The Fringe Festival is fringe, alright. Everywhere we go is strangeness. The High street looks like a Fellini movie; weird clowns and street performers dance down the sidewalk, surrounded by thick crowds of cheering onlookers. Club kids, dance troupes and musicians line the streets, bumping into each other, smoking, yelling, laughing and drinking.
Of course, Edinburgh is beautiful in August, the Fringe events take place under a canopy of racing clouds. The resulting sunbreaks add a sweetness, a group high. It is a festival after all.
Billy and I lack the let’s-do-what-everybody-else-is-doing-that-looks-fun gene, however, so we escape to our flat with the mountain view. Maybe they aren’t mountains; I bet there’s a Scottish word for what they are. They look like tilted mesas…green, ascending meadows.
To set up house, we walk to Sainsbury’s (pronounced “Sains-breeze”). I think our new landlord gave us directions, but we haven’t been able to understand a single word he’s said so far. Which is unfortunate, ’cause he seems to have a lot to say; we’ve been nodding and smiling for a couple days now. So we find Sainsbury’s on our own and even discover a short-cut through the park so we can stop and feed ducks on the way (ducks are important).
We feel weird…more than jet lag, which only feels like a knife in the eyeballs. This is different, like we’re shaken dice tossed and left to land where they will. We figure it’s because we never just go to a place and know where we are, like most people. Instead, we bounce around a whole lot first (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island), we stay in motels, we visit friends and family, places we used to love, places we used to live, we see rain, sun, heat and cold, fly, drive, drive, fly, sleep, don’t sleep, eat, go hungry, place children and snakes here, a dog there, another dog there, music playing the entire time…when it all stops, we aren’t quite sure where we ended up. We look around for clues–we’ve gotta learn to go native quickly in order to survive. That’s it: we feel like aliens.
It doesn’t matter, of course, ’cause we have work to do. I’ve lost my second Mudrock guitar to airline screw-ups, but this one is (thankfully) delivered in time for the show. The venue for Paradoxical Undressing’s Fringe debut is, as Billy puts it, “a dungeon of a basement of a dive”; the perfect setting for the stories I’m telling.
I decide that I’ll be brave and I won’t drink, even though I’m nervous; a decision made less impressive by the fact that no one offers me a drink and I don’t have any money to buy one. But I find it relatively easy to stay focused, given that the crowd is right there with me, laughing (and crying) and taking pictures and sending warm waves in my direction. Really warm ones; it’s about a thousand degrees in there by the end of the show.
We are all thoroughly wrung out.
50FOOTWAVE
books
Kristin Hersh
Paradoxical Undressing
Throwing Muses
The show was fantastic, I would have bought you a drink!
These city mountains are extinct volcanoes and ancient lava flows, eroded and bashed about by glaciers… makes for an interesting landscape
I’m proud you didn’t drink.
hiding behind walls is always fantastic but i find that regiments are not, despite the necklaces, and a dungeon with steep steps cannot disguise daily dystopia? but kristin i love you and you are some sort of florence nightengale in the deep deep dungeon of dread and drudge dugheep shackles and shake…oh and perhaps you were viewig arthur’s seat…but maybe you weren’t…but that is a place of squally magic and mystical fortes when you reach the top after daddylonglegs rain, clearing to a clear moon…hmmm.yes.indeed with bourbon dashes
Wish I was there!
Thank you for a wonderful evening last night. I feel extremely privileged to have caught your show and share some of your experiences. I should have bought you a drink
This is belated, but just to say that the reading/concert at the Cabaret Voltaire was fabulous. Kristin, your prose style is exquisite. Each sharp, clarifying turn of phrase falls into place, bestowing its subject with an emotionally true, and truly emotional, blend of humour, melancholy and richly visualised recollection. As an essay on the nature of music (making it, hearing it, living with it), ‘Paradoxical Undressing’ gets closer, I believe, to the heart of the experience than any amount of music journalism – and in much finer forms of expression! I’ve long loved your songs and concerts (the London Barbican gig a few years ago was such a memorable night), but I’m now a bigger fan than ever.
Hope the rest of the shows have gone well. I can’t help feeling that you should have been promoted as part of the Edinburgh Literary Festival, too. I can’t wait to get hold of the book…
Love,
Jamesy
A captivating show, I could have listened all night, despite the chilly chamber. Missed you and Billy DJing at the Voodoo Rooms because that bam Irvine Welsh was hogging the decks too long (hee hee). Was a great night. Hope to see you both back. thank you – S
Pingback: Paradoxical Undressing < Technicalities
I came to see Paradoxical Undressing on the 17th – my first night at the Fringe – and can honestly say that it made the trip for me. I identified with some of the material from your script, and it worked on so many levels to hear it from you as spoken word AND songs. You would have had sooo many drinks bought for you if you’d asked!! Thank you. Ax