Updates from the “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” tour

10.20.2008: Louisville

We’re staying at 21c, a combo museum and hotel here in downtown Louisville. The ground and lower floors are given over to curated shows of contemporary art, much of it from the collection of the owner, Steve Wilson and his wife.

I was given Wilson’s contact by Stefan Sagmeister, who designed the package for the various physical manifestations of my current album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, as well as many of my past CDs. My palatial room (for which I was generously comped) features a whole wall of photos of Thai Ladyboys (sex changes), a series of photos of a woman undressing in front of a variety of men, and a muscular Chinese man in his underpants holding up the top of the picture frame. I guess some of these pieces were deemed not quite appropriate for the lobby.

(That’s not Kurt, by the way)

Well, I wasn’t going to make much use of this luxurious apartment all by myself, so I invited all the band and crew to stop by for mint juleps after they had their dinners. Jenni volunteered Steven to bartend, and with the huge patio there was plenty of room for all of us plus local musician/actor Will Oldham and some of his pals. It’s not really his kind of scene, I imagine, this hotel, but it was nice to meet.

During the day a few of us biked to the massive Cave Hill cemetery, which is so big it has a lake with a fountain, ducks and swans. Colonel Sanders is buried there, but we missed his gravesite. We moved on, through a neighborhood of large houses, to nearby Cherokee Park, “built” by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park and quite a few other urban parks, and we stopped for some homemade applesauce at a picnic table.

Apparently, Elizabeth found happiness at our picnic table.

Others biked in the opposite direction and came across blocks of burnt out buildings.

10.18.2008: St. Louis

Some of our group wanted to do the arch (there’s a kind of funicular that goes to the top), but Obama was speaking there, so the area was cordoned off. Natalie and Jenni went to the speech and said the vibe was wonderful, hopeful and optimistic, with women noisily correcting him every time he said, “IF I become president,” with cries of “WHEN, WHEN!” People were carrying “Republicans for Obama” signs.

I rode southwest in search of a museum on the edge of town that ended up being too far. I passed a day-old bakery with a suggestion to “Get your buns in here!”

A yard with a dead plushie.

The central plaza reminds me of Karl-Marx-Allee in the former East Berlin. The civic buildings are remarkably similar — the architecture of control, as some would describe it, has a grammar that transcends ideologies.

This was only a small portion of this allee. If one turned around, one would see the Arch at the end of the boulevard, a piece of massive sculpture that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Soviet Union. None of this shock and awe takes away from the magnificence of the arch or these government buildings, the feeling that we can only surrender in the face of such awe-inspiring solidity, power and symbolism. I’m getting carried away.

A few of us ride through the empty center of town to the Grand Center arts district where the venue is located. We pass block after block of vacant office buildings and warehouses, beautiful buildings most of them. Steven comments, “At least they haven’t torn the buildings down and replaced them with ugly modern condos.” Some have signs on them that they are available for lease; others stand dark and empty. There is no traffic. It’s Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., and we can ride down the middle of the street in the center of town.

The venue, “The Fabulous Fox,” is a former movie palace in the Orientalist mash-up style — strangely skinny Buddhas sit in sconces, lions with glowing eyes flank the lobby, and an elephant looms way up high above the proscenium. It’s way over the top and massive, almost the size of Radio City Music Hall in New York City.

There are “inspirational” pinups above the urinals in the men’s room.

Jackson Browne and some of his band came to our show and we chatted a bit afterwards. A former girlfriend of his was close with Jenni when Jenni was a kid, so they reminisced. It turns out we have Spanish friends in common as Jackson passed through Zahara, the little town on the Atlantic where I’d spent a few summers. He was impressed that big TV personalities, who also summered there, like El Gran Wyoming, would sit around with the local townspeople and sing songs late into the night. There’s no pretension, which I also found incredibly refreshing.

10.16.2008: Omaha

Mauro, with some help from Jenni, organized a trip to an indoor go-kart racetrack here.
The next day, I bought a few CDs at Homer’s, the local indie record store in the Old Market district, and then rode across the river on the pedestrian bridge to Council Bluffs, Iowa, continuing downstream along a bike path past Harrah’s Casino. After passing through a bit of woodland, I came upon another casino with a fake riverboat attached. The bike path routed through the casino parking structure.

After going a few more miles, I wondered to myself if it might be possible to cross back and return on the western bank rather than retracing my steps. If there were another bridge somewhere I could do it. Most of the bridges, however, are for the interstates and bikes are strictly forbidden. My map says there is a bridge nearby, the South Omaha Bridge. I see workers building a clone bridge alongside the old bridge and others making a bike path that will be like an access road running parallel to the highway when it’s done. Right now, it’s too muddy to ride on.

10.15.2008: Milwaukee

It’s raining, so plans to bike down the lakefront to the new Calatrava designed museum are scuttled, but Lily has a school friend Andi here who has a better idea. A group of us pile into Andi’s car and head for the house of Andi’s friend Paul, who lives in a boat that was built on dry land. Paul, says Andi, is a bit of a historian of the rich local culture, so together they’ll take us on a mini tour.

Paul’s house was originally built by a man who accidentally sank an identical boat in the harbor. Out of remorse or sheer perversity, he decided to rebuild that boat, but on dry land, “where it could never sink again.”

a href=”http://martinzager.com/stories/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/byrne8.jpg”>

When he applied to the local city board to build this structure, the approval was denied, so he built it off site and surreptitiously dragged it up here one night. Needless to say, it’s since become a local landmark; Paul says it’s not uncommon for couples to consummate their relationship on the lawn. After that, a dentist lived in the boathouse and is the current landlord. Not your ordinary dentist — a wacky dentist/inventor who among other things invented a dog-powered chariot and a dental hovering device, consisting of a series of bungees and pulleys that would allow him to perform dentistry while suspended ABOVE the patient! I wish I could have seen this device. Can you imagine being this dentist’s patient? Paul said this dentist also performed a root canal on himself. “Those damn dentists are so expensive!” he was quoted as saying.

Paul said that when he was in 8th grade, he was hitchhiking and he got in a car and the driver was playing the song “Life During Wartime.” Young Paul found the music somewhat disturbing and told the driver he really didn’t like this kind of stuff and could he get out immediately. Of course, a year or so later, he changed his mind.

As in Pittsburgh, some parts of town that were deemed not worth “saving” in the urban renewal schemes in the 60s and 70s are now the neighborhoods that are the most full of life, the ones that are coming back in some fashion. Where Andi lives, there’s a food co-op that only sells organic and local foods, artists studios, and a Polish social club whose traditional mission was to provide gymnasiums for the youth of various cities. This one still has a gymnasium attached. Nearby is a tiny herring factory and downtown there are still big sausage works. The breweries that once dominated this town used to build little taverns on every corner, to feed and lubricate their workers. Some of these remain, but not very many.

We head over to the ghetto, to Satin Doll’s Lounge, run by Doll — Minette D. Wilson — a former dancer with Duke Ellington and others. She wasn’t going to let us in at first, as someone across the street had called her and said, “There’s a white man taking a picture outside.” That was me.

She did let us in, however, and we had a round of drinks while Paul caught up with her. Someone had poisoned her dog, which was not good news. The room was filled with Christmas decorations, faded photos of Doll with Duke and some more recent soul singers, stuffed animals and Milwaukee police patches. One door was labeled “sleeping room” which we guessed must be a place where customers who were too drunk to get home could sleep it off. Paul claimed that I was a gun freak, so Doll pulled a .38 revolver from under the bar and we passed it around. She removed the bullets before handing it to me.

Paul explained that Milwaukee experienced one of the last waves of Black migration from the South. And therefore, those who came only experienced about 20 or so years of the city’s industrial heyday. That’s not long enough for a second generation to get a good foothold. The 1st generation of newcomers are often just surviving and it’s their kids who more easily navigate their way into the workforce and build new neighborhoods. But just before this might have happened, Milwaukee, like a lot of other industrial cities in the US, went into a decline. The folks in this part of town were discriminated against and had little recourse or resources to enable them to rise. It became a welfare zone, which it still is to a large extent.