FiumeNights

I spent one day at the Coachella music festival on friday night, saw some great acts (Girl Talk, the ultimate hero of the over informed generation of music addicts, or McCartney with his epic 3 hours set - read about the funny costs of it) - but left just after to spend 2 more days in the desert, far from the crowd and the insanity of Palm Springs, hell on earth (walls and walls and people in it). I’ve been to Coachella before, didn’t like it at the time but wanted to give it another try, to arrive to the same conclusions.

It seems that over the past ten years, the idea of music festivals have just exploded over the whole western world into something more and more spectacular. Bigger and bigger. Let’s think about that a second - why most of those things grow towards always more? Why not, sometimes, growing towards less? ‘This year, we have decided to invite only 10 bands, over one stage, compared to the 200 last year over the 12 stages. It’s our choice’.

This mainstream idea of music festivals is something which seems to bring more and more people in it, but that less and less people seems to enjoy. Maybe it’s just my vision due to the people i meet, but there’s something quite significant in it. It accelerates, it’s always more spectacular, louder, more expensive, while people seems to criticize it more and more - but continue to go. It’s like TV. But there’s a certain end coming, or at least a switch.
For sure the pleasure of a music festival isn’t that much in the live performances - more into the crowd experience, the drugs experience too. And diverse ways to present music are needed anyway. The main point is that some music festivals over the past few years have been developped in such hyper-everything way that they now are threatening other musical experiences.
There’s an interesting parallel to draw there, between, on one side, a music industry, made of professionals, creating distance through music videos and music festivals, and often reluctant to new technologies in their basic aspect. And on another side, a creative community, made of amateurs, building intimacy through blogs, music films and more underground circuits.
Of course those two sides are permeable to each other, but the opposition between them is pretty strong. There’s a need which have been the main reason behind the success of the Black Cabs Sessions, the Take Away Shows or some other web project over the past few years. A need for intimacy, for simplicity, a need to break some pedestals of the ‘artist’.

Last week i wanted to post this video of Lhasa de Sela and Patrick Watson, covering ‘Between the Bars’ by Elliott Smith, it’s probably better that it happens only this week. Two musicians performing together, two friends singing over a piano. Then the camera pans and opens on what was hidden for the first half - an audience, in a small space. This intimate performance ‘at home’ was in the spirit of what Chryde and la Blogotheque started to develop a few months ago with the Soirees de Poche / Pocket Parties. The idea behind the project was to continue the work we started with the Take Away Shows, stripping down the music to come back to the basics of a live performance (no stage, no distance, often acoustic…) - and this time, with an audience being there, and hopefully being more than an audience. Destroying any idea of hierarchy between creators and spectators to merge them all into one - an ephemeral performance, a commune or even a TAZ… And while the Pocket Parties are a little bit different formally (diverse angles, reworked then in split screens edits), i just shot those little performances with one camera, arranging the set-up to allow me to move a lot around the band, and tell little stories over the course of 3-4 min.

People like to put brands, names, in an era of intense marketing, and to start trends. Ok, so let’s claim we are organizing gatherings, in temporary areas. We have this idea of a first Take Away Show ‘gathering’ with a very reduced crowd, in a beautiful outside location. I hope this idea will take off soon, and maybe with the help of Hannah Baker, whom i asked to write a few words about the Republic of Fiume, from which this blog takes its name. Here it is, thx to her:

“Fiume. A bizarre and wonderful story full of pirates and poets, pushed to the backs of historians’ closets to collect dust alongside failed monarchies and ideological dead-ends. It begins and ends with Gabriele D’Annunzio, our hero, the bold, melodramatic, genius, one-eyed Italian. He was a politician and a pirate, a poet and a fascist. In the fall of 1919 D’Annunzio gathered a motley crew of 2,500 adventurers and took them with him to the port city of Fiume on the Adriatic sea: rebellious twenty-somethings, World War I veterans, poets, anarchists, Futurists, artists, and musicians. He originally claimed the island for his country (without his government’s permission), but, after the Italian government’s lukewarm reaction, D’Annunzio declared the city a free state. His utopian society lasted for 18 months before Italian forces came in and took over in December 1920. The main functions of the totalitarian government he established were to organize the military and to entertain the people. Each day began with a speech by D’Annunzio and ended with a public concert and a fireworks display over the port. The state was organized around Music as its central principle, the state religion was a ‘cult of music.’ Though a dictator, D’Annunzio gave a large amount of social freedoms to his subjects. Fiume was a city full of Creators and Revolutionaries- artists, musicians, radicals, and pirates of all ages dressed up in capes and feathered hats, absolutely and completely free for the first time in their lives. Drugs, alcohol, and sex were out in the open decades before the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies. Everything, even the air, was charged with creative energy. Just like the poetry he wrote when he was young, his state was vivid and sensual. Every sense was stimulated, every fantasy acted out. The whole affair sounds like a teenager telling his friends, “This is the world we’ll make, so different from what our parents have done!” I can only describe the magic of Fiume partially, through reading stale texts and anarchist manifestos (Hakim Bey mentions Fiume in his book ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’)…the Fiumians declared and defined themselves in the Testa Di Fiero in the best way that I can imagine:

We are the island of wonder, which in its journey across the ocean will carry its own incandescent light to the continents stifled in the darkness of brutal commerce. We are a handful of illuminated beings and mystic Creators.”

This story of Fiume is a beautiful and very unknown story of the 20th century (think about what the situationnists never made), and i wonder how this can inspire us while thinking about those new musical gatherings we are trying to create. Anyway, this is just a beginning.

CULTURE MUSICAL CLUB
Last week i posted a little film on Bi Kidude, this week another little souvenir from Zanzibar, with her backing band performing without her. Incredible movements there, and bright colours. And a question i will abord another time - each sound deserves its own filmic approach.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf: A Moment Of Innocence
I was talking briefly last week about Kiarostami movies, and especially Close-Up, one of my favourite movies of all time. I just discovered the incredible A Moment of Innocence, by Mohsen Makhmalbaf (the other great iranian filmmaker of the 90s, who was at the center of Close-Up). Very similar in its approach to reality, blurring lines, and it’s another iranian masterpiece. Ask me if you wanna see it.

Illich vs Kurzweil
Finally, a little word on something which continues to amazes me every day - culture clashes due to information access. What a great era we are living in - being able on the same day to randomly read an Illich book, Energie et Equité, and watch a document on Ray Kurzweil on VBS (what a number of great stories there, unfortunately without a very interesting form). I’ve been interested a lot in both writers for the past year, and their positions are so different on technology and their use that going through their ideas on the same day is quite revelatory. While Illich developed some very critics thoughts in the 70s on the use of energy in our societies (praising for less energy use - and waste - to prevent from social disparities), Kurzweil is a very interesting futurist fascinated in the merge of human bodies and technologies - in 2045 as he says. Beyond critics we could give to both visions (and especially to Kurzweil’s one i would say, whom deep social impacts are often eluded), the key thing there is, how can we absorb such divergences, and grow from it?

Ok, can’t wait for mogwai in NY next week, yalla