Crimbus Easing Its Way Out Of Milan, Italy.
The ferry system, to get us from the hotel to the bus, was functioning this morning. This was our second choice hotel: first choice was unable to guarantee a check-in before 15.00 on Thursday. As the Crims were leaving Prague at midnight for an estimated 12-hour journey, the best-guess check-in was at noon. But the journey took 18+ hours so we didn't get to the hotel until 19.00 anyway. Who cares with a location opposite the cathedral? Today we have a nominal 2.5 hour journey, however long 2.5 hours might be.
The Hotel Tired But Well Located, Milan, was of the pre-ethernet variety. There seem to be two choices of hotel available to the Contemporary Happy Gigster:
1. Modern, with good facilities & high-speed online access, sited within a 4 hours' slow drive of anywhere you'd like to spend an hour or two over coffee, or a 2 hour fast walk to somewhere you'd like to see;
2. A well-located traditional hotel that has heard distant echoes of rumours that messages can travel down telephone lines, something like faxes but without paper. Three calls to AOL at this hotel disappeared into an endlessness of Italian cyberland.
Bump bump bump shake bump. Bump. Shake.
13.43 Hotel Depressing Of The Sixties Kind, Genoa.
The blurb that the hotel provides exemplifies the beauties of this town. But where are these beauties hiding? One can always go walking to find them, but in this heat that is already too far. One can put energy into seeking the centre, but I'm tired. Where is the centre then? A taxi ride might do it. So, here I am again - somewhere in a depressing hotel and I don't know where to go to simply & easily alleviate that condition.
16.04 Bruvver has called Sister who is visiting our pals, the Leggs, for lunch in Dorchester. She tells me that she has been having a fabbo time in England visiting many of our close relatives & old friends. Here in Genoa, the Crims have a lobby call at 16.30.
Saturday Night - Sunday Morning 21-22nd. June, 2003;
00.21
1. I am no longer prepared to travel long distances under uncomfortable conditions to have performances fucked over.
2. Where a performance is willfully fucked over, I give myself permission to no longer accept responsiblility for that performance.
The venue was an opera theatre. There was flash photography from the beginning and during the bows. From this Diary for May 20th --
The point is that our presence, in any context, has affect. In any activity, simply being present & being who-we-are, changes the character of the activity. If the poster brings a camera to a Crimson performance intending to use it, then the intention to commit a non-consensual act is itself a violation, even if the camera is not used: the key is intention.
So, for the characters with cameras in reserve for the acknowledgements at the end of the show, their intent is held & resonates throughout the performance.
A runner, in Happy Gigster parlance, is the character provided by a local promoter to run the band to & from hotel and venue. Our runner today was a young man and, as is usually the case when touring Italy, a young Italian man. I wouldn't normally mention the runner, but this one was so exceptionally stupid that I am mentioning him because he was so exceptionally stupid.
On the first trip, from hotel to gig, he had the radio on. We asked him to turn it off. This did not provide a difficulty for him. He explained that this was sound that he heard without actually listening to it. No explanation was necessary: that this small part of how he lives his life is how he lives all the small parts of his life, was clear. This is how he lives his life.
The bad news: he was also the runner for the return trip. As we left the venue for the hotel, he was confronted with an insurmountable obstacle: how to drive his car around the parked Crewbus. As the problem-solving process got underway (by other people) I climbed out of the vehicle. Remaining within the area of his presence in a small, enclosed space was unbearable: his was the presence of absence. That made him dangerous: he lived in a world of accident.
"Performance is inherently unlikely."
