POLL: Chateau Marrmont US/Canada tour

[FanDeAliFee]

I will soon send the following PM to all our AAm leaders.

Hello AAm leaders,

It has been ages since I wrote you as a group. I would bring your attention to a very special opportunity to possibly impact the career of Alizée significantly. You may decide to do nothing about it, but I believe it would be a grave error not to think and talk about it first.

I refer of course to the tour of the US and Canada which Chateau Marmont. Alizée's Institubes associates and UEdS collaborators, will make next month, March 2011.

I have created a discussion thread with a poll about this issue. I hope you will vote and comment there, along with our general membership.

Long ago, I asserted that the foreign language issue is the biggest barrier which Alizée must overcome to find success in the United States. To this end, I advocated building fan groups within extant francophone and francophile groups in the US. I began by offering a plan ten months ago.

As far as I know, nothing like what I had suggested was attempted. But what if it had been undertaken and now there were dozens of Alizée fans in New York City who knew and liked one another, on the eve of a CM gig there?

It is no surprise to me that among the cities CM will tour, if only for a day. is New York City. Wouldn't it have been great if an extant Alizée cadre there might now be planning a "meetup" at the CM show which they advertise to the three thousand meetup group members in NYC? These hypothetical Alizée partisans could have shown up en masse at the CM show, each wearing an Alizée teeshirt!

In NYC, CM will be playing at an important venue, Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan's East Village. Admission for their Friday 11 March 8PM show is $12, and is detailed here:

But now, even without an Alizée "strike force" in place, surely anyone in metro New York can still attend the show and be joined by many others in the BosWash corridor. who can take Friday off to attend, returning home on Saturday.

At the least. surely Ben, the overall leader of AAm, should attend the show - and even go beyond to extend CM the hometown hospitality he is in a great position to offer them. How many times will a band which just made an album with Alizée - whose very story is set in New York City - actually visit the city for a gig?

Yes, I know CM will not be selling UEdS, nor anything else to do with Alizée. But they and she are not joined at the hip the way Debbie Harry and Blondie were a quarter century ago. It was no affront to CM for Alizée to perform in Corsica and Israel last year with neither CM nor UEdS songs. Neither is CM's US tour any insult to Alizée today.

But, as far as I know, this is the first US tour by ANY group from Institubes - and consists of Alizée's INTIMATE collaborators at that! It is the closest thing to a live US performance by Alizée to date. If it flops, it could also be the last of its kind.

Needless to say, what might be attempted at the New York City show can also be attempted in the other tour cities on a smaller scale.

1. Should AAm care that CM will tour the US and Canada next month?

I say yes!

2. Should AAm try to do all it can to help the tour succeed?

I say yes again!

3. Is AAm competent enough to help?

This is the big question in my mind. To be frank, I found the boast in last year's Open Letter to Alizée rather arrogant. because it presumed our efficacy. Later, Scruffy's willingness to spend many thousands of his own dollars on a radio ad campaign at least proved the sincere and generous commitment of ONE of us,

CM is touring for their own reasons - music is how they earn their bread after all. But by accident, the visit also challenges our ability to help an Institubes act on our home turf. Will we swing at this pitch, and if so, can we hit it?

If AAm wants to get behind the CM tour, it must act very soon. There should be a tweet from our LONG-dormant Twitter account. It would hardly hurt to also e-mail all AAm registrants, just as we did for the Xmas shopping season. If people who live in tour cities can lodge fellow AAm visitors from out of town overnight for free, more of the latter could attend the shows. Think about what we would do if Alizée herself were visiting. This can be our chance to debug such schemes by carrying them out.

P.S. The following would make a great visit gift for presentation to CM in NYC! It is unbreakable, almost zero volume and personalized. Best of all, Institubes might indeed hang it on its office walls, rather than throw it into a warehouse!

Grand Central Subway Sign