Mary Rose Cook

Work on tip top secret project, J’Adore, begins this weekend.

The important things are those that happen between the lines. I can write the most tangible descriptions, but you will not dream of them, you will not reminisce, because you don’t know all the details.

Sunday

Matthew and I sat in Victoria station and ate two Krispy Kreme doughnuts each.

Three hours later, Theresa, looking cooel in her little lace-ups and red anorak, met Matthew and I at Schodenfeld airport. We took a cold walk to the underground railway and then videoed each other as we went back into the centre of Berlin.

We arrived at Theresa’s beautiful apartment in Latte-Machiatto-land and hung out and drank Yorkshire tea in the kitchen, off-white fridge buzzing in the corner. I got Theresa to talk to the camera about the venues we would be playing at.

Monday

Matthew and Theresa set off early in the morning, he to interview a prominent architect about shrinking cities, she to her Musicology tutorials at Uni.

I struggled out of bed at noon and then, without map, without directions, without any kind of a grasp of ze Deutsch, I set off to meet Theresa at the Perkammonmuseum. I asked my way there, making progress street by street, speaking to nice couples and sour-faced women, handsome boys and American tourists.

By some miracle, I arrived on time and hugged Theresa in gladness. We walked through the streets, passing huge, ruined buildings being renovated, beach-hut coloured apartment blocks. We walked on broken-up flint pavements and granite paving, went into shops that subsist on disposable incomes and grocers full of old women. We ate vaffles and swung on swings near a graffiti wall Theresa likes and then went back home and sat on the sofa.

The first gig was at A, a sort of tavern with huge windows that looked out onto quiet streets. Matthew and I met some of Theresa’s friends - Olga, Hauden, Andreas, his housemate Andrea - and we talked about the art scene and short films and plagiarism and squats.

I played first, each song bookended with muted applause and successively quieter “Danke”s. Theresa then came on and played a wonderful set, complete with demonic, crawling cat robot, toy guitar riffs and alternately ebullient and mournful video projections.

We got very drunk and finally took a cab home at three a.m.

Tuesday

The three of us took a tour of posh boutiques, ate delicious falafel in floury pancakes at a Turkish place, drank coffee and then, in a highly caffeinated haze, we rushed out onto the street, Theresa saved me from getting hit by a tram, we flagged a taxi, picked up the car and the Golden Disko Ship music stuff, filmed a Ronin-esque journey across Berlin out of the front of the car, picked up the beamer (projector) and arrived at venue two.

The place was a concrete shell with a lamp-post in the centre of the room (complete with yellow bin), a kiosk for beer, a stage (the front representing a window looking into a house). Sauvern took Theresa and I through our sound-checks and then we drank beer and composed impromptu songs on the piano. Matt and I discussed the fact that we had begun to speak English like foreigners. Apostrophes had disappeared from our words and sentences. Further, we were veering towards German - our “yeah”s had become “ja”s, “hello”s “hallo”s, “pardon”s “was”es

I played first and bellowed my way through the set. People seemed to enjoy it and when I came off stage, I stood in the corner of the room and hung my head as I withstood a minute’s worth of applause and embarrassment. It struck me that the expression I wear when singing is much the same as the one I wear when kissing.

Theresa suffered through numerous equipment malfunctions and sound problems. She weathered it, though, and for the first time the sadness of her songs came through live.

For the rest of the evening, we all stood around and talked and drank beer. Theresa and I played an improvised duet on the piano that stood behind her video projection screen on the stage.

Then we packed up and left.

Wednesday

A lovely, lazy day. Matthew went to the airport and Theresa and I went to a little cafe in Latte-Machiatto land and ate waffles and ice-cream as Jose Gonzalez played in the background.

We drove to the Soviet monument - a park of statues and granite - and stood on the steps of the main building. The cold bit at our noses and cheeks. It started to rain, and we stood there in the orange, unheated glow of the stone building.

We ate a Bolivian supper, spent the evening jamming in a rehearsal room and then went home.

Thursday

Theresa lent me her Sonic Youth “Confusion is Sex” t-shirt. We ate breakfast. We went to the airport.

I keep on looking up at my iPhone and smiling, the way you look up from a book and smile as you read next to your lover.

Sunset Rubdown were started by Spencer Krug, more famous for his less good band, Wolf Parade.

Sunset Rubdown’s second record, Shut Up I Am Dreaming, is a wonderful collection of sad songs that have unexpected melody falls that rip your heart out. The most upsetting is where, on The Empty Threats Of Little Lord, Krug sings, “You snake,” with such venom that you can hear the curl of his lip. That part of the song affects me so much that I have been, unsuccessfully, trying to work out who I am associating it with.

Maybe I am thinking of myself.

I live in London now, but I used to live in Leeds. When I was there, I was heavily involved with a volunteer-run social centre called The Common Place. I helped with a number of things there, and one of the events we did was a club night called Harder Faster Louder. The idea was to have an evening where DJs only played the most brutal music, but from a mix of genres: hard-core, death metal, breakcore, dark d&b, gabba, grind and noise.

I had really high expectations, because brutal music seems one of the few genre-spanning genres. Many people into death metal also like breakcore. Many people into gabba also like hard-core.

Hardly anyone came. And I’ve always hoped that someone else would give it a go and maybe do it better than us and make it work.

I always knew music was better, and now I know why.

When it is live, as it should be, it is a performance. Anything can happen when I am on stage. I might find some new, more beautiful, sadder melody to sing; my laptop might explode; I might be see my own thought in the face of someone in the audience; I might sing louder and change the whole character of the song; I might finally realise what I’m singing about.

Films are different. The artist creates the art, distributes it, and then it is static. That is fine, but I find it less compelling. The default mode for music is to have some sort of live, unpredictable interaction with the audience, whereas director Q&As just don’t happen very much.

However, Tracy + The Plastics are slightly different. They are a band that blend live music with live video. Wynne Greenwood, playing Tracy, stands on stage and sings in front of a projected video that shows her acting out the parts of her band mates, Nikki (keyboards) and Cola (drums). The interesting part is that Greenwood puts pauses in her videos and sections where she converses or even argues with her bandmates.

So, what Greenwood has achieved is live, unpredictable film:

I didn’t upgrade my MacBook Pro to 10.5 until I got home from the Berlin tour. (It would have been a shame if the Live/Leopard mix had made my computer explode on stage.)

I finally inserted the DVD and got cracking last night. I selected the upgrade option, some things whizzed, the computer restarted, the desktop appeared, and then everything slowed the fuck down.

Opening a new Finder window took thirty seconds. Launching TextMate took five minutes.

The solution was to do a clean install, then restore my files from a backup.

I have no idea what screwed the upgrade - I had done a clean install of 10.4 relatively recently, I’m not some freakfuck haxie fucktard and my setup and configuration is exactly the same as it was when I was on Tiger.

For reference, I installed on a first generation 15” MacBook Pro w/ 2GB RAM which had the following applications on it: Transmit, TextMate, Quicksilver, Coda, eMusic Download Manager, Firefox, Live 6.0, GraphicConverter, PodWorks, YourSQL, iTerm, Ruby, Rails, MySQL and Tascam US-122 audio/MIDI interface drivers.

Theresa, the lovelz ladz who is putting Matt and I up in Berlin and acting as our tour guide, advised me that Germans are sick of people sazing Ich Bin Ein Berliner because thez’ve heard it a lot before.

We are having lots of fun in Germanz. Zesterdaz, I went to meet Theresa after she had finished Uni. Unfortunatelz, Matt took the map so I had to ask mz waz there. I said a lot of “Etschooldigong”, followed bz mz two-second guide proceeding to conduct matters entirelz in English.

Must go to breakfast with Theresa-resz and Mattieu.

Contact

mary@maryrosecook.com

Masks Elsewhere

Art

They say that you can judge a person by the contents of their bookshelves. Well, here is a very small selection of mine:

If you like even one of these bands, check them all out: Heavens To Betsy, Love Lost But Not Forgotten, Tracy + The Plastics, Maximillian Colby, Xiu Xiu, Dilute, The Fakes, Huggy Bear, The Need, Sweep The Leg Johnny, The Paper Chase, Circle Takes The Square, Converge, Sextional, Will Haven.

The same might not be true for these books: Love And Death And Other Disasters, The Secret History, V For Vendetta, Stirfry, Tipping The Velvet, Frog And Toad, 1984, Gifts Of The Body, The Eighteenth Emergency, Goodbye To Berlin, Rotary Spokes, Potential, The Scarecrows, The Lost Garden.

Or these films: Heat, When Night Is Falling, Goodfellas, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Swingers, Bound, The Thin Red Line, Go Fish, The Insider, L’Auberge Espagnole, Betrayal, Sneakers, Malcolm X.

Technology

Hosting: TextDrive. A bit flaky when it comes to uptime. Good for Rails, but one can’t help feeling that the Official Rails Host should be able to make it a bit easier to deploy your application.

Diary software: custom Ruby on Rails application written in a couple of days.

Database: MySQL.

Development tools: TextMate (code editor), YourSQL (desktop SQL client), iTunes (noise), Transmit (file transfer client).