FraKctured

on the speakers: Finger Eleven, "First Time"on the page: "Water Music" -- Mungo Parks avoids disembowelment and beds the immense ocean of Fatima.

hmmmmmmm.... well, one of our sadder nights in my humble opinion. Though not everyone else agrees. Both Richard Chadwick, our manager, and Laurie Small, our tour manager, said they loved the show. And the audience seemed to love it as well. However, I found it very flat.I also find it quite unfocused from the very first note. I kept finding the 'fear of losing my way' creeping in throughout the whole show. Which is bizarre because I do know the material quite well. But the fear of losing it was very present. I didn't lose it, but it doesn't seem to really matter. Because if you lose it... well, then you lose it -- and somehow that kicks you into the present. But, if you just trundle along in fear of losing it, then you never, ever make it into the present. Am I suggesting that it is better to go ahead and make grievous playing errors on-stage rather then play very well but be racked with fear? Yes, I guess I am.The audience was very, very, very, very quiet tonight. Which is fine, and expected here in Japan. It is no surprise to me, at all. However, sometimes it is hard when you rock the house with terrifying and powerful chord slashes and then you hear nothing coming back. The one place where this really worked well, tonight, was at the end of Thrush. There was complete silence for quite a while. This is wonderful to stand in front of. To just sit together in this warm bath of silence. With, not even so much as one small voice reaching over to pull out the creme rinse.Oyster Soup was good. We have been trying this one in the encore slot for a change, and it has really effected the energy within the piece. It has slowed it's inner tempo a bit and is a bit heavier, as well. I like it like that -- slow.

I did discover something interesting tonight. Josh, our soundman is as much inside the performance as we are. He is in the audience, as well, so he can have a perspective about the audience that we can't, but he is still inside the performance. And this means that he is just as lacking in an impartial perspective on the performance as the musicians are.

We did redeem ourselves after the show by playing air hockey at the video arcade next door. It was so intense that my hands and shoulders are sore. That wasn't quite enough for Pat and Bill. They decided that they need to some serious killing to fully purge themselves. So, they pickup up uzis and blasted away snipers for about 20 minutes.

A quote from Susan Sarandon from the Japan Times, that throws a curve ball at some of my romantic musical convictions: "It's always better to play Captain Hook than Peter Pan. The burden of sincerity is really a heavy one, so it's always much more fun to play bad people. The trick of it is to understand they don't think they're bad."One thing that's always intrigued me about the film that Tim Robbins made with her and Sean Penn, "Dead Man Walking," was in regard to the death penalty. In a clear way, this film was very much an anti-death penalty statement. However, Sean Penn's character's redemption came directly from his being sentenced to death.