had wanted to go to. THEN: He tells me about this sensational idea he came up with to create what he calls – I think he called them this – a “videograph.” This is not an autograph, where a celebrity simply signs a paper and says a few words of hello and how are you… this is a thing where you hold your iPhone video camera up and ask the celebrity for a few words as an autograph – a videograph. In this case, the videograph was for Ciaran’s young son, who is a musician, and Ciaran asks Jeffreys to say why music is so important to him. Very, very cool. But also I thought it a wonderful loop in the story of how I had been corresponding with Jeffreys entourage, almost went to the concert… then had it all come back to me a month later, in the form of a videograph. Someone better make an app for these things – a videograph book!!! (Maybe they already have….)
Valencia, Spain, continues to be the only city in the world where I have failed to find a formal open mic or jam session in a bar or other place during my four night stay in the city for the race. There is an open jam here in a rock bar, but it happens on Mondays or Tuesdays when I am never in town. None of this matter much on Thursday night when I ended up playing in La Pepica restaurant for a group of British journalists – and last night it mattered not at all either, when I ended up on beach playing for and with Brazilian journalists.
Unlike the night at the Pepica, this celebration was one I had planned for in advance. My Formula One journalist friend from Brazil, Luis Fernando Ramos, brought his acoustic guitar and invited me a race or two in advance to show up and take part in the music on the beach. There was to be a party for another Brazilian journalist colleague’s birthday.
So I went, late, and we played until well after midnight – maybe even until around close to 2 AM … I suppose it was a really good session, as I cannot remember even what time it was when I stumbled off the beach into a cab. But it was a great pleasure, a kind of sitting-around-the-campfire kind of thing, with people singing and playing along – and it was a great way to make up for the lack of open mics or open jams in Valencia. Someone else showed up and played guitar as well, and Luis sang as well as played.
I may be starting a trend here of F1 journalists taking their guitars to the races….
I’ve been saying a lot lately that if you want something interesting to happen in your life, carry around a guitar with you. I might also add a guidebook. At least, that is what happened to me in Valencia, Spain, last night – something very fun and interesting thanks to my guidebook and my guitar. And it also happened at a very interesting place where Ernest Hemingway, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles and others used to hang out.
To step back a little…. I finished my day’s work at the Formula One race track at the Marina in Valencia and I decided, exhausted after a long night the night before and the travel and the work, that I would not even look for a place to play music. Valencia has never been good for my musical adventure. So I opened up my guidebook, called Cartoville and published by Gallimard in France, to see if there were any good restaurants nearby.
hemingway at la pepica
Carrying these Cartoville guidebooks is a new thing I have been doing this year after I was introduced to the books by my friend Vanessa, last year, and she took me to some amazing places thanks to these books. So I thought, why not find one for each town I go to. Tourism was never my thing – but there’s no point traveling around the world for my work and being dumb about finding places, either.
The books are great because they split up the cities into sectors, and in each sector you have only five or six choices of bars, restaurants and shopping. So the choice is done very carefully, and I am rarely let down by what I find. I looked in the area around the Formula One track last night and saw this restaurant overlooking the beach; it was called La Pepica, and the guidebook described it as a “local myth” and that it was mentioned in Hemingway’s novel, “The Dangerous Summer,” and that these other celebrities had followed him there, etc. And the food was said to be good, and the ambiance was good, and simple, too.
So I walked over to the place, dragging my luggage behind me, and with my guitar on my back – for I had still not checked into my hotel. As I approached the restaurant, I saw suddenly some familiar faces: A massive table of maybe 35 British journalists sat on the terrace of the Pepica, in some kind of get-together for before the British Grand Prix, which is the next race after the one this weekend. There they were, BBC, Sky TV, magazine journalists, newspaper journalists from all the major publications and wire services, web journalists, other television and whatever journalists – the cream of the British racing media.
As soon as they saw my guitar, two or three of them requested I play a song. In the state I was, and given that it was the beginning of the evening and still bright out and they were just being served their first course, I thought, No way. I laughed off the invitation and said that perhaps once I had eaten, I would play.
I went inside, found a table not too closely within sight of the Brits, and I had a wonderful meal. The first course alone consisted of three dishes: a Valencia salad, calamari and some kind of mini muscles, shellfish. I had a nice half bottle of Rioja, and an amazing desert of some kind of parfait ice cream. It makes me want to run right back there as I write these words.
So I finished the meal, reading my New York Review of Books and the latest issue of Rock&Folk, the French music magazine, and then I went out and wondered over to say goodbye to the British journalists. Some had already left, but I was immediately invited once again to play music. And now, I was really ready, and desperately wanting to sing. And what a place to do it in? An old Hemingway hangout in the country of the flamenco guitar….
I ended up playing perhaps a total of 10 songs, split up by periods of talking, carousing and drinking the wine they offered me. Somehow I managed not to drink so much that I would lose hold of the notes, and I must say, with the beach in the distance, the sea a little beyond that, and even the appreciative waiters at this wonderful restaurant, it was an unbelievably great way to finish my first day in a town that has never been nice to me on this musical adventure – until now.
(Unfortunately, although a number of the journalists took photos and made videos of me playing, I have none myself, exceptionally, for this post.)
Hugely mixed emotions yesterday night as I had a couple of literary evenings mixed with music to attend. The first was not mixed with music, in fact, but was the most bittersweet. That was a visit to The Village Voice Bookshop, for a party to “celebrate” the closure of this Paris institution of the last 30 years. The store is closing as it can no longer survive as an independent bookshop in our Internet and ebook world. The second event was a celebration of Bloomsday, at the Swan Bar, where I was invited to play music and to listen to readings of James Joyce prose and other Irish things.
The Village Voice was one of my first Paris hangouts, and I went there in the second year of its existence, starting in 1983. I had seen many readings there, met many people, and got to know Odile Hellier, the woman who started the shop and has run it all these years. She is a fascinating woman who loves American literature, and decided to open a store with the true feel of the American literary expat bookshop in Paris – I guess she is a mixture of both Sylvia Beach AND Adrienne Monnier, who ran their stores only a few blocks away a few decades ago….
When I arrived for the closing celebration, I found that not even my personal invitation to the thing would save me from the impossibility of getting through the doors, so full was the two-floor shop of admirers and book lovers. In fact, they were bursting out into the street. All I could manage to do was glimpse inside and see Odile reading something from the staircase to the throngs below. I made a video of this, to give an idea.
I went off and ate a wonderful pizza dinner at a nearby pizzeria, where I also devoured the London Review of Books that I had bought in Montreal last week. Then I returned, sweating from that hot and spicy pizza, and found that I could now penetrate into the Village Voice. There I found the place now had enough room available for a visitor to wander around, and meet old friends. I started by saying hello to Odile outside the shop, where she was talking with someone and no doubt getting some fresh air after her various readings.
Inside, I found some old friends, including Jim Haynes, the American Paris expat supreme, whom, I recalled, I had met for the first time at the Village Voice in the back room cafe it used to have, in 1984, while I was reading Jim’s very own autobiography, “Thanks For Coming.” Jim and I kept contact over the years, I have been to his famous Sunday dinners at his atelier in the 15th arrondissement, and our lives have criss-crossed occasionally.
I also saw David Applefield, whom I had met at Shakespeare and Company in 1983 in the writer’s room, but whom I had probably seen more often in those early days at the Village Voice. David, at the time I met him, was working on the first Paris issue of his literary review called “Frank,” which would go on to have many more issues and a long life in Paris. Last night he passed on to me a book he has just published, right off the press, in a new imprint, and which was written by another Paris literary alumnus, John Strand.
Strand had started another Paris literary review in the early 1980s, called Exile, or Paris Exile, can’t remember quite. But I do remember him celebrating one of the issues at some kind of evening at the Village Voice in the early 1980s. Strand has gone on to become a multiple prize-winning playwright based in Washington D.C., and his novel is called, “Commieland.” I’m looking forward to reading it, and seeing where Applefield’s imprint, called, Kiwai Media, goes.
Unfortunately, I could stay long at the Village Voice as I had agreed so sing Irish songs at the Bloomsday evening at the Swan Bar, a newer American-culture hangout in Paris. In a brisk walk from the rue Princesse to Montparnasse, I managed to digest that pepperoni pizza and all the desert items – macarons – that I ate at the Village Voice. I arrived to find Sheldon Forrest hard at work accompanying a singer, and the Swan Bar was just brimming full of people.
This bode well, and as I waited to perform my first song, it occurred to me that I had a nice little story to tell about James Joyce, and I could connect it to the build up of my song. It was a story about how the journalist and novelist Eugene Jolas had spoken to Joyce one day and asked him what he accomplished that day, and Joyce responded that he had worked all day and managed to complete a sentence. “Only one sentence??!!!” “Well, yes,” said Joyce. “I knew what the seven words were, but I could not figure out what order I wanted to put them in.” I then told the audience that I had several songs, but did not know what order to sing them in. The one that went down the best, and which I did sing the best, was “Only Our Rivers Run Free,” by Mickey MacConnell.
There were lots of other musicians, lots of readers, and the evening was in general a bigger success – I felt – than last year’s such celebration at the Swan Bar.
I returned home, had a good sleep, got up today and finally, finally, after nearly four years finished the book I have been working on about my first year of musical adventures around the world. I also came up with a new, final, working title: “OUT OF A JAM: An Around-the-World Story of Healing and Rebirth through Music” In the end, I must say, that it felt appropriate to complete the book on such a literary weekend….
It was a huge contrast last night as I visited two great venues in Pigalle to see two completely different kinds of shows. I ended up feeling that my expectations of each had been reversed: The burlesque woman’s monologue was the brainy thing, and the Kararocké was the brainless thing. Both had their place and made for a great evening, since brainlessness is a great counter reaction to braininess.
What had given me my advance notions about what I might find was that I had seen Louise de Ville’s burlesque act not long ago – and written about it here – and it was part of her stock show, of a kind of burlesque, fun, brainlessness, well, not really. But anyway, the last thing I expected to see at Les Trois Baudets last night after I was invited by a friend of Louise’s to see her one-woman show called “Betty Speaks” was a fabulous and inventive monologue written by Louise in French – she is American – and acted out and spoken in great French – with a strong American accent – with all sorts of playing on words, and fun, psychological insights into womanhood.
josephine baker
Having said that, the thing that also surprised me was that here I was watching a one-woman-show that has a burlesque element to it – she is sexy as hell and has some moments of strip tease – but most of the laughter I heard around me came from the women in the audience. This was a one-woman comedy, burlesque that has sex as one of the main themes, but which is speaking very directly to women. Oh, it is also very camp, and can clearly please men who like camp, too. Having said that, Louise can transfix men who don’t like camp as well, just by being there.
As an American in Paris entertaining the French in their language with witty playfulness and issues that women think about, but at the same time appearing like a sexy burlesque, I had to think where Louise could fit into any kind of tradition. Could we call her a white Josephine Baker? Probably best just to call her Louise de Ville.
Oh, as it turns out, that entire mixture of things I just spoke about with Louise are very clearly fixed in her knowledge of herself and her approach. Here are words I just found on Louise de Ville’s web site today about herself:
“I may look like it, but I’m not your average burlesque girl,” she writes. “I love glitter and feathers as much as the next girl, but I love feminism even more! I’ m a beauty with brains and I’m not afraid of showing off either.”
So after that show I saw I still had time to go to the monthly Kararocké at the Bus Palladium. It was more densely populated than at any time I have seen it in the last six months. A massive success, and a wild, wild time. I rinsed out my brain with the music and then took a nice brisk 5.5 kilometer walk back home through the rain and rinsed off my body.
Again last night no music, just trying to write a new song, memorize a cover song and fix my toilet. Success on the last item! But today being New Year’s Day, I decided to put up a new menu area on this blog, to put up another rejected story in my series of rejected stories and to quote from another blogger’s blog. Heather Munro has a great blog, and her New Year’s message is a brilliant one, so I suggest you go and read it: It is about the two wolves inside us all.
Alain Passard
My rejected story today follows on a theme from yesterday’s rejected story, but was actually written a few years before that. This story was written in around 1987 or 1988, and it was about Alain Passard’s restaurant called the Arpege. The restaurant was then a one-star establishment, I believe – or about to earn its first star – and it ended up having three stars, the top rating. Ten years ago, Passard decided to take a huge risk and he became the only three star restaurant in Paris – or perhaps anywhere – to focus entirely on vegetables, and drop the meat. He did not lose the stars, so creative is he as a chef. My restaurant review of the Arpege was, of course, rejected, no doubt for the same reasons as the Robuchon story would be a few years later, as I was not an expert and had no food writing gig.
