I managed to do two of the three open mics I aim for on Monday nights in Paris’s Latin Quarter last night. In fact, I even managed to play at the first, go and play at the second, and then return again to the first to seek out the bonhomie and fun that I sensed there the first time. But for some reason, I also managed to make practically nothing but crappy videos of the performers. There were some good performers, I did my performance mostly up to par, but for some reason I could not much concentrate with my Zoom recorder in my hand, and I ended up doing mostly pretty crappy videos of the excellent performers. I’m going to put up a number of them anyway, since they do not reflect negatively on the performers, but only on me.
Funny enough, probably one of the best videos I did was at the Coolin when I ran off to the toilet and left the Zoom all alone to its own devices on the table, stranded, sitting there ready to be pecked off, stolen, taken away. And it managed to do a very nice video of a woman singing and playing her banjo… and I got out and back to it just in time to grab the camera and turn it off before the next performer.
Oh no! Time keeps on slippin, slippin, slippin, into the future! Or is it trippin? In any case, I’ve been back against the wall with time problems concerning this blog and my life in general in the last few days. Oh, my priorities have been there, like I DID do two open mics on Monday and one last night, and I’m running out now to do however many….
But the result is the slowdown on the blog and the inability to lay down more words on this page than what I will leave you with this time. Again, as I have very occasionally done in the past, I must simply leave the videos to do the talking about these adventures.
Oh, I must however mention that after a great night at the Coolin open mic, where I sang backup vocals on a Steve Forbert song with Jake Weinsoff, who had backed me up on violin on Crazy Love, I went on to do a fun Galway open mic…. and then last night, the Ptit Bonheur la Chance. And there, I heard so many great musicians, but with two or three real high points. One of the real high points I wanted to mention, as that was from Carly, who had a unique sound that seemed to be a mixture of Tom Waits, Marianne Faithful and Janis Joplin.
It was an unexpected situation last night at the Coolin and the Galway as two of my favorite three open mics on Mondays in Paris kind of swept me away with music and mirth. I mean, I had to show up early at the Coolin to sign up on the list, and I ended up there late and found myself 13 on the list of performers, and it was already 9:50 PM. So that gave me time to head off to the Galway to perform first. Just as I was trying to figure out should I stay or should I go now, my friend Joe Cady arrived at the Coolin with his violin, and so we decided to head off together to the Galway to perform together there, before returning to the Coolin to perform in my No. 13 slot.
But arriving at the Galway, I found that the evening although not jam packed with performers had a healthy number of performers, and an even healthier sudden offering of a Polish woman classical guitarist to go up on stage after my set and play the guitar while I sing and Joe plays fiddle – fiddling around, as it were. The MC, Romain, after a two-week absence, was completely open to the idea of the sudden, impromptu performance by the Pole, and we set about massacring the Eric Clapton song I least like to hear, because it is just so sad. I had to sing it… that thing about if you see me in heaven….
Then the Pole played the Girl from Ipanema and Joe tried to play along and I tried to sing along, and made an even worse massacre of that. But I did get some of it on video on the stage while “performing.”
All of this unexpected happening on stage meant that by the time we left and returned to the Coolin, I had missed my unlucky No. 13 slot by about 30 seconds. No matter, the nice MC there, Timothée Gobé, who was replacing Etienne Belin, allowed me to go up on stage right after the performer behind the mic as we entered. So it was that Joe and I went through a couple of the songs we had already warmed up on at the Galway, “Mad World,” and my pretty new song “If I Only Had You.” Joe then played a song and so did some other unexpected performers who suddenly decided they wanted to play, and the evening went on later, and its high point was the stupendous singing a cappella of Frederic, who sings lyric in a conservatory. You have to check out THAT video!
All in all, then, the evening was full of unexpected singers and events and I barely held onto it all as it zipped along….
Is the definition of a great night out that you have no energy – or even any day – left the following day? That is how I might define last night. I decided to eat out at the great pizzeria across the street from the Coolin in order to get my name on the list at the Coolin open mic. It turned out that the list was not very long, as a lot of Paris musicians seemed to have taken a break from the Paris cold. So I got early enough on the list to go out and eat a great pizza parma and then return to play my songs and then continue onwards to the Galway for the open mic there.
I heard some nice stuff there, got to play my songs, and listen to and watch Thomas Brun run the open mic for the second week in a row – replacing Romain of All the Roads, who is temporarily away – and then I met some friends at the Galway and went out for another drink with them before returning to their apartment and playing music until 7:30 AM.
Oh yes, that was it. Tried to take a taxi back home at that time only to find the driver a completely different bird in the morning than at night time, doing nothing but complaining about all the traffic, all the trucks, all the troubles I was causing him and all the extra time I would have spend in his taxi because of the traffic. Wait, yes, it WAS getting on for 8 AM and that meant trouble for me. So I got off at Chatelet and took the metro home….
Sometimes everything works out. Well, almost. I managed to show up in time to sign up for the Coolin open mic last night and be the sixth person on the list. That gave me just the time to leave the Coolin to go to the Tennessee Bar to see if I could play there, and as I had not played there for months – or at least many weeks – I got to play there too. Then I returned to the Coolin, and found that an hour or more after signing up, only the first two or three musicians had played. So I had my second beer, listened to some music, tuned my guitar, and then played my songs. That then meant that I had enough time to go off to the Galway and see if I could play there – and I got up twice, for six or seven songs….
It is January in Paris and there are fewer people at the open mics, especially as the evening started with snow last night. A discouraging thing for some musicians and some bar clients. Having said that, at the Galway I met a couple that said they had specifically gone out BECAUSE there was snow in Paris…. Unfortunately, it turned to rain – and went on all night.
Now, despite everything going absolutely perfectly, as a victim of the collective flu/cold that no one in France will escape this month, and because I had therefore spent almost the entire previous week closed up in my apartment and bed, I left my home last night for the open mics WITHOUT my Zoom Q3HD recorder. And then, at only the second venue – the Coolin – I found that I had completely filled up my entire available space on my iPhone 4’s memory card. So I have no videos of the great time at the Galway.
The evening at the Galway, by the way, was hosted, exceptionally, by Thomas Brun, the host of the Highlander open mic of Wednesday nights in Paris.
The open mics have come back to life after the Christmas break, and last night I headed off to the Tennessee Bar first, having entirely written off the possibility of playing at the Coolin, since you now have to sign the list at 8:30 in order to play at between around 10:15 and 12:15, and it was already around 10 PM. So I figured I would never get a spot on the list. But walking into the Tennessee Bar I found a madhouse of activity, and what was surely a list of about 500 names. So I just said, “Forget it.” I headed off immediately to the Coolin with the thought that you just never know….
And there to my delight I found that there was a long list, but that there was room for me anyway – after around nine other performers. So I signed up, took a beer, and then sat and listened to the music. Feeling as if I would not find someone to talk to, I decided I’d go off and check out the Galway and see if I could play there, since it was early enough. I hid my beer in an amazingly good hidden corner I found at the Coolin, went off and found a buzzing Galway open mic.
There I found that I could make it to the list, but with only five people ahead of me. Now, unfortunately, my maths were not that good. Five people ahead of me at the Galway were to play 3 songs each, while the seven people that remained when I left the Coolin were to play 2 songs each. That meant that I was most certainly on target to get back to the Coolin having missed my spot on the list.
I listened to some cool stuff at the Galway and then did my songs, and then returned to the Coolin to find that I HAD missed my spot. But Etienne Belin, the kind MC, offered to let me play after the singer who was up – and I became the last performer of the night. That’s why I love the Coolin. Oh, and I managed to recuperate my beer – and then have another, the free one offered to singers….
Damn! Gotta run! I have about five things to do before I find myself at one of my favorite open mics, so the words in this post will be reduced. Good news, no doubt, dear reader. But last night the Coolin pub celebrated the one-year anniversary of its open mic, and I cannot let that pass!
I went to the open mic, following the suggestion to dress up nice, wearing a suit jacket and nice red scarf to signify Christmas. I went with some work colleagues, however, and so spent most of the time talking, rather than listening and making videos. And when it came my time to play, I had no Christmas song to sing, and no anniversary song either, so I decided to sing two of the songs that I sang at Coolin the first time I went there a year ago – “What’s Up!” and “Father and Son.”
It has grown so much, this open mic, that it has become one of the most successful in Paris. May they have another year like it…..
Feeling a little disoriented, having sung my two songs but wanting more, having seen off my colleagues, I decided I would wander over to the Galway to check out the open mic there. I was stopped on the way by four people standing in front of the Mazet – where there used to be an open mic – and they asked about my guitar and asked me to play a song. So on the sidewalk, I took out the guitar and played a bit of stuff, and then half of “Mad World.”
Then I went on to the Galway and I was invited to play immediately, a 4-song set. Very, very, very cool. So all in all a great evening of open mic and business, and sorry there is not much more profound writing about the other musicians or videos of their sets….
It has been a very long time since I attended a literary event – if you exclude the literary events I partake of every time I read a work of literature, which is very often – and now that I am on vacation and staying at home in boring old Paris, I decided I would make an effort to attend as many literary events as possible. So it was that when I arrived at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore for the first of my planned literary events and I was being refused entrance by a young and somewhat helpless book worker, I was very upset. But the guy was kind of right to try: The bookstore was so full of people it was barely standing room only, with all corners of the shop being occupied by listeners for a panel of editors of literary reviews talking about the past, present and future of that genre.
I really insisted, though, and the guy could see as well as I could that there was just enough space on the inside of the door for me to stand – with my large Gibson J-200 in its bag, by my side. So I got in and nodded thanks to the guy. I was delighted to see also cramped in there in a little desk by the entrance the delightful Sylvia Whitman, who has in recent years taken over the store that belonged to her father, who recently died, nearing 100 years of age. Sylvia is doing amazing things at the shop, and this panel is an example, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, so much so that I bought three of the reviews discussed in the panel, and I will have to busk for a week in sub-zero Paris weather in order to pay for them at 16 euros each. Literature is not for the poor. (Oh, sorry, another of the reviews, Five Dials, is entirely free and downloadable on the Internet, supported by the Hamish Hamilton publishing company in the UK.)
But anyway… The panel was made up of … no, forget that. I will just paste in the full details from the Shakespeare and Company newsletter announcing the thing: “Please join us to celebrate the launch of The White Review No. 6, notably featuring interviews with China Mieville, Julia Kristeva and Edmund de Waal, fiction by Helen DeWitt, essays on J. H. Prynne and Bela Tarr, artwork by Matt Connors and poetry by Emily Berry. To mark the release of this new edition, editors Jacques Testard and Benjamin Eastham have put together a panel to discuss the past, present and future of literary magazines, including Christian Lorentzen (Senior Editor at the London Review of Books and editor of Say What You Mean: The n+1 Anthology), Craig Taylor (Five Dials, and the author of Londoners), Heather Hartley (Paris editor of Tin House) and Krista Halverson (former managing editor of Zoetrope).”
The panel was a probing and interesting look at what is on the minds of the editors AND the readers. IE, how it is so much more fun to create a review and publish your own stuff rather than looking for a “traditional” publisher or one of the top magazines; how doing that also allows for discovering much interesting stuff from foreign writers in translation; how difficult it is to go through a slush pile every day; where to get writers in translation the funding of which will come from foreign literary lobbying organizations; how to distribute such reviews in a time when book stores no longer exist – except in strange places like Paris, where there is a massive number of small non-chain stores that will carry such magazines; how, with “so many” such reviews a reader is to make a choice on which to buy (!! if you’re rich, I say, buy them all); how submission to the slush pile really, truly, DOES work for the good writing, etc. It was fresh, and I hope that I have not highlighted too many “negative” things. I recall having attended a similar panel at the Village Voice book shop in around 1984 at a time when there was quite a movement of local expat literary magazines in Paris like Frank, and other names I now forget(!), and last night’s panel seemed so much “larger.” Having started to read N+1 today, I think it is, in fact. (I thoroughly enjoyed the opening essay, an insouciant attack on other magazines: the Atlantic, Harper’s and…the Paris Review.)
I think I will quit that theme now. From Shakespeare and Company I headed off to the Coolin that has a new system for the open mic that will be the death of it for me. It is an 8:30 PM sign up before the music starts at 9:30. This brings it to the level of the Highlander, where I can never get early enough to get my name on the list in a comfortable position – my fault, and the fault of living in the suburbs and eating a meal at home and getting up at 4 PM. But anyway….
So I went and signed up for the Coolin, then went to a great Italian restaurant next door and sat beside one of those women that you want to say to them: “You are the most beautiful woman in the world that I have ever seen.” But you don’t, because they’ve heard the line 500 times and no matter what, they will think you are insincere. And since it has happened to you 500 times you probably are insincere – except it seems true at that moment. But there she was with a friend, and talking about being friends with Vanessa Paradis and having approached “M” over some proposition or other…and slowly you think, maybe she IS the most beautiful woman in the world. Anyway….
Left the restaurant after eating one of the most beautiful pizzas in the world, went to Coolin, played two songs – Steve Forbert’s “Romeo’s Tune” (fitting, no?) and No Expectations of the Rolling Stones. Then realized that having signed up early enough to be around the sixth performer, I had the time to drop in briefly to the Tennessee for its open mic and then go to the Galway for its open mic. So went to the Tennessee, recorded a couple of acts, but did not even think of signing up to play at that late moment of the night, and then went to the Galway and played four songs.
An amazing, amazing night, all things considered. Four rendezvous, three open mics and two sets. Oh, and a pizza beside the most beautiful woman in the world that I have ever seen. (At least at that moment.)
No Internet at home for nearly a week, but I’m sitting on the Emirates A380 on my way to Dubai en route to India, and I have an Internet connection…. The world turned upside down – as it were. With a horrendously busy week ahead of me in India, followed by another week – or almost – in Abu Dhabi, I wanted to get a few words down on my badly neglected blog about happenings. The most important, urgent thing to write about is David Broad and his CD and concert in Paris over the weekend.
I wrote about David Broad, the finger-picking virtuoso from Leeds – of all places – when I was in Mokpo, South Korea, of all places, sick as a dog ready to be eaten. I realized a few days after writing that post that I had not done any justice to the subject of it whatsoever. Nowhere in my post about David’s amazing CD and musicianship and skill, etc., did I point out that all but three of the songs on the CD were written by Broad himself.
The reason for that oversight is because I thought that the songs were all old standards of blues, folk, old time stuff. Reading over the CD carefully upon re-listening to it while doing my exercises after returning to Paris from dogland, I realized that David had written all but three of the songs and they were insanely good. I had heard several of them before, and the one, Congress Street, I was certain was an old standard.
Nope, Broad’s broad material.
Anyway, so I went to hear him in his gig at the Zelda bar in Paris on Saturday night, and I apologized to him about not doing justice on that thing I wrote – which he had not even noticed! A very low-key man. The concert at Zelda’s was superb, with just Broad and his guitar. He held the audience electrified for more than an hour.
It also turned out that the bar, Zelda, was run by an old friend, from the band Rock&Roll, a short lived but relatively successful band from the bubble of baby rockers that came out of Paris in the middle of the last decade. Check out the Zelda bar….
On Monday, last night, I returned to two of my favorite open mics, the Coolin and the Galway, and I played at each one, but did not take out my recording device all that much, and in any case, I may have an internet connection here on the A380 above Turkey or wherever I am at the moment, but if I were to upload a single video I get the feeling it would take the rest of the flight – and certainly my allowance in terms of Internet bytes…or is it bits…?
Suffice it to say that Coolin was as fun as ever, if a little late in starting – which helped me check out the Galway first….
I was starting to feel ill about four days without a post on this blog! I cannot remember the last time I went four days without a post. And really, it’s NOT my fault. It’s the fault of the Paris-in-the-month-of-August-syndrome. Well, all right, that combined with the fact that I am here in Paris during that month of August.
That does not mean that I have been doing nothing creative, no writing, no music, or any such nothings. I have been hugely active working on my book manuscripts, sending them out, editing my film, planning future projects, buying a new dish washer, shoes, clothes, a life….
But most of the open mics in Paris closed down for the August lull, so I had so much more time to tend to these other projects. Last night, finally, the four-day drought ended and I was able to go to…three open mics. I was late doing it, though, so I did not have time to stay longer than 30 seconds at the Tennessee Bar before I decided to go to the Coolin open mic, and I then followed that one – after my performance, and several other people’s – with the Galway pub open mic.
Despite the August lull – a time lots of people profess to like, but I now hate more than ever – there were lots of musicians at all the open mics. There were even spectators. So I played two songs at Coolin and four at the Galway, even trying out new songs I have learned – a Dylan and a Stones.
It was a nice evening that made me forget I was in August in Paris. Today was a “cold shower” of a wake up, though, when I ended up running into one August-related crappy situation after another as I sought to pick up those shoes at the cobbler’s and found them not ready; went to five stores in my neighborhood to find ink for my printer and the stores were either closed or did not want to serve me because it was August, and none had the ink; received my new dish washer only to find that all the cleaning of the floors I had done was now reduced to a muddy swamp with the exit of the old one leaking its dirty water and then finding that the delivery men had left their tools at the previous client’s place and had to leave and return to install the dish washer; going to Casino and finding there was only a half a box of dish washer salt and I need a full one; oh, I think there were other aggravations, but I’d better keep them to myself lest I have readers regretting that I have returned after a four-day lull!!!!
