August 20-21 2006 Seattle to Paris

There's nothing to be said about the banality of the airplane experience, especially when such potentially spiritually uplifting moments, like flying through the clouds of dawn, are discouraged in favor of drawn shades and television. The coffin flight is getting more and more common-little corpses on hold until arrival.

This little corpse was decanted into 6am London Heathrow with no trouble (the airports all were functioning normally a week and a half after the latest bomb threat-if "normally" means in perfect denial of the uselessness of the current airline security process-come on, if someone really wants to get a liquid on a plane we are all walking containers: cavity searches of every passenger? Now that would pull the plug on the business...) and I and my guitar joined the Underground's speeding hordes

single-mindedly headed for work, leaving them at Eurostar, where everyone was going on vacation and much less hurried. There was a good Dixieland trio playing in the waiting room for Eurodisney-bound crowds. Always comforting to see tuba and banjo.

The speed and visual stimulation of the train, and a seat traveling backward all combined to mix me up like a cocktail (I know the images are out of hand, but what do you expect from a little liquid corpse decanted into a cocktail shaker shaped like a locomotive?) There were five or six jet trails in the sky, and my depth perception was so messed up they seemed to be below the clouds and pacing the train. I couldn't shake this illusion at all, but when I pointed it out to the woman from New Zealand sitting next to me she gazed out the window politely but unmistakably thought I was nuts.
I'm staying in Montparnasse, having just read a book my neighbor Craig loaned me about Kiki's Paris. I chose a good one, the Atelier Montparnasse on rue Vavin, which is right next to the 1920's artsy hangouts like the Dome Le Cupole and the Select (Kiki's favorite). Friendly staff, pretty quiet. One's first day on a new timezone it's imperative to stay up at least until 9pm, and in Europe the hours of 3-7pm are the hardest, as your body knows for sure it's the wee hours of the morning.

A random walk out of my hotel led me to the Montparnasse cemetary, where I could see by the map both Julio Cortazar and Man Ray were buried (Kiki might be in there too-I better go back and look), but I was so disoriented I couldn't find them. I found Ionesco and Baudelaire, which should have given me points to triangulate from, but I kept walking from the map at the gate to where I thought they should be with no luck. Behind the cemetary is another world entirely-the Monsieur Hulot Modernist skyscraper world,

all glass and traffic roar. Cities function very well with trains and people at high densities, but cars, oh the stinking cars, clogging everything, choking the air-how I hate them!

I followed a very stylish bum's bum down the street as he checked every garbage can rearranged the contents according to style precepts of his own.

I gesticulated for food at Chez Clement, a pleasant chain restaurant on Boulevard Montparnasse, with decor that reminded me of a dream I had once, where all the musical keys were represented by different colors and images. E was a deep green narrow valley. F# was a yellow box of forks with twisted tines. Making a choice of restaurants is something I leave up to my subconcious, and it doesn't often go wrong.

FINALLY it was 9pm and I went to sleep.

August 22
This morning a cheerful lady woke me up with a singsong"Bon-jour" and a pot of strong coffee, croissants and gouda. What's not to like? When I'm loling in the gutter, broke, in my elder years, memories like that will be my refuge.
Out and about down rue Vavin (which turned into rue Babystuff after a few blocks-lots of families out walking about, french moms dads and usually 2-3 little kids) to the excellent and evocative Luxemborg gardens. Butt gardens more like.

Never seen more butts in my life-the french queens were well draped but all the other statuary was lovely viewed from the rear.

The park is full of avid readers and tai chi practitioners, pleasant and cool first thing in the morning. Many police, uniformed and strolling, gaze fixed in solemn middle-space; I suppose because the French Senate meets in the building. And bees, lovely bees in the middle of the city.

Bees cheer me up almost as much as tubas and banjos.

Looking for the Musee des Arts Decoratifs was much like looking for Cortazar and Man Ray, but I didn't give in and I finally got there. I wanted to see the Balenciaga retrospective, which was a perfect combo of repression and extravagance, a Spanish Catholic desire to cover the body and a French desire to reveal it, working together to make clothes wearable by Fascists and Fashionistas both, repellant and attractant in abou equal measure.

In honor of Kiki I had lunch at the Select.

Aug 23-24 Paris to Rochefort

I met Steve James at the Montparnasse train station, and we got on a fast train to La Rochelle, hightailing it through the late summer gardens and fields, past the Futuroscope (a bunch of fantasy cubes and glass stuck in rolling fields of grass, another demonstration of the schitzo antique/modernist French aesthetic: cow/cube in the countryside, and Corbusier/Huysmans in the city).
We changed to a teeny tiny one car train at La Rochelle and the Rochefort en Accords festival staff picked us up and delivered us to the interesting Hotel de la Corderie Royale.

It's on the Charente river next to the old rope making factory and shipyards from 1665. The factory buildings are enormously long for stretching out the rope, and the shipyards seem to still be making replicas of French Men of War wooden ships. The limestone buildings embody old French order and power: clean lines, grand scale, everything rectified and orderly. The dogs here, as in Paris, give the lie to this Appollonian dream by pooping everywhere: "hey human, watch where you're headed". They have a cool sort of werewolfy-looking dog here, with a long jaw and stiff hair; they look like they've stepped out of a renaissance wood-cut.

The summer has come to an end here-the tourists have mostly gone home and the weather has turned drizzley and tropical. The black-clad musicians and journalists here for the festival are enjoying themselves at our clubhouse, Longitudes, with piles of oysters (the Ile d' Oleron is just here) and plenty of wine. I feel handpicked for bibulousness and loquacity (a mot I repeated until the former overcame the latter) We had lunch with a music journalist from Paris, Micheal Zwerin, who didn't give me much hope of improving my French-an American, he's been here thirty years and still can't speak. Worse, he says he doesn't get French jokes. This is key-the reason I get by so well in Spanish is because I have a Mexican sense of humor-the pessimistic los de abajo irony of Mexico makes perfect sense to me, whereas I've always hated Jerry Lewis and Monsieur Hulot gets on my nerves. Cantinflas and La India for me!

Aug 25-26 Rochefort
The weather has turned lovely again, definately autumn, but sunnier. We played in the Jardin de
Theatre a hidden spot inside a downtown block. The stage of the Coupe de Or theater was our dressing room and we played out in the windy damp garden for a very sweet patient audience. It was a double bill with Keith Christmas from England, very nice cat who plays good fingerstyle guitar in many tunings and the sound crew was lovely-very impressed with our one mic set-up.

Afterwards we headed back to Longitudes for more oysters and way too much wine.

We are apparently in serious "terroir" turf-the "products of the land" are amazing, and once again the map reads like a wine list-Cognac, and Petit Champagne are both close by. At the farmers' market that filled eight long blocks downtown Saturday morning there were all kinds of interesting vegetables, pates and gooselivers and hand-made breads, crusty little ladies pushing through the crowd and filling their shopping carts with delicious things sold by other crusty old ladies.
We took a tour of the novelist Pierre Loti's house which was both fascinating and excruciating. The tour guide was of the kind that has memorized the tour and if interrupted or distracted must roll back like a tape machine. She appeared to have no idea what she was talking about. So her interminable drone, in french, was appalling. The French people were very submissive and polite through the whole hour and a half, then a giant four person screaming match broke out back at the entrance. Perhaps they wanted their money back? The tour guide looked stricken and ran away. The shift from polite to screaming was alarmingly abrupt: Americans would have simmered and roiled for a while first I think, making some disturbance all along and then not actually yelled.

In any case, Pierre Loti wasn't a magician as I first remembered, he was an absolute Victorian Orientalist nut. The first room of his house wasn't such-a-much, just a little investment in maroon velvet and gilding any good queen could undertake, then a historical formal Louis XIIII drawing room. Then came the medieval cloister dining hall with the two storey vaulted ceilings and stone steps and tapestries, then the gothic room with the wooden carved set in seats, then the mosque with the marble columns, tiles, rugs, gold inlay, then the reading room like an islamic bordello with the interior palm thatch roof. Then his bedroom-plain white washed walls, an iron bed (single-his wife was chosen by his sisters: the requirements? she had to be shorter than 5'4'' and rich and Protestant. they had one son) and no decor beyond his sword and sea-chest. Loti appears to embody the acquisitive spirit of the colonialist-constantly dressing up in other's identities, from past and present, an aetheist himself, he smuggles home the most sacred objects of other religions and installs the mosque so it doesn't even face east, then entertains aristocrats in there dressed as a sheik. He used the coffins of an arab king and his sons as groovy decor as well, their helmuts on display over the coffins (I hope he didn't balance the drinks tray on them at happy hour). All this nuttiness inside a very ordinary looking row house on a quiet maritime 1800s street.

Aug 27-28 Rochefort-Nantes
We rented bicycles today and went up the Charente in the morning, past more giant drydocks and tidy little houses well above the river (which looks like it would flood alot). When we came back, the festival was throwing a picnic on the grass (Yo! Dejuner sur le hierbe, all in black) in front of the Corderie Royale. We bid farewell to our hosts and the odd assortment of musicians assembled (definately a festival booked by a split personality-half rootsy Americana songwriters and half shoegazers with loops and drum machines. Oh yeh, and us, described by the newspaper Liberation as "les nouveaux Lulu Belle & Scotty") and went for another ride, down the Charente past gypsies and kids fishing for tiny white shrimp with interesting nets to the transbordeur bridge, an odd 1800s mechanical bridge that floats across the river at a surreal dream pace every four minutes while you stand on the platform. There was (of course) a cafe at the bridge where a very nice woman gave us a new drink we'd never had, Pineau, which comes in white and red and I think is made from raisons-sweet but not too sweet, very thick. Then we rode our bikes around some cornfields and country lanes and transbordeur'd back (Cocteau's characters are great ones for transbordeuring around the underworld-his camera moves at the same speed as that bridge).

Back in town we caught Karel Beer acting the auteur: he's been chasing everyone around the festival with a movie camera, and he was on a street corner downtown getting backgound shots for his documentary. He was waiting to film the clock tower ringing 7pm. "Oh" I said, "I better shut up if you're filming" "Oh there's no sound" he says. Then I notice there's no hands on the clock either. So no sound, no clock, why wait for 7pm, you could film it any time. "It's for the feeling of authenticity" he says. Karel is perfect for France. Him and Cocteau would have got along. But I wouldn't have wanted to see their bar bills.
Walking to dinner we came on a great kids' garden project-all the different schools had designed and planted plots, one plot was a cave garden, another was full of "pothead" people and best of all, a transbordeur bridge made of sticks! For dinner we had many interesting kinds of shellfish-little snails, periwinkles-and some eels. Very exciting day!
Monday at the train station waiting for the train to Nantes, Karel started filming the train from Bordeaux. "But we're leaving for Nantes-it won't be authentic" I said. "Once you've waited for the clock with no hands to silently ring, why depart before your arrival?" He went off to the other end of the platform like a good little surrealist.
Nantes is a big interesting town, seems old-fashioned: glove and hat shops, a shopping arcade of the 1800s type supposed to promote "flaneuring" (according to Walter Benjamin), lots of Belle Epoch tiles and grillwork and an intact beautiful cafe "Cigalle" where Oscar Wilde should have been holding forth among the candelabra and pearls. We stayed at the Hotel Saint Daniel and drank at the Rabelais right out front. It has begun to rain seriously now, not the short sprinkles of the end of summer, but serious sheets of wet-cubist intersecting planes of non-dry reality...

Aug 29 Cork Ireland
Other than taking away a octogenarian's lunch and charging us severely for excess baggage, airport security at Nantes was relaxed (another sandwich bomb defused!). Americans are the only ones falling for the dog-training program that is airport security-the TSA is training us to follow meaningless orders and comply with nonsensical directives. A couple months ago in Atlanta I really got a sick chill while being urged into a trot by a baton holding TSA guard. Surrounded by people, I couldn't see around the corner: what are we being herded into? Then just when I was going to have a full-on Philip K. Dick fit of paranoia, I got to the xray machine, and the screener says "Hey what kind of resonator uke is that? I was was thinking of buying a National..." I mean, really, who ever heard of a uke player sending anyone to the gas chamber? Or am I being naive?

Ireland was sunny and green as we pulled into Cork airport. I got some wifi while we were waiting for our baggage to come down and booked a hotel (I hope there's free wifi in hell). We went immediately for a pint to The Corner House, the lovely venue we'll be playing next week, that Steve has played many times. There was a nice session of fiddles and guitars that night.
Cork was it's usual grimey, friendly self: like this whole country, the new yuppie glitz of bustling stuff is plunked down into the hard-worked soot and stone of the old town.

Aug 30 Carrick on Bannow Ireland
Here's a small place!Musician (and son of a musician) John Murphy owns Colfer's, a pub out among the farms in County Wexford. We took a long time getting there-queueing in the rain for a bus from Cork to Waterford, then walking in a drizzle to the train station (the new thing, worldwide it seems, is to move the bus station away from the train station-someone out there doesn't want you to use public transportation). A tiny train full of hillbillies ( and you thought hillbillies were an American thing-uh-uh, they come from Ireland too-exact same behaviors, same screaming kids, the teenage sexpot moms, the 40year old grandmoms, just like Alabama, but they're on the train with you instead of cutting in ahead of you on the Interstate driving a 1980 Monaco with a bungy cord holding the hood-which is preferable? I couldn't say; altho the train is certainly less lethal) took us to Wellington's Bridge, where a nice hackney driver named Pat was waiting for us. He was our ride for the next 48 hours, since Colfer's isn't near anything. He had to drive us to sound check, then back to the b and b, then to the gas station for a sandwich, then back to the club, then he had to come and fetch us at 1am after the show-ridiculous, but I'm sure glad not to be driving on the wrong side of these narrow roads.
Pat is full of information-the EU put a stop to sugar beet farming (no subsidies for agriculture) so the town's economy is very changed. He used to be a full-time farmer, now he's a "hobbie" farmer, with the only taxi in the county for a sideline. I heard the same story from a other people at the show, they used to raise beef, now it's coming in from New Zealand and Dublin yuppies are coming in and buying farmland for millions of euros-sounds like California during the dotcom boom, as Silicon Valley paved the orchards to house the technocrats. All these little towns are choked with traffic too.
The gig was not very well attended, but the people who came were lovely. The bar was empty too-John says the smoking ban plus the drink driving laws are really effecting his business, since there's no way to get to his place but to drive.
We've been playing a lot of New Orleans songs, and the people here are visibly moved and saddened by the story of New Orleans. "It's disgraceful" whispered an old lady on the train. She saw me reading a newspaper story about Bush revisiting NOLA on the anniversary of Katrina. "You the most powerful country in the world, and who suffers-the old and the sick. I mean no disrespect but 'tis very sad" and she shook her head. I wish some those "proud to be an American" types, who have never been anywhere they couldn't drive to, could talk to her and explain exactly what they're proud of...

Aug 31 Julianstown, County Meath
From the pub to the upper crust! This gig is in a castle-the tower at least (we're playing in the arched base of a giant tower) is a 1400s Norman fortification, and around it has grown up an 1800s manor house. The gig is put on by Micheal Grimes, a nerdy-smart energetic man with lots of bright ideas and the house is owned by Lisanne and Ken, who have really done a lot with wattle and daub...the crowd is upscale, and there is much wine-drinking and a nice supper after the show, upstairs in the enormous kitchen (the next floor of the tower). the arched stone room has perfect acoustics-everything sounds close to your ear with no echo at all.

The wheels in Michael Grimes head are turning (you can practically hear them whirr) and by the end of the night he's got his old pal Tony, who is a high school principal at Fingal Community College, on board to have us come play an assembly at his school. Micheal and Tony would make a wonderful movie from what I can tell of their history. When they were teenagers, Tony played his sunburst '62 Jaguar guitar in a showband (the kind of big band with horns that would back up touring artists like Brenda Lee and Roy Orbison) and Micheal got the gigs-I can just imagine them as skinny teenagers in the '60s. Now they're still scheming, calling each other, making music happen just like that in the highschool gym and at the castle...since we missed our train playing for the friendly Fingal kids,

Micheal drove us all the way to Enniscorthy, to the Bailey Live. Enniscorthy was a tough town last time Steve James played it, but this club was brand new-in an old brewery, with four or five big rooms and different venues, very upscale.

Sept 2-3 Dublin

Oh it's very very wet this morning at 7am when we tumble down the splendid tattered red stairs from the fourth floor of the Bed and Breakfast, out into sheets of water pounding the gray river. Five blocks to the train station and we're soaked through, and so's everyone else, and very goodnatured about it, all yelling at the top of their lungs. In France (and Mexico), the loudness of Americans is excruciating; in Ireland we're comparatively quiet. Also, "youse" "dese" "toity" for "thirty" "toisday" for "Thursday"-all the classic NYC-isms-are all Irish. You probably knew that already, but hey the great thing about being ignorant is I'm always finding out stuff I didn't know.

It cleared up by the time we got to Dublin, to Buswell's Hotel on Molesworth Street, near Trinity College. A pretty nice hotel, but our rooms were near some kind of giant machine, that shook the doors in their jambs and rattled the cups on their saucers. "Oh yes ma'am" says the desk clerk "there are fans by the kitchen". They must be the size of turbines.

Dublin has the Mark Of Doom: a Lush store. Lush is a bath product store that only turns up when the yuppies have truly taken the reins of your economy, and soon all your industry will be virtual. Prague has one, Paris does not. Sydney has one, Mexico City does not. I have my own signs of Doom, and Lush is one (not that I don't like a bath bomb occasionally-even Hell is great for a couple hours on a cold damp day-like today. And yesterday.).
Dublin onna Saturday night: the streets are jam packed with shoppers in the downtown and the young women are hands-down wearing the most unflattering clothes on the planet, falling out of their two-sizes-too-small bras, tripping on their stilettos and borrowing eye-shadow from zombie land (the red eye look is very popular). Is this what happens after 12 years wearing flat shoes and a navy blue uniform in school? Men of all ages are dressed as if it was 1975 (which could be either good or bad). Oh and everyone is very very drunk. And walking, because the drink drive laws are very strict. This is going on in the center. It's also very touristy in the center, with lots of middle-class Americans doing their usual thing, waddling and pointing. It's like the Village on Saturday night when all the New Jersey suburbanites come into NYC to throw up on mid-westerners.
Out of the center, it's less annoying. People have real faces, not TV faces and their faces tell more story than perhaps you want to know. Talkative, friendly, given to conversing instead of watching, people seem quick-witted generally, human-nature adept, rather than book-learned.

We have an avid fan, Michael Purcell, who has come to every show. He takes us and two of his friends to dinner at a very nice restaurant, Shanahan's On The Green, the kind of place where the wait staff do a the silent spinning waltz around the table for each course and the silver and plates magically appear and disappear.

The gig is at The Cobblestones in Smithfield. Larry Roddy, our agent and the club owner Paul are nowhere to be found when we arrive: the Cobblestones has no TV (yeh yeh!) so they've gone down the street to watch the soccer match. Soon a crowd has formed at the door, but the barman won't let them in since there's no doorman (he's worried they won't pay once they get in free-I'm not worried, I recognize most of them from the last time we were here) finally Larry and Paul come back and we get down to business. By the end of the night those two are too 'faced to make sense, there's no cabs to be had (Smithfield is a bit out of the way and the streetcars stop too early) so we walk back across the river before we find a cab, through swarms of half naked girls dressed as bees, drunk boys barfing into the Liffey or propped into corners passed out, thobbing discos with the smokers blocking the sidewalks outside (amazingly law abiding on the no-smoking issue: wouldn't you think the tough, rebellious Irish would break the no-smoking law and the effete Californians would comply? Nope just the opposite. They were smoking like stoves in hippie healthy Santa Cruz last time I was there and the Dubliners all go outside like good citizens)Dublin onna Saturday night!

Sunday is golden-it's our day off! The turbines kick on at 7am, but that's ok, we've got used to them. First stop the Smithfield horse market. The yuppie/old world clash is at it's most obvious here. The old Smithfield fruit and vegetable market is now an empty stretch of cobblestones surrounded by condos, hotels, a fake Jameson's brewery (they're not actually making whiskey, just money off the tours of the re-created brewery-virtual yuppie Disneyland). But they can't get rid of the monthly horse fair. We got there too late for the actual deals, but the new owners of ponys and traps and horses were still there racing dangerously top-speed up the cobblestones, horse poop everywhere.

Then we went to the museum for a wonderful exhibit of Irish clothes 1600s to 1950. The great disparity of wealth and long history combined to preserve some amazing pieces. Worth gowns, William III's riding gloves, Balbriggan silk stockings; for a clothes nut it was highly stimulating, as was the exhibit on Eileen Gray, an Irish architect and designer who looked like she had a lot of fun in Paris in the 1920s...

Sept 4 Ballymore Eustace
John, a Dublin member of the IUGN (the International Union Of Guitar Nerds, which looks out for us in most every town, from NYC to Luxemborg) just took off from work to drive us from Dublin to Ballymore Eustace, about an hour away in the Wicklow mountains. Larry Roddy's description of where we're supposed to be staying wasn't right (nothing so modern as an address or phone number oh no) so after visiting first "the place where we stayed last time" then "the place up the road a mile or so" John left us at the gig, the Ballymore Inn. Larry eventually came and collected us and took us to a B and B we'd never been before.
The restaurant at The Ballymore Inn has undergone extensive renovation since we were here last year-instead of a small cozy front bar facing a roaring fire, with a dining room in the back, there's a big, rather bland dining room in front, and a huge back bar/functions-room with a giant TV screen. They set the music up right in front of the screen, of course. Might as well be in Texas. Food is still good, but the atmosphere is gone. How I hate TV.
I think the people living around Ballymore Eustace may be changing-more money, more exurbanites from Dublin, more commuters. I don't know if Larry is changing with it either-no email, no fax, no cellphone. Commuters don't walk through town and see posters-they're driving. They don't hear about the gig over a pint-they google it.

Sept 5 Round Hill, Northern Ireland
Larry drives us to Round Hill in County Armagh, playing the new Bob Dylan record all the way. Pleasant green countryside, Ireland is still very rural as soon as you're past the edges of the city.
I don't know if it's imaginary on my part, but I sure get a hunkered-down, watchful feeling in Northern Ireland. The party-time exhuberance of Dublin is replaced with prickly reserve.

I like our host Peter Linus very much. He's a very quiet fellow with an eye for real things: his house has interesting pictures, he drinks interesting wines, his bookshelves are full of books on hard subjects and his refrigerator has hard salami and not much else. He inherited the pub from his father, and the downstairs is pretty much a regular pub in black and white: pints and smoking and the game on TV, but the upstairs, Groucho's Music Lounge, is a dark jumble of brown leather couches, with African masks, Hindu idols and Buddhas lit by candles and amber lights.

Sept 7-8 Cork
Welcome to the new world-you're in Cork Ireland,

eating excellent tapas (at Boqueria, our new home away from home) served by Polish people, who fired the original Spanish cook, cause he didn't speak any English, now the cook's Slovenian and the manager is French. It reminds me of eating sushi in Portland Oregon made by Mexicans, who were joking about making us "tako tacos". This is what's going on (inevitably) all over the world, while blithering idiots are trying to build a wall on the Mexico-US border. To all the xenophobes I say GET OVER IT ALREADY. People different than you are everywhere and they're working their asses off-your only revenge is that their children will be just as lazy and worthless as you ...Boqueria is across the street from the excellent Corner House, a big welcoming room; a friendly, no TV, music pub.
We're staying at the York House, run by Monica and Mick, a comfortably down to earth place with bikes in the hall and a big windows looking out on the hubbub of York street. Yelling Catholic-school girls after class. Yelling cabbies after lunch. Yelling debutantes at 4am after lord-knows-what. But the bed is so comfortable and the windows let in such a nice salt-smelling breeze and the yelling crowd packed into the Corner House are so apologetic about the yelling, and so friendly, that you just yell back "That's ok!" Cork is loud and likeable. It's not tarted up, it's not repressed but it's not acting out some teenage MTV fantasy either.

Sept 9-13 Devon EnglandWe're on a transportation roll: walk off the tarmac in Southhampton airport, train to to town comes instantly. At central station, the train to Exeter-St.David's rolls up on our same platform in 10 minutes, same thing again and in just a few hours, having seen no customs men or border guards, we've changed from Ireland to England and we're picked up at the Topsham train station by Julian Piper, a musician, writer and part-time promoter, mostly of gigs at the wonderful Bridge Hotel, a 16th century pub and freehouse where we played last year. He's got us a room at the top of the hill above the Bridge, which sits at a low water crossing on the marshes of the river Clyst. You can see the pink and black pub, with it's patched roof, from our window, which is on the top floor of a former school. Our room is next to a library full of wonderful books, mostly children's books of old fashioned vintage "What Katy Did" "Little Women" "Dr Dolittle's Circus" "The Mogli Stories". We are taking our vacation here after the gig (what, you think my whole life is a vacation?!? It sort of is, but staying in one place for four whole days and not dragging the baggage behind me is luxurious).

Topsham is on the river Exe, and the town comes to a point where the Exe and the Clyst join. The Exe is tidal, so the boats all loll on the mudflats at low tide and it's marshes and canals all up the river. There are signs saying "public footpath" everywhere, leading through cow pastures, and wetlands, up hills covered in giant oak trees, past towers and follys in various states of repair or dis-repair.

It's paradise for a hater of cars-we walk down to the gig and back, walk to the river and boat across, walk across the fields, ride a ferry across the wide mouth of the Exe, walk to the bus stop and get a double decker bus with a grand perilous view to directly in front of our door. There's lots of other people doing this too-the English like to walk to get around. One old geezer could barely lift his knapsack, but he had his stick and his boots and off the train and onto the path he went.

There's a castle across the Exe,and for getting across the Exe, there's at least 3 ferries we've found so far, from a tugboat sized diesel boat to a Charon-sized skiff, piloted by Ernest Hemingway. The houses are very neat and stylish, as is the town, and along the water are many public houses, The Lighter and the Passage House Inn, the Globe Hotel and the Salutation Inn.

Across the Exe (Ernest Hemingway will take you for only 60p one way-that's about a $1.20) there's the Turf Hotel, situated on the canal locks. From there a pleasant 45 minute walk seaward on the Exe brings you to The Atmospheric Railway Pub in Starcross, where an almost transparent bartender who looks like Osbert Sitwell brings you your gin then sweeps back his long grey princely hair and regains his seat at the end of the bar, playing patron until it's time to serve.

One of our excursions took us onto a steam train and on a boat down the river Dart, where oak trees covered the hills all the way to the water's edge.

Julian and his partner Kathy took us along on a family body surfing expedition to a lovely Cornwall beach-although I must admit, a beach in Cornwall and a beach in California and a beach in Sydney look much the same, and are inhabited by the same sandy windburned kids, little boys with boogie boards and sullen teens: the great family of humankind "loving repeating being" as old Gertrude Stein would say.

Another day we went up to Exeter and wandered into the cathedral just as the eveing services started up with the giant pipe organ and the visiting Canturbury choir. The sound in a cathedral is wonderful. As I listened I realized the cushion I was sitting on, that ran around a bench on the inside of the whole place and was a detailed needlepoint history of Exeter. My mom, working pretty steadily, takes more than a year to do a 4x4 foot rug. Very cool that they don't mind you sitting on it either.

We did notice after a while that our taste in pubs, restaurants, walking paths and steam trains is shared mostly with octogenarian upper-class types. The only thing we don't share with the geezers is our constant serch for wifi: in Topsham the only unguarded signal was by the garbage cans in front of the coroner's office. The people our age must be at home resting up before they go back to work, and the kids are listening to lousy music and watching TV.

There were some perfectly loutish kids sharing the front seat of the double-decker bus with us as we careened (the top of those buses, especially in the countryside with tree branches and narrow roads, is like a wild mouse ride at the carnival) through Devon. They were dissing the "old" (32) bus driver for playing "classical music"(Pink Floyd).

Sept 14 Bognor Regis
Say "Bognor Regis" to yourself: does it make you chuckle? It makes everyone in England chuckle, for a sure-fire stage laugh, say "We just got back from Bognor Regis" and they'll break up.

It's just a plain seaside town, where Adam Franklin, another member of the IUGN, had arranged a workshop for us. He assembled a lovely assortment of guitar nerds in a little music shop of the kind usually filled with teenage boys banging out "Stairway To Heaven" on asymetric neon electric guitars. The place we stayed, the White Horses B&B, was fantastic: designed and run by artists, everything was aesthetically pleasing and well thought out, from the art on the walls to the fruit in the fruit salad. When you stay in a lot of spaces you haven't got control over, you notice when there's intelligence at work composing your environment! The cool surprise was the excellent old pub Adam took us and a few of the workshop attendees to afterwards-it was the place William Blake was arrested for sedition, and just up the road was his house, where he wrote "Jeruselem", an odd, lopsided house with a swayed roof and crazy bricks-a house out of a Hiyao Miazake movie. In fact it wouldn't surprise me to find out that Miazake (he did the great animated Japanese movies like "Spirited Away" and "My Friend Totoro") had taken inspiration from the south of England's landscape. The way the light goes pink and misty, the way the trains float above the marshes, the textures of old wood and stone, are all like his world.

Sept 15-17 Rye
Oh boy, finally some English Eccentric Action! America produces plenty of lunatics, but the English Eccentric, wrapped in the trappings of total respectability, yet nutty as a fruitcake is a wonderful creature. Take "Nigel", who we met on the train to Rye, dressed in jacket, suit, tie, carrying a case and a rolled umbrella. Sounds pretty normal? The shirt has stripes, as does the tie, the jacket is a bold tweed, the umbrella is a beach parasol and all are frayed to various degrees, but worn with an air of perfect respectability, no showing-off, no fashionista parodying, the man just got up in the morning and put on his clothes. Toothless, wild wispy hair, he was a very nice fellow, just back from visiting his parents (he looked exhausted). When he found we were musicians, he immediately gave us his card and said we were to drop in on him if we had any "difficulties".
Then at the Rye train station we met Charlie Boy. Not Charlie, Charlie Boy. About 45, shifty eyed, heavy-set, fresh out of prison, looking for marijuana, he grabbed a piece of our multitudinous baggage and walked along with us wanting, what? A dark corner? Nope, it was noon. He tried to talk us into heading for a pub and quickly let go of Steve's bag when he saw the high cobblestone hill we were determined to go up (he seemed like a fellow who always went downhill, like water). For the rest of our stay in Rye, we kept looking out for him in allyways and low haunts (in Rye the haunts really are low-the town is walled, and the chichi Tudor and cobblestone part is up above, with the raucous dives and brick rowhouses of regular folks in the flats) but he musta gone right back to gaol.
Our Mission Imposible-style intructions were to find the Grammer School record store on the High Street and Jeff would tell us where to go.
Soon we were installed at Mrs. Rae Festings house. She was very busy making great piles of cucumber and salmon sandwiches for her charity garden party, due to start in an hour. Her excellent garden was open to the public to raise money for Great Dixter, Christopher Lloyd's garden about 15 miles away. I suddenly realized that Rye is the town that E.F. Benson set his "Lucia" novels in, and that Rae was like a character in from his books. Still very beautiful, probably in her late '70s, she showed us upstairs, graciously waving a creamcheese smeared hand, "I'll meet you properly when I've finished with the garden party. I've put you, dear, in this room, which is in the new part of the house. The old part is from 1540. This room wasn't added on until the 1600s" and we stepped up into a huge room with a bay window "You'll see the garden party from here, dear" , cosy reading chairs, each equipped with a good strong lamp and a four poster bed. The whole house is stuffed with books: Robert Graves on Lawrence of Arabia, 1930s era guides to the flowes and wildlife of Great Britain, dectective stories edited by Dorothy Sayers, nice illustrated copy of Richard Burton's travels...it was the continuation of the schoolhouse library in Topsham, the bookworm grown up. I immediately started looking for a copy of "Mapp and Lucia" which was conspicuously absent, but I bought one at one of the many bookstores on the High Street.
Rae's kitchen and her telephone table (and headquarters) looked through a screen of vines onto the bustle of the High Street, a perfect look-out for comings and goings, a bustle of people all day, while her back yard was a brick walled oasis of perfect quiet, over-looked by no other houses, with a high wall. The hills beyond town were all you could see from inside, so it felt like the country back there, and there brick and stone towns are very quiet.

Our host here is Michael Prince, and the Rye Arts Festival, one of those cool festivals that take over all the venues in town for a couple weeks with everything from lectures on Carol Reed's films (given by a man who learned to play the zither from Karas, the cat who played the "Third Man" theme) to operatic tenors to us and are run by hard-working volunteers. Michael looks like a prince, slender and dark with a trimmed beard-very Shakespearean if he'd lose the Hawiian shirts.
We have a concert Friday night at the community center (an old church) and guitar workshops the next day.

Sunday we rent bikes-really cool green and blue cruisers with fat seats and fat wheels, which match our f-outfits. The sea is not too far away, down little cowpaths and lanes and a little bit of scary road. Never more than a mile from a pleasant pub either.

Sept 18 Lydney
The Blue Front Blues Room at the Miner's Arms is in the Forest of Dean, almost to Wales. John Anderson, a lovely fellow, very dedicated to blues music runs it. He's friends with Paul Oliver, who has recently donated his archives and memorabilia on African-American music to the university at Gloucester. That's very exciting-I hope it's visit-able next time I come here.
A big cold rain started in right around showtime, scaring off our crowd, but after a night of rain it's back to unseasonably sunny warm weather. Global warming-all the UK papers are full of it this week; the unique weather records of the middle of England, going back 350 years, prove that the temperature has risen by 2 degrees in the last 45 years. Even the trash papers led with the story. I think a nation of gardeners like the English get it about climate change. Riding the train in England you see garden patches, "allotments", surrounding every housing estate and most houses have some little garden patch going. Nothing like that in Ireland, and not so much in Scotland, although Scotland seems like one big alpine garden.

Sept 19 Scotland
We have a seven hour day on the train headed for Aberdeen after the Blue Front, through the Lake District which is lovely and when you hit Scotland after Carlisle, the land gets hillier and there's more and more sheep (plenty in England but way more in Scotland). The steep hills are trod down by their relentless little black hooves and divided into terraces by stacked walls of stone that all look like Andy Goldsworthy art projects. There are ruins of lookout towers on the high hills.
We hit the ocean (a new one for me, the North Sea-now I've seen the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Carribean) at Edinburgh and it's lovely: great cresent beaches, deep inlets or steel blue water, rocky cliffs. Very like the Northwest, I feel at home. The light is like the Puget Sound too-more white, less pink, even at sundown.
Aberdeen has a strong character: tall, grey, foursquare, extremely unfrivolous. Everything made of grey granite blocks, like a monochrome needlepoint canvas, where squares become all shapes once they're filled in.
Our host, Chris Simmonds is a big quiet rather unfrivolous man just like his city. Lucky for us he's just made a big pot of gumbo when our taxi arrives from the station. He runs stage crews for big rock and arena shows as well as promoting music, and his house is full of cds, rock memorabilia, backstage passes and empty bottles of memorable spirits. We're going to leave our bags with him and take a little trip to Inverness overnight tomorrow.

Sept 20 Inverness Scotland

It's two hours north on the train, and the grey skies clear up as we head into the Highlands. Same hills and sheep, with copses of oaks and hedgerows with red hawthorn berries. The colors here are more evergreen and silvery greys, not so red and gold as the south of England. Definately north, although it's still about 68 degrees-endless summer at the end of the world. There are whisky distillers aplenty along the peaty looking streams-it looks like sheep, farming and whisky are the fruits of the Highlands. The train rolls by little one room distilleries and the giant grey and green barns of Chivas Regal.

Inverness is a busy market town, with plenty of punky teenagers and ladies in for a day of shopping. The young people are kind of grungy in style-if the Dublin girls are following Paris Hilton, these girls are more in line with early Patti Smith. I'm also noticing a number of black eyes on the young men. Hmm...
We find a bed and breakfast overlooking the rushing water of the river Ness. None of this lazy, in-n-out tidal river action here-the Ness is headed to the sea at high speed, and it's not going slow down.
You can walk up river about a mile, past elegant houses with lawns on the riverbanks to the Ness Islands, little parks with old cedars and oaks, then cross over pedestrian suspension bridges and walk seawards on the Caledonian canal. We walked about four miles, found some lovely food at a great restaurant called the Mustard Seed, then found a traditional Scottish music session going at a pub called the Hootenanny. Very like the scene at the Corner House in Cork-the musicians at a table in the middle of the room, well supplied with beers, two fiddles and an accordion player. "Ceilidh", pronounced "kay-li", it's called. I asked the damp Scots lady who came and joined our table (I think she was waiting for her bus) what ceidlidh meant. "Oh it's what people did in the old days-playing music, a bit of dancing, food and drink. People injoying themselves with a bit of music". So hootenanny is a good translation.

Sept 21 Aberdeen Scotland
Back to the Grey Man. The show here is at Musa, a cafe/gallery, in what used to be first a catholic church, then a banana ripening warehouse. Since Steve James has a phobia about bananas this is highly amusing (to me).

Sept 22 near Perth Scotland
The Folk Club at here meets in the back room upstairs at the Hotel Creith-this is the best kind of gig-your room's right down the hall from the show and so's dinner: "Neeps and Tatties Soup"= "Turnip and Potato Soup". Scots people like to eat plenty of neeps and so do I. Very nice audience, reserved during, but very friendly afterward. Like Midwesterners.



Sept 23 York England
The trains in Scotland have been a little erratic-they're working on the lines, so sometimes you have to transfer to the bus, or the trains are late. Plus our masterplan, which involved visiting Edinburgh then taking the night train to London to arrive Sunday morning isn't going to work-no sleepers on Sat night. Poop. We're worried about trying to ride the train all the way from Scotland to Crawley (near London) on the day of the show. So a brilliant idea-we'll go to York Saturday, get a random B&B near the station, then go the rest of the way on Sunday morning. We can visit guitar maker Ralph Bown,who made Steve James' excellent 12-string, who has his workshop in York, admire the ancient wall around the city, see some Roman ruins even.
Unfortunately our master plan is flawed-who knew there would be a giant food and wine festival in town that would fill every available bed in York? Ralph and his housemate Jan end up saving us and finding us a nice bed at their place, afterall, where would the guitar makers be without the feckless idiot guitar players? They need to keep us alive!

Sept 24 Crawley England The Hawth Crawley is a large arts complex in Sussex, about 45 minutes from London. The environs remind me of Westchester. Our host is Tony Malloy, a vigorous Londoner and promoter of blues events
Sept 25 Heathrow
We are being ordered around by idiots-yesterday they relaxed the carry-on hysteria at the airports here, specifically allowing instruments to be carried through security for gate check. So an officious security screener refuses to let mine through, meanwhile letting Steve with his instrument through. Steve sat about five feet from the guy waiting for me to come back and the idiot never noticed. What else isn't he noticing? The whole thing is a farce and when the real thing comes along they aren't going to recognize it.
We're leaving England for five days in Stockholm, then we have to come back to Heathrow and do the whole bullshit routine again. I will never fly into this airport again.

Sept 26 Stockholm Sweden I have been curious for years to visit a real Western democracy: will there be a noticable difference in people from a country that's had, what, 75 years of socialist governance?
Driving in from the airport with our host, the excellent guitarist and arranger Lasse Johansson, I was worried: the big American-style freeway (feels good to be back on the right side of the road!) lined with office buildings and corporate neon looks like Bellevue or any other freeway nowhere-land. But then downtown Stockholm is magnificent. The main buildings have their grand entrances facing the sea (another new sea! The Baltic!) Most cities treat the waterfront as a back door, a messy yard that might get cleaned up and redeveloped when industry moves on, but here the palace and the grand hotel all were built to be arrived at by boat, and rows of white ferries are lined up at the cobblestone wharves. The center has a crappy glass and pavement '70s redevelopment full of chain shops, but the neighborhoods have lots of little stores and cool cafes, plenty of bookstores and bars.

The first positive indications come from the 7-11s. You know the American Satan-11s: the pasty, apathetic clerks, the weird burritos and sugary drinks, the chemical snacks and cardboard muffins, the watery beer, all bathed in unflattering florescent twicker. In Stockholm the 7-11 is full of fresh fruit, big baskets of breads and muffins are displayed under indirect lighting, the hot food looks edible and the beers are good. Maybe the capitalists haven't been lying to us after all: maybe they do just give us what we want and what Americans want is blue slurpees and wet burritos and what Swedes want is mineral water and four different kinds of pasta. Same hot-dogs though. So we've got that going for us...
I haven't seen one giant belt made of gilded leather, no rolls of fat peeking out from too tight tops-these people have taste, they're very good-looking and Paris Hilton is not their role-modal. Friendly and well-educated too. The other place I've been where people seemed so generally educated and alert was Cuba-another country where all school is free.
Eating and drinking here is ultra expensive in restaurants: food in the grocery store or at the Hotorget market (where agro ex-Yugoslavians hustle giant piles of chanterelles and lingon berries) is about a third cheaper than eating out. It's easy to spend $130 on two dinners and a couple rounds of drinks in an ordinary neighborhood pub. A similar meal in Paris would be $40. Lucky us, we have Lasse's wonderful apartment to cook in. He's staying at his girlfriend's place all week. We have his spacious place full of cute Martins all to ourselves, so we're cooking at home and pretending we're Swedes. No clutter and plenty of herring, it's Hans Christian Anderson meets Akea.