Gillian Grassie

Off The Rails

// June 21st, 2010 // 2 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Travel

I’ve spent roughly half of the last month on a train, covering over 15,000 kilometers, from Hong Kong to Gubkin, where I’m now sitting in a hotel room in the South Western corner of Russia. I don’t even know how to begin keeping up with the bizarre and wonderful events that have been blurring each passing day – it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago I was climbing The Great Wall of China! I’ll be blogging a separate update about that adventure soon, but for now, here’s an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend during the four-day trip from Beijing to Krasnoyarsk on the Transsiberian Railroad. If you’re looking for a good soundtrack to this blog post, try spinning Joni Mitchell’s “Just Like This Train” and “Off The Rails” by the Notwist.

my kupé berth on the transmanchurian K19

Excerpts from a letter written on May 24th, 2010

Today I bought a small container of sour cream, thinking it was yoghurt, and ate about half of it before deciding it couldn’t just be that Russian yogurt is funky in a way not unlike how Greek-style yogurt is funky. This reminded me of the time I was making dinner for my host Ralf and his five year-old son Raphael in Berlin – a nice gnocchi dish with sautéed bacon and mushrooms in what I’d intended to be a cream sauce, only I’d bought some weird soft German cheese thinking it was crème fraîche and the whole thing curdled in the most disgusting way; it tasted fine but looked awful. Poor Raphael, who is a picky eater to begin with, had a meltdown at the kitchen table and refused to eat the stuff. I couldn’t really blame him and felt bad because he got in trouble for the tantrum when it was really my fault. Oh the joys of buying dairy products abroad.

The train is remarkably empty. Perhaps because we’re just a week or two shy of tourist season or perhaps because we’re on the less popular transmanchurian line (people like seeing Mongolia more). It’s a good thing too, since it turns out my harp simply will not fit in any convenient way in a kupé class cabin. When I had the cabin to myself for the first two days, I left the harp out and played it some, but I got a bunkmate on the third day and had to store it up to the bunk above me. This train seems to travel in ¾ time.

The view out the window could be Wyoming. Plains and hills with brown, gold, and green (almost) grasses, a bit marshy in parts, with cows and sheep and goats occasionally grazing in clusters, and ill-maintained barbed-wire fences, tiny outpost towns now and again, and even the odd Russian cowboy or two. They gave me a bit of trouble at the border for bringing my harp, but not too much. The weird thing was they had to switch out all the wheels on the train when we crossed over from China – apparently the tracks are set wider apart in Russia, something to do with World War II.

Lake Baikal

Even though it is the end of May, winter is only just beginning to ease its grip on the land here; lake Baikal was a cobweb of floating ice. There are field fires everywhere, blackening the white trunks of the birch trees. The kind German/South African man in the berth next to me, who lives half of each year in rural Siberia, told me that the Russians light these fires to clear the dead leaves and grasses, since the seasonal shift between Summer and Winter is too short to allow proper decomposition. Sometimes at night the glow of the brush fires can be spectacular, and also disturbing, like how I imagine land might look during War Time.

My bunkmate is a kind-faced Chinese man. He doesn’t speak English and I hardly know any Chinese, so we can’t really talk, but we share our bags of nuts and dried fruit and can manage some basic friendly communication via gesticulations and context. I wonder what it will be like when I get back to the United States and can understand everything that is being said around me – snippits of conversations in the park or on the street. I wonder if it will be overwhelming. Not long now. I’ll be back July 30th.

Behind The Great (fire)Wall

// May 7th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // News, Performances, Travel

Hello Everyone. I’m in China, land of The Great (Fire)Wall. I haven’t been able to update my twitter or facebook accounts, so I put together this blog post of the tweets that would have been, if China would only let the twitter bird out of its cage.

Here’s a summary of the last month in installments of 140 characters or less:

April 12, 2010

catching the overnight train from Hong Kong. Gonna miss those cappuccinos at Café Corridor.

scenes from the train window: a lone telephone pole askew in a lake. rows of plastic bottles demarking a net. scarlet brick factory kiln.

scenes from the train: a fussing wife wiping sleep-sand from her husband’s eyes with a blue-striped washcloth. the hock and spit over a washroom sink.

April 13, 2010

ah, Squat Toilet – how could I forget your keyhole charms in the oasis of Hong Kong luxury? moving train adds extra element of thrill & skill.

To the pushy lady at Shanghai station: I know you’re old & tiny, but I swear to god, if you shove your luggage cart into the back of my knees one more time, I’ll eat you.

Well, hello...

April 14, 2010

Had to buy copies of this wonderfully homoerotic poster celebrating “10,000 years of Sino-Asian Friendship & Brotherhood” at the Shanghai Propaganda Museum today.

And how could I pass up an original vinyl of the classic “Our Great Motherland is Abloom with Flowers”?

April 15, 2010

Loved the fishmonger who was serenading his fish with a flute at the market this morning. Is it crazy to say they seemed to thrash less? How do fish hear?

Was slightly alarmed at woman cleaning her earwax with tip of large, sharp knife. More alarmed by notion that she cuts enormous tofu blocks beside her with same blade.

April 16, 2010

Got to stand behind the DJ booth & watch all the knob fiddling at LoGo. Felt my cool factor exploding by association. Is this how rock stars feel everyday?

April 17, 2010

Little Punk

Tonight at Yuyintang: Stegosaurus? EP release with Boys Climbing Ropes, Rainbow Danger Club, and Dragon Pizza.

Boys Climbing Ropes – not sure I’d listen to a CD of this, but frontwoman Little Punk is a tiny ball of intensity. Worth catching them live just to see her crazy eyes.

Dennis Ming Nichols & Jesse Munson of Rainbow Danger Club

Rainbow Danger Club: all expats, but solid, mostly instrumental experimental rock. Rhythmic structures hint at members’ jazz-backgrounds. Dug the bowed bass & drumstick guitar rattling.

Dragon Pizza: These boys made it through all of 2 songs before going shirtless. Japanese bass-player goes cross-eyed during intense shreds. Pretty lighthearted bunch for a metal band.

Dragon Pizza

April 18, 2010

Stopped 4x for photos w/ Chinese tourists while walking on The Bund today. Got used to this in India & Indonesia, but surprised to have the experience in cosmopolitan Shanghai.

April 19, 2010

field research for songwriting: tried bone marrow at a hot pot restaurant – at once surprisingly creamy & stringy. Check out quasi-related lyrics

there are many things you can cook in a hot pot

April 20, 2010

Dammit, Rilke! Now I’m really, truly, actually going to have to learn German.

April 21, 2010

Found: decent bagels in Shanghai! Gotta say though, this is one thing North America just does better. Also dirty martinis.

April 22, 2010

Spent the afternoon with awesome Ada, a certified Chinese tea ceremony master (5 year program!), who taught me how to serve green tea in her studio. Days like this are why we travel.

April 23, 2010

Wuji EP Release Concert at Yuyintang shut down by police w/o explanation save “Expo.” Went to hastily organized house concert, but worrisome

Wuji regroups at a friend's house

April 24, 2010

Tried frogs’ legs twice this week. More like shellfish than chicken in texture. Devilishly tricky to grab with chopsticks. Reminded of Triplets of Bellville.

Yuyintang open as bar, but still closed for music. Pinkberry concert cancelled. Police confiscated computer & sound equipment. Check out article by Shanghai blogger, Jake Newby

April 25, 2010

Shanghai & Mumbai have approx. the same population, but Shanghai has ~7000 people/km2 & Mumbai has over 22,000. The feeling is v. diffirent.

model of Shanghai at the Urban Planning Museum

April 26, 2010

Got to hitch a ride with press to soft opening of Obama nightclub. Gawdy, gold, & ginormous. Apparently nothing to do with Obama save publicity stunt. Cheers to the go-go dancer on stilts.

April 27, 2010

Great chat with Sean Leow this morning. Check out Neocha.com, & edge.neocha.com – online network of China’s creative communities (art, music, film, etc…)

April 28, 2010

Playing a show at OZNZ tonight. Check out urbanatomy.com listing by the lovely Leslie Jones – 1st harp joke in print I’ve laughed at in a long time.

April 29, 2010

My Shanghai hosts set the bar ridiculously high. How am I ever going to leave them? Good thing I accidentally missed the train to Beijing & had to stay on an extra night.

Heading over to The Revitalization of Shanghai Rock show. It’s Emo Pop Punk night like whoa, but happy to celebrate the fact that Yuyintang is open for live music again.

Yuyintang

May 1, 2010

Welcome to Beijing, where breathing the air is like smoking 70 cigarettes a day. Hang on Siberia, imma commin soon.

Taxi was too big for the roads, so arrived in forbidden city with self, harp, & bags in rickshaw – velvet & fringe on top. Like the surrey in Oklahoma!

May 2, 2010

camping out at Midi

Midi Modern Music Festival Day 2 highlights: The Swamp, Xiao He, Voodoo Kungfu, Asaf Avidan & the Mojos.

Made it to the right bus stop, then followed likely-looking T-shirts to festival entrance at Haidian Park.

Voodoo Kungfu: um, Mongolians + bodypaint + deathmetal? Yes, please! Love a band that includes “backing-growls” & horsehead cello in their line-up.

Asaf Avidan says he’s from Israel, but he must have just touched down from Mercury. That voice cannot have come from this planet.

May 3, 2010

Epic feat of foreign public transport mastery achieved in finding my way to Strawberry Festival at Tongzhou Canal Park. 3 Metro changes, 1 bus, & nearly 3 hours ONE WAY.

Modern Sky Strawberry Festival Day 3 highlights: Fruit VC (highly danceable + onstage foam shower?) Wang Yue & Hang on the Box (All-girl band, sounds a little like The Ting Tings)

Gotta hand it to the Chinese rockers – even the bands with mediocre music put on one hell of a live performance. So much energy!

getting myself a custom-made shirt

May 4, 2010

Overheard: heated fight between drunk couple. Chopsticks were thrown, but no injuries except eardrums.

May 5, 2010

Still haven’t gotten used to seeing open slit-back trousers on the wee ones here. Torn between adorable factor of baby butts & gross-out spectacular of free expulsion.

May 6, 2010

Found myself playing harp in hostel bar w/ 2 handsome Russian ballet dancers, sweet Irish couple, Thomas from Beijing, & my gregarious Canadian bunkmates last night.

tent at Haidian Park

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luthiers and coffee beans

// March 8th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // News, Travel

Well, after three months in Mumbai, I made it out of India without a hitch, except that when I arrived in Jakarta and unpacked my harp, I discovered she’d been damaged pretty severely during the journey to Indonesia. On the back of the harp, near the top of the sound box, the wood had been pushed in and sported a long, ugly crack, split clear through, as if someone had punched her.

the break

This is the part of the harp that rests against my shoulder when I play, and it’s important structurally for sound quality. But – if I can talk about this without becoming overly sentimental – this part of the harp is also significant emotionally, since it is the point of contact between the instrument and my body; when I play, the sound vibrations travel through this section of wood to my shoulder and resonate physically in my body.

When I fly, I pack the harp in a soft, padded case that fits inside a second, rigid foam and fiberglass flight case, like a set of Russian dolls. Over the years, I’ve flown internationally using this set-up about a dozen times without any problems, so it must have gotten dropped very hard for this to have happened. It’s hard to imagine what exactly the baggage handlers might be doing to cause such serious damage to otherwise well-protected musical instruments, but David Carroll’s YouTube video offers some pretty funny ideas. I suppose it’s a bit of a miracle that nothing like this happened before, especially given the number of unlikely and inhospitable places I’ve taken my harp.

there's always one smart-ass at the airport who makes a crack about a dead ex-boyfriend. They always think they came up with it too.

Having had my fill of major Southeast Asian metropolises, and feeling not a little heartbroken, I hopped on the first train I could book to Yogyakarta, a much smaller and slower-paced city in central Java, and the island’s semi-official cultural heart. I was hoping that somewhere in this hub of universities, music schools, and gamelan orchestras, I might be able to find someone who could try and stabilize the crack until I could get the instrument to a harp maker and look at my repair options.

Sure enough, literally around the corner from my guesthouse, there was a luthier. I spent a couple hours watching him build acoustic guitars with a reassuring, grandfatherly countenance and a craftsman’s leathered hands. I brought my harp over for him to take a look at, and we discussed (with the help of a friendly local’s translation) how he might try and stabilize the instrument. At first, things seemed optimistic, but, after a few days of head scratching, he ultimately decided he wasn’t confident working on the harp.

I guess if you’re going to find yourself halfway around the world with a rare, broken instrument, Yogyakarta isn’t the worst place to evaluate the situation and regroup.

First of all, there is excellent coffee.

I’m still getting used to the grit of drinking it unstrained – which is how it is served here – but there is absolutely no question that Java’s coffee plantations are producing delicious joe. Secondly, and much more importantly, the people in my Sosrowijayan neighborhood are wonderful.

tony let me hold his pet bird

The Sosrowijayan neighborhood is pretty easy to fall in love with. As soon as you turn off the main drag onto Jl Sosrowijayan, things get dramatically quieter. There are more smiles and fewer hawkers. Upon turning onto one of the alleyways that lead into the residential part of the neighborhood, the sound decibel decreases another few notches and suddenly you feel as though you aren’t in a city at all, but a small village, with lots of adorable young children running around, friendly faces asking how your day was, and the old folks smoking clove cigarettes and looking on.

making music on the batik shop steps

It helps that I started off on the right foot by bypassing the restaurants and eating at the neighborhood food stand, which serves amazing rice, tempe, tofu, gado gado, and ginger tea, along with a plate full of fried chicken necks complete with heads that I try not to think of as staring at me while I eat my veggies. The flora and fauna in my G.I. tract provided by three months in India have made me braver than the average tourist, so I’m not too distracted by traveler’s belly to appreciate the dirt-cheap, delicious food. Lunch typically sets me back about 80 cents. The food stand is also great because it’s next to an open space where kids play pick-up football games (the kind the rest of the world plays, not the U.S. version) across from the mosque, and is generally an all-ages neighborhood hang-out. It also helps that I’m American, since Obama has a nation-wide fan club in Indonesia for having spent part of his childhood in the courty – there’s even a statue of a 10 year-old “Barry” catching butterflies in Jakarta.

mucking about with a siter

Within my first 48 hours I’d talked to a group of high school boys about their favorite bands (Guns and Roses, Metallica, Oasis, and a bunch of Indonesian emo-pop bands), received an invitation to a nearby village for a traditional music event celebrating the rice-harvest that’s particular to this region, been advised on the fair purchase price for snake fruit (4000 rupiah per kilo), and planned a couple of bicycle day trips to nearby mountains (read, volcanoes) and beaches. Taking pity on the harpless harpist, some locals also invited me to an evening jam session on the front steps of a batik shop. They played guitar and offered me a siter (not to be confused with India’s sitar) to mess around with. The siter is a stringed instrument typically played in Gamelan orchestras and the closest thing to a harp I’ve seen in Indonesia.

Togor

A couple of nights later, when (much to my horror and embarrassment) I found myself in tears over the situation with my harp, I was immediately offered a hot cup of tea and invited to sit down and talk with some new friends. We didn’t come up with a solution that night, but I was deeply touched by the sincerity of their concern and empathy, and I went to bed feeling a lot better after singing a couple English songs Togor knew how to play on the guitar (amusingly, these were “Summertime” and “Jingle Bells”), and learning a Bahasa lullaby.

It’s true that I can get another harp (and hopefully my insurance will ensure that I do) and that there may still be hope that my harp can be repaired properly, but even with a new back, her voice will probably be different, and I can’t shake the feeling that something has been lost here that is not replaceable. This feeling is especially poignant since I learned that Jack Faulkner, the man who designed and built my harp, passed during the fall.

sound check at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival, 2001

This particular instrument has been my partner since I was twelve years old. She has shared the stage with me at every major competition and performance of my life. I remember feeling nervous backstage at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival when I was fourteen, and how much comfort I felt as soon as I sat down and pulled her back to my shoulder. When I was fifteen and found myself living in Switzerland, alone for the first time in a foreign country, it was on this harp that I wrote my first song. She has helped me make music in the mountains of British Columbia, and in a whole string of grimy, smoky clubs in the United States. More recently, she decimated cultural and language barriers in Mumbai, when a young girl’s curiosity lead to an impromptu concert in a Western Rail suburban train car.

my best impression of a pack mule

When people see me lugging the flight crate through customs or walking through cities saddled like a pack mule with the harp on my back, they often raise their eyebrows at the idea of girl bothering to travel with such an unwieldy thing. What they don’t realize is that it’s not me who’s dragging the harp along for the journey, but rather the other way around. It’s true that I’ve turned down family vacations before because I couldn’t bring my harp with me, but it’s also true that the vast majority of opportunities for travel I’ve had have been provided by the harp. I wouldn’t have seen Scotland or most of the southern United States without the financial support she’s given me through touring and scholarships, and I certainly wouldn’t be here now, writing a blog update from Indonesia, without her help. She makes me braver than I am, and often takes me places I wouldn’t be bold enough to go alone.

camping in British Columbia

Despite the sense of loss, I’ve been trying to look at this as a moment of opportunity. Perhaps this is a good chance to pick up another instrument, something that could offer fresh ideas for the way I approach the harp and might even liberate me from some of the frustrating limitations and creative ruts I’ve found myself preoccupied with over the past several months in my songwriting. Maybe I’ll start immersing myself in electronic music and composing on my laptop. I might finally pick up the guitar, or the piano, or some weird little instrument I come across in my travels in China next month. I’ve always had a soft spot for the accordion, although I’d have to consider the repercussions of inviting that many more bad jokes. Whatever happens, I’ll keep you updated on my adventures.

daybreak at Borobudur

Recording by the Black Forest

// October 21st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Travel

On Sunday night I returned to Mme Claude in Kreuzberg for their open stage and ran into Dorothea, a fantastic German singer-songwriter fresh out of the Jazz & Rock Schulen Freiburg – a contemporary music conservatory that has a popular exchange program with (and similar curriculum to) the Berklee College of Music in Boston. We got all fired up talking about the independent music scene in Germany and closed the bar at Mme Claude, met up the next night at another open stage, Arcanoa – where Doro wrote a new song upstairs in the smoking room on a borrowed guitar – and by Thursday I found myself rolling South on the highway with my harp for a weekend of recording at a studio in Freiburg where Doro’s been working on her debut EP.

Pippi!

We stayed with some old friends of Doro in this awesome student complex with a big mural of Pippi Longstocking on the front wall and an elaborate squatter camp next door, complete with organized art events, political demonstrations, and its own wash-your-dishes-and-it’s-free “Café,” where I had one of the best cups of Chai in my life (ask me again after India). Across the street was a very modern office building powered entirely by solar panels, which, fittingly, housed a group of dedicated environmental organizations. To say that this university town near the French border is preoccupied with saving the planet is an understatement; Freiburg has become one of the de facto capitals of the international Green movement. Environmental issues dominate the daily news in both print and radio, and the city elected Green Party member Dieter Salomon as their mayor. Bikes rule the streets and a short trip outside the city will lead you into the heart of the Black Forest (think Brothers Grimm).

the patio/balcony. a sign hangs above that reads 'Occupied' in German, and a large banner with a quote from Brecht hangs on the fence

I got to see a bit of the Black Forest in all its winter glory on a drive to a town an hour outside Freiburg where we rehearsed with Doro’s guitarist. As the road climbed up into the mountains we suddenly found ourselves pulling out of the thick clouds into a world of white, snow dusting the conifers and fallow fields and trapezoidal barn roofs. I had the best meal of the trip so far that evening, though it’s hard to say if it was the delicious food or the three bottles of wine or the new friends or the fact that whenever I looked outside I felt like I was living in a fairytale gingerbread land. Before we headed back to Freiburg to lay down some tracks, we took a drive out to see an old castle and stood along the banks of the Rhine River, looking across into the Swiss Alps (don’t worry, Watson, I didn’t cross the border!). The water had that gorgeous glacial glow, a sort of blue-green that seems somehow milky, like frosted sea-glass.

Schwein!

Growing up on a farm, animals –lots of them – have basically surrounded me all my life, and one of the few downers of this year of travel so far has been the critter-withdrawal I’ve been going through. So I was elated when Doro got a phone call from another old friend and asked me if I’d be interested in visiting a little farm nearby that afternoon. I think I was probably even more enthusiastic than the two year-old we were with about seeing the piglets, and the goats, and getting kisses from bulls (seriously, these were the sweetest, gentlest bulls I’ve ever met, a whole pen of affectionate Ferdinands).

the Koes in Normandy weren't into Knufflen, but the bulls in Freiburg were all about the kisses

If anyone can identify exactly what kind of pig this poor, unfortunate-looking dear is, I’d be very curious to know. We found two of these guys in a pen, with curled tusks, a big, bristled back, and kind of squashed, pug-like faces with a serious brow-bone.

poor dear, what are you?

Later that night, we went out to a performance by Lindsey Blount, a jazz singer who came over to Freiburg from the U.S. through the Berklee exchange. If you have a chance to see her perform in the U.S. (Philadelphia, I’m talking to you), you really must. She is a total treat.

doro laying down some piano in the studio

The trip to Freiburg finished with an inspiring day in the studio, tracking accordion, piano, and harp for Doro’s songs. I feel really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Doro, who writes beautiful, interesting, strong songs with both German and English lyrics. As soon as she finishes mixing down a few of the tracks and posts them online, I’ll put up a link here and you can listen for yourself. It was exhilarating to have the good fortune to meet such a cool artist and be able to take her up on such a wonderfully spontaneous offer – all within the span of a week! Serendipity has been on my side lately, and I hope it sticks around, because one of the most incredible things about the Watson Fellowship is that it has freed me to accept fantastic, last-minute opportunities like this one, and granted me a spirit of flexibility that I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed before.

setting up mics for the harp

Berlin has been extraordinary, in part, because, despite a long history, it’s still a very young city in many ways (November 9th will mark only the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall). There is an energy here of constant change and reinvention and opportunity; it’s a very creative atmosphere, and this combined with the fact that it’s still an affordable city to live in lends Berlin a gravitational pull for artists of all sorts. The general consensus is that the arts and music scene in Berlin now is comparable to that of New York City in the 1980s. But there is also a sense here that the moment is fleeting – how long will it be before Berlin’s housing market becomes gentrified and beyond the reach of low-income artists? Do we have five years? Ten? Once a city’s rent climbs past a certain point, the creative arts scene invariably changes; artists become less experimental and collaborative and more competitive, accepting the types of commissions and bookings (and day jobs) that pay the bills. The low-rent factor that helps permit Philadelphia’s music scene to be more community-oriented is one of the reasons I prefer it to New York’s.

But this acknowledgment that Berlin’s creative heyday is probably not indefinite lends its own sense of urgency and earnestness. Doro, and I, and the other artists I’ve met so far agree: it’s exciting to be here, now, at this age, in this moment.

Experimental Music at Mme Claude, Berlin

// October 14th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Music, Travel

Last Monday I headed out to Kreuzberg to check out the experimental music night at Madame Claude – a small, quirky bar and music venue off of Skalitzer Strasse. When I got to the club, I paid a nominal, three euro entrance fee, got my hand stamped and walked down the stairs into a room that had been decorated so that everything was topsy-turvy, with all sorts of objects stuck to the ceiling and walls to give the appearance that you were in some sort of Alice in Wonderland World where everything was upside down. A row of pots and pans hung upright on the wall behind the bar, along with a backwards clock. Elsewhere in the room there were all sorts of things stuck to the ceiling (bolts? Super-dooper glue?), among them a pair of white high-top sneakers, a coffee table set up with chairs, and a David Bowie record.

pots and pans hanging up behind the bar

I bought a delicious bottled beer at the bar (for under 2 Euros – beat that, Paris!) and followed little black signs with “Live Musik” and arrows printed in red type through the lounge/bar area to a tiny, cobblestoned, blackbox basement of a room where a dark-haired, serious woman sat at a table, lit by a single old-fashioned lamp. She was fiddling with two Macs (a laptop and a desktop), a keyboard, and a few other pieces of equipment, making soundscapes of pulsations and fuzz – like deep space radio static, or a pack of hornets at the end of the world. I kept waiting for her to add in other sound elements, but she did so very rarely; a snip-it of a French woman’s voice announcing at the train station, then nothing for at least ten minutes, then an Asian flute, some chanting.

Emmanuelle Gibello performing her electronic soundscapes at Mme Claude's

I’d been exposed to music like this before, during an electro-acoustic composition workshop at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival back in 2001, but the notion of it as a live performance art was new to me. I kept looking around at the other audience members to try and find some cues for how to go about appreciating this sort of performance. Some seemed as baffled as me, our eyes catching across the room. They looked down quickly with embarrassment while others flashed tentative smiles, hoping for someone else to confirm their assessment that “this is really weird.” The wandering eye contact acted as a catalyst for a mass exodus of sorts from the room – people left in groups of two over five minutes.

Listen to \"Bleu\" by Emmanuelle Gibello

But others sat on the floor with their heads between their knees, reverent, or perhaps seasick. This is how I felt – the latter – as though the sound waves reverberating against the fluid in my eardrum were enough to give me motion sickness. Maybe it was. Still, this was not violent sound in the way of some music. I watched one young man in a checkered flannel shirt fold his coat on an overturned wastebasket – a recently vacated seat – and lay his head down on his arms. Another guy in a bright green sweatshirt under a sports coat leaned back in his chair with his head against the wall and seemed to fall asleep. One young man left the room quickly, as though he too was overwhelmed and seasick. In his haste, he knocked my foot quite hard from where it rested, crossed over my knee. He didn’t pause to notice the sudden contact. Others filtered in and took his space.

live musik

I remembered the time a man passed out at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. From the balcony, I saw him slump in his suit in the center of the fifth row during an aching, slow movement (I wish very much I could remember the piece). The woman beside him called his name a few times, each repetition growing in volume and panic, until she cried out for somebody to please, call a doctor! The pomp and circumstance of the classical music world was, however, so ingrained in tradition that neither the orchestra nor the audience was quite sure what to do. The notion of interrupting a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra was such a taboo that it actually took a long minute for the musicians to stop playing and the audience to start moving to help this man and his frantic date. After the man had been carried out on a stretcher, the conductor seemed stumped as to whether he ought to re-start the movement, skip it, or try to pick up where they’d left off in the score.

In a strange way, sitting on the grimy floor in the basement of Mme Claude’s felt a bit like going to the orchestra. There was a familiar anxiety among much of audience, an earnest desire to do the right thing but not certain what that might entail. The Classical music world can feel rigid to audiences because of its long-steeped tradition, but this experimental music is tense for the opposite reason: it’s so new, with so few rules, that all the freedom can create feelings of awkwardness too. Do we clap between “movements”? Can we leave in the middle of the “set”? Can we enter? Do we have to watch this woman fiddle with her knobs, or can the performance become more of a physical experience? Are we supposed to feel seasick? We all look to each other for indications of appropriate aural consumption behavior, wary like the person unwrapping a cough drop in a concert hall, the miniscule movements of crinkling paper deafening.

musician want-ad on Mme Claude's bulletin board

(belated) Normandy

// September 20th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Travel

In the month of August, the Parisians who can generally clear out of Paris and leave the city for the hordes of tourists who descend during vacation season. Because of this shift in population, the kitsch factor of the town goes way up and the ratio of decent, local live music to awful cover bands singing Oasis songs for drunken Expats gets completely skewed. I’d been planning to spend August traveling and learning about the music outside of Paris, so after an incredible ten days at the la Festival Interceltique de Lorient in Brittany, I was only too happy to accept a serendipitous invitation to play a house concert and follow-up on some new contacts in Normandy.

Jacques-Jean and Anna reading by the ivy

Through the graces of some dear friends, I was able to stay at the most unbelievably gorgeous farmhouse in Carentan, a small village not far from the coast. This place was the real deal. The ivy that covered the entire front façade was so old that the vines were as thick as my forearm and the glossy leaves bigger than my hand. Beyond the garden was an old boulangerie, a tiny building with an enormous wood oven for baking bread. Wild blackberries lined the sides of the single-lane roads running through the marshes and cow pastures, and there were hazelnuts and an old fig tree growing in the yard.

Jacques-Jean with the remains of the blackberry crumble (photo by Andrea Alessi)

On the last evening I was there, we gathered an obscene number of blackberries and made a delicious crumble with them and the hazelnuts we’d painstakingly gathered, shelled, roasted, and chopped. (Okay, so I wasn’t really involved in the actual gathering and shelling of the nuts. But I watched and later I ate the crumble and it was truly fantastic).

Also among the culinary adventures that week was the day we found a rusted, old-school rotisserie. We bought two chickens, stuffed their skin with rosemary, garlic, and shallots, and roasted them in front of an open fire in the den. About three to four hours later, we ate two gorgeous birds with a mushroom cream sauce.

the rotisserie

Every other evening, we would take this adorable tin milk pail with a wooden handle and walk to a nearby dairy farm to get our fresh milk, and when I say fresh I mean warm-from-the-cow, unpasteurized, full-cream deliciousness. When we came back, we’d pour the milk into a big glass bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight, skimming off the thick cream that had risen to the top with a large spoon in the morning and shaking it vigorously in old jam jars to make butter. Seriously.

One day I got to talking with the very nice dairy farmer and he let us go into the small barn and watch the milking process. After a little more chatting he even let me stick my finger in one of those milking machine suction valves to see what it felt like (gentle), which is way more than we got to do on my third grade class field trip.

attempting to convince these cows they should let us knuffle them

I confess to being irrationally excited by the milk pail and to wearing pigtails and skipping almost every time we did the dairy run (I’m REALLY sorry I don’t have a picture of this, don’t know how we missed it). My enthusiasm for the quaint factor was, however, a bit muted by a severe bout of indigestion that lasted for a week after I returned to Paris. I didn’t really think I’d have to break into the supplies of ciproflaxen and immodium until I got to India, but I guess the cows who made that delicious, unpasteurized milk didn’t want me to forget them when I left.

Even with the upset tummy, the trip to Normandy was a total treat. Sometimes when I’m in the city, squashed in the Metro at rush hour, I think about those long evening walks around the marshes, looking for cows amenable to the idea of koe knufflen. I hope I can visit again someday. Maybe next time I’ll run into David Sedaris.

nap time

(For more pictures, check out the photo gallery on my flickr account)

Bread and Roses

// September 5th, 2009 // 8 Comments » // Travel

in the poetry nook at Shakespeare & Co. I left a a poem tacked to the wall - If ever you're in Paris, look for it!

The thing about fresh bread that you don’t realize in America, when all you have at your disposal are pre-sliced bags of “seven grain wholesomeness” preserved to within an inch of its perpetually spongy life, is that fresh bread goes stale – quickly. Overnight, in fact. That’s okay though, because one of my favorite breakfasts in France involves dipping crusty chunks of leftover baguette, smothered in demi-sel butter and jam, into a steaming bowl of chocolate milk. The staleness of the bread becomes important here, because it softens as it sops up the hot milk and chocolate and becomes the most delicious, slightly chewy, juicy bite to start the day.

If I were more mature or had an earlier wake-up call or an actual desk job to get to, I might mix the milk with Ricoré, the chicory-blended instant coffee they sell right next to the powdered chocolate. As it happens, I’m on my own schedule and generally don’t wake up until around 9 AM, when the construction workers start banging holes into dry-wall and jack-hammering cement mercilessly. They seem to be converting several rooms between the sixth and seventh floors into a single, enormous apartment that will no doubt be magnificent when they’re finished. At the moment it’s mostly just dusty, and the stairwell and hallways fill with chalky clouds from the plaster demolition.

I made friends with some of the workers, to be polite, and also because I know approximately 3.5 people in Paris, and those not very well, so it’s nice to have the human interaction. One of the men is from Portugal originally and when he asks me out on dates I pretend that I can’t understand his heavily accented French, which is partially true. Still, I gave him one of my CDs and sort of sweet-talked him into fixing the lights in the hallway. Now, when I come home from concerts at 2 AM, I don’t have to rally quite so much courage to round the corners of the narrow, Tim Burton corridors with my shaky, LED flashlight and pocket-knife. The pocket-knife part of the all-in-one Handy Tool used to lend me that extra bit of confidence I needed to brave late-night bathroom excursions, when I would walk with measured steps, every nerve on edge, calming myself by imagining exactly which jiu-jitsu moves I would explode into when faced by the serial killer or vampire who was surely lurking in the shadows just ahead. I consider the Portuguese’ copy of Serpentine one of the best-placed CDs I’ve ever given away.

The garret I’m living in is strange, because it would be a lot like living in a student dormitory, if only there were anyone else here. There’s a collage covering the North wall of one of the bathrooms – torn off pieces of newspaper and magazine advertisements, heads of Obama and Sarkozy and Michael Jackson and kittens. It’s the sort of thing that seems like it was a collective, unspoken effort; when you’d wander to the bathroom at night you’d bring some tape and the latest quirky find from your favorite periodical. I wonder who did make it, and where they are now. I can imagine the little numbered doors clanging open and shut all night, Sorbonne kids sitting cross-legged in the hallways with flashlights, studying before exams, music from crappy stereo speakers spilling through the thin walls, cigarette smoke curling out open windows, someone knocking on a neighbor’s door for a condom. We’d laugh about the stairs, and the broken lights, and the Tim Burton aesthetic. Maybe we’d plan a group outing to see Number 9. But there’s no one. At first, I thought there might be someone else – a noisy someone else – until I realized that if I didn’t shut the bathroom door properly, it would blow open and bang shut with the wind all night.

chambre de bonne

Of course, the seventh floor could never be a student dormitory, for the simple reason that in this neighborhood, it’s illegal to rent out the chambres de bonne, since the good, upstanding residents of the Septième wouldn’t want rooms in their building sublet to untrustworthy, low-income, young, noisy strangers (quelle horreur!). As the name implies, these rooms were originally reserved for live-in servants, and the back staircase with separate entrance passes by the external laundry closets on each landing, and the backdoors of the main apartments, which open directly into the kitchen. My impression is that the rooms on the seventh floor are mostly used for storage now, since it’s a ghost town up here, but theoretically it’s still acceptable for each main apartment in the building to house, say, a nanny, in their chambre de bonne, or use it as a guest bedroom. This latter scenario is the case with the dear family friends who have been kind enough to let me stay here while I’m in Paris. It bears noting that they are a decidedly hip couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter and share none of the stuffiness that seems to afflict their neighbors.

The long staircase and grim hallways are more than made-up for by how cheerful my little room is once you’re inside.* It’s tiny in a sweet, charming way, with a comfortable bed, a kitchenette, a miniature shower, and a truly fantastic little wooden writing desk by big bay windows that let in an unbelievable amount of light from the courtyard. There is a fabulous set of enormous, old-school iron keys for the door. I especially like being here during rainstorms, when I can hear an entire symphony of water spilling off the rooftop into the gutters, and the diffused light extends the feeling of early-morning into mid-afternoon.

fabulous, enormous, old-school iron keys

It’s days like these that I do most of my writing (musical and otherwise) and reading. When I’m not doing research for my Watson project, I’ve tried to pair my pleasure-reading list with the places I’m visiting.** For Paris, that list has ranged from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, to Leila Sebbar’s Métros Instantanés, to Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity(totally different from the movie, by the way, and largely set in Paris circa 1980), to Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast (which I picked up at the same Shakespeare and Co. mentioned repeatedly in the book).

I’ve especially enjoyed Hemmingway’s memoir, not least of all because he also spent most of his time in Paris living in tiny garret apartments (granted, in vastly worst conditions than mine, in much less posh neighborhoods, without plumbing, oh, and with a wife and young child). His descriptions of this time in his life, as a young writer discovering his craft and living humbly but happily abroad, really strike a chord with my own experience right now. Even though I daresay Paris has lost much of the charm it had in Hemmingway’s time – a charm that has been converted into a sort of nostalgic kitsch rather conspicuously clung to in some of the brasseries and certainly in the postcards stands that clutter every corner – I think there’s something special about being 23 and living in a funky apartment in any big, strange new city, where you don’t know anyone, and everything is new and foreign and exciting. It’s doubly special when you have some kind of creative outlet to channel all that into.

Métros Instantanés

There are several songs in the fire now, including one little tune that I wrote while in a terrible bout of homesickness, thinking of my sister. Mind you, it’s a very crappy little recording, done on my iPhone as I was writing it, and a long way from any final arrangement. It is also an instrumental, partially instigated by a recently rekindled love affair with the traditional world of harp at the Festival Interceltique in Lorient (blog about THAT forthcoming). I’m pretty sure “I Miss My Sister” is not going to be its working title. But still, I’m posting it here so that I can share with all of you a very genuine moment in this grand adventure I’ve embarked upon. Past experience tells me that the worst of the homesickness will pass over in a few more days. Then I should be good for about five months. After five months, I’m not sure what happens, but I’ll be sure to let you know.

I Miss My Sister

Bryn Mawr College came back to life for the fall semester this week and I can’t help thinking of all my dear, dear friends settling into those gorgeous gothic buildings that don’t look so unlike some of the older bâtiments here. I’ve been imagining the students gathering underneath the trees between Taylor’s bell tower and Thomas Great Hall for the first step-sing of the year, raising their colored lanterns each time the refrain, “hearts starve as well as bodies / give us bread but give us roses,” comes around. I remember sitting on a velvet, Queen Anne armchair in the blue room of the Wyndham Alumni house for my Watson interview, being asked what challenges I thought I might face during the year. I said that while I worried about many things – staying on budget, the logistics of traveling with a harp, language barriers and the limitations they might place on my interview subjects – I thought isolation might be one of the biggest hurtles to cross.

Loneliness is an inevitable part of any long-term traveling experience, and it’s not necessarily a bad part of it. Discovering the pleasure of my own company, learning how to forge new social networks, finding the courage and confidence to go out there and make a fool of myself in new languages – that’s all part of the Watson experience, and it’s important. But I’m finding the project aspect of the fellowship increasingly critical, since it lends a structure and purpose to days that would otherwise feel like an overwhelming, aimless void. There’s only so much wandering around city streets – even streets as pretty as those in Paris – you can do before you start to feel a hunger all the pain au chocolat in the world couldn’t fill. And it is at the edges of this place where I am most grateful for my work and for my music.

Footnotes:

*I wouldn’t moan and groan about the staircase so much, except that you have to remember that I’m traveling with a harp, which I carry generally on my back, and in the French system the first floor is the American second floor, so actually I’m on the eighth floor, and if you count the descent into the basement of the building upon the initial entry, then it’s a total of nine spiraling staircases I have to climb, with my harp. The good news is that my legs haven’t been in this great shape since I ran with the cross-country team in high school, and all that huffing and puffing definitely offsets the pain au chocolat and pâté I’ve fallen in love with.

the view down into the abyss that is my stairwell

**I also tried this approach with an iTunes movie rental one night, which resulted in the somewhat disastrous selection of “Taken.” In retrospect, I can see how insane that choice was, but at the time my train of thought wasn’t so much young-American-girls-in-peril as Liam Neeson kicking ass in Paris? Yum…

Venus Zine features Gillian Grassie

// July 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // News, Press

The fabulous Venus Zine just posted this new feature about the upcoming (week from today!) Watson adventure. Check out the article here:

Thank you Erica Phillips!

NBC 10! Show Performance

// June 19th, 2009 // No Comments » // News, Performances

If you missed the airing, have no fear – the link is below. Thanks to all my friends on Myspace and Facebook for picking a “winner”

Watch the performance online!

Gillian to perform on NBC 10! Show 6/18

// June 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Performances, Press

The wonderful folks at NBC have asked me to join them for the 10! show on Thursday, June 18th. Tune in at 11 AM (tricky, tricky…) on channel 10 or watch the segment online.

The band and I will be performing just ONE song, and picking favorite songs is like picking favorite children… so I thought I’d let you decide! Cast your vote for the song you’d most like to hear from Serpentine by commenting on Myspace or Facebook by Tuesday (shall we say midnight?) and then tune in to see what song got the most votes.

Groovy?

Much Love,
Gillian

P.S. You can still get a free song by joining the mailing list at gilliangrassie.fanbridge.com. Just look for the link in your confirmation e-mail. This will be the best way to keep updated on my travels in the coming year.