Entrance Lobby, Hotel Moderately Grande, Barcelona.
The view from the desk of this room, of a dark air-well, is not sufficiently alluring to set me down to compute. I have relocated to the lobby, where the business center section has two computers & both are out of order. The lobby is where people gather to blow smoke over each other, as is conventional in much of Eastern & Southern Europe. But the sun shines and there are windows and there is light streaming through the windows.
16.42 Brave or what? I took the Metro alone to the Sagrada Familia. Gaudi's cathedral is currently is a building site thronged with tourists. The level of construction work demonstrates a degree of political will absent 30 years ago. But that was a different Iberia, one where Franco still had power. The feel here then was something like Chile with The Old Man. The Spanish police had the same kind of confidence that I felt in Chilean police not very long ago. It was already different when Crimson returned to Spain in 1974. It was different again when Fripp & Eno visited in 1975.
Back in the hotel & listening to a JGB talk from Sherborne House on i-Tunes. Remarkable. He was trying to download as much as he could to a load of young people who had no almost no idea at all of what he was trying to give them.
Then a limp around the block in search of cafĂ con leche. I was joined at my table by a wandering Belew. As is the case in this band, where accidents & coincidental meetings take place, a simple exchange of views over coffee have more substance than formal meetings. Formal group meetings are negative, destructive, people speak from ingrained positions & vent long-held resentments. There is no resolution. So, over coffee with Ade, an exchange of views on present & future Crimson arisings.
Now, to prepare for a 17.30 lobby call.
Thursday Night - Friday Morning 3-4th. July, 2003; 01.17
The venue: a beautiful square, with performance in the open air. A responsive, supportive audience. The show was punctuated throughout by flashes. This undermined my show & I played poorly in several places, to the same extent that Ade played well & enjoyed his.
Have I mentioned that my performing life has been spoilt by photography? Have I mentioned that this has removed joy from my musical life?
A performance may, under certain circumstances, acquire a "soul". That is, it may take on a life that persists through time & be available to us, as if it were a friend. But, for the soul to "become", the conception must be true, the gestation healthy, the delivery fine, and the progress through the world fitting & just. Otherwise, the possibility is lost.
And I have suffered the attention of a Total Commitment mosquito. It has bitten me on a place that only a very needy, hungry mosquito would go for food.
Ade did a 'phone interview today. One of the questions his interviewer asked, in all seriousness, was is Fripp a monster?
"The presence of absence is an entry into loss."
