October 2nd, 1997 – Montreal

02009-10-02 | Touring

TOUR REPORT
Sound check at 2pm. Show at 8:30pm. Le Spectrum is a Club, not a theater, and the management has left space in front of the stage for dancing. Within the span of 4 songs people start dancing. The atmosphere is fantastic and I can see that the whole band is getting caught up in the great mood of the moment. The second set is happy, and exuberant, and the band gets as much joy from watching the smiling, dancing, standing, clapping audience, as they are getting from our music. A performance is a closed feedback loop. Undoubtably one of the highlights of the tour.

Thirty Years Ago

02008-09-06 | Ottmar, Travel

File under “Wanderjahre”:

Thirty years ago I was on Phuket island in Thailand. On the Trans-Siberian train in April of 1978 I had met a few young fellow travelers, an Englishman on the way to India, a Swede on his way to Thailand. We called ourselves the Semolina Club, because for vegetarians the only food options on the train were semolina gruel, peas and the occassional potatoe, baked, wrapped in newspaper and offered for sale in buckets in railway stations by old ladies. The train would stop for a few minutes and we would jump out and buy potatoes. Yes, I did sell a pair of jeans to a waiter in the train’s restaurant car. And we drank vodka with soldiers on the train.

I arrived in Japan at end of cherry blossom season. In Japan I got around by hitch-hiking, and while hitch-hiking is something the Japanese did not do themselves, they tolerated foreigners doing it and in fact it was very easy to get rides as people wanted to practice their English. Three weeks later I flew to Taipei, where I stayed for a month studying Tai-Chi. In July I traveled to Hongkong, which I loved, and in August to Bangkok, where I ran into the Swede from the Trans-Siberian train, heard about the beautiful Phuket island, and took a bus South. At the time Phuket had one resort hotel (((must be hundreds now!))), but I rented a hut about 100 feet from the beach, for $1.50 per night. I stayed for a month.

Related entries: Rockgarden in Japan, Papaya in India, Traveling in Thailand, Bombay and Goa, Eating on the Train

Bike or Mule

02008-08-21 | Bicycle, Touring

This morning I discovered that the rear tire of my bike had deflated, walked the bike back up the hill to my house and drove. When Jon pulled his bike out of the shed he keeps it in, he discovered that he too had a flat rear tire… What are the odds? Jon says that as he was opening the door, he thought how weird it would be if his bike had a flat tire as well…

We met for breakfast and saw this very cool cargo bike:

.

dave commented:
Well, it does have 8 speeds. You could put your guitar in front and pedal to local shows.

Link to Dutch manufacturer and link to U.S. dealer

From an earlier post:

Ottmar Liebert » Blog Archive » Saturday Music One-Two
In a few years you might just find me on a horse or bicycle, with a guitar and laptop strapped to my back, riding from gig to gig. Or, maybe this itinerant mariachi with international connections should use a mule-drawn cart…

WWW : Books : Oral Communication

02008-08-03 | Internet, Musings, Reading

If the world wide web is global and books are cosmopolitan, storytelling and oral communication are local. (I am paraphrasing David Abram)

It seems to me that the third option, story-telling, is vastly different from the first two.
In all three instances molecules are moved and energy is transferred, but only the last one exchanges energy directly between the content-creator and the listener/receiver. Breath is expelled, air is shaped and propelled and received by ears and interpreted. Pheromones are exchanged, scents are traded and we can get a feel for the other person that is more than the sum of their talk. The story is not contained in words alone, it is the entire presence of the speaker.

Without the support of a local engagement, that is to say oral communication and person-to-person(s) conversation, the other two become a card house, lacking a real foundation.