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

[User22]

I still don't see the point to this after reading it twice. Supporting another Institubes group doesn't support Alizee. And Alizee's relationship with Institubes is dwindling anyway.

If Alizee wants to come to the US then she will. She shouldn't be worried about flopping in the US because all those Youtube Junkies that watch her videos would support her and she'd most likely make headlines just like she did back in 2000 in France.

So yeah, I don't see this as a good opportunity to support Alizee.

[Scruffydog777]

I think the plan has merit, but it would have to have about dozen Alizee fans there to be affective. Three or four wouldn't make much of an impression and the dozen or so who did go would need to be seated near the front to get noticed.

What good will it do, I'm not sure. The tour is only about 12 days long with the show in NYC being on the third day so it's not like they could say after seeing a bunch of Alizee fans there "Hey let's get Alizee on the phone and get her over here." There just wouldn't be enough time for that and I'm sure that's not FandeAlifee's intention. I think he just wants their tour to do very well. So well that hopefully they'll schedule another tour here in the near future and if we get them to realize there's a bunch of Alizee fans here, well hopefully next time they'll make sure they bring her along.

There's too few of us and we're too spread out to try and think we could do much in the way of having an affect on CM's tour. It will have to do well on it's own merit. I think it would be too much to ask several people from this forum to show up for a few concerts in different cities. Not many if any people here have the travel capabilities I do, but even I who am scheduled to work the night of the NY show would probably have to give up 10 hours pay to attend. So the best I think we could do is make a good showing in New York and give them the impression that there is a noticable Alizee fan base here that if they come back is worth trying to tap into.

One thing we can do in the mean time is go to CM's myspace page and make a comment asking why Alizee isn't going to be with them on this tour. That's something I will do later on today.

http://www.myspace.com/chateaumarmont

[User22]

I'm glad someone else see's it the way I do. And why go to their concerts when we can save up money for when Alizee DOES come to the US or even has a tour in France or Mexico in 2013 after the rumored pop album release in 2012...

But yeah...

[babyblue558]

Originally Posted by Aaronius31

I'm glad someone else see's it the way I do. And why go to their concerts when we can save up money for when Alizee DOES come to the US or even has a tour in France or Mexico in 2013 after the rumored pop album release in 2012...

But yeah...

Agree with Aaron. As far as I see it, Alizée's partnership with Institubes is most likely over (no biggie, she'll find somewhere else I'm certain) but after the extremely poor sales of UEDS it would be a bad commercial decision for Institubes to do another collaboration with Alizée. Nevertheless, even if she DID stay with Institubes for another album, there are far better things Alizée fans who are prepared to take time or spend money to help her career could do than promoting / attending a concert of another Institubes artist.

[User22]

Originally Posted by babyblue558

Agree with Aaron. As far as I see it, Alizée's partnership with Institubes is most likely over (no biggie, she'll find somewhere else I'm certain) but after the extremely poor sales of UEDS it would be a bad commercial decision for Institubes to do another collaboration with Alizée. Nevertheless, even if she DID stay with Institubes for another album, there are far better things Alizée fans who are prepared to take time or spend money to help her career could do than promoting / attending a concert of another Institubes artist.

Thanks for putting my thoughts into words, cause that is what I was thinking but didn't know what to say.

And yeah, FanDeAlifee, there is a super massive probability that Alizee's next album won't be with Institubes. I could almost guarantee she won't side with Institubes again, let alone Institubes wanting to side with her lol.

[lefty12357]

If you want to support the idea of French music groups coming to the USA and having success, then attending CM's shows might be a good thing. The more success French artists have, the more encouraging it may be to Alizée to one day come here. But it is CM's show and not Alizée's, so I think a person should respect that. However it wouldn't hurt to draw some attention to her as long as it doesn't disrupt CM's gig.

[Ben]

Originally Posted by lefty12357

If you want to support the idea of French music groups coming to the USA and having success, then attending CM's shows might be a good thing. The more success French artists have, the more encouraging it may be to Alizée to one day come here. But it is CM's show and not Alizée's, so I think a person should respect that. However it wouldn't hurt to draw some attention to her as long as it doesn't disrupt CM's gig.

Agreed. Not gonna go guns blazing, but I'm curious to see Chateau Marrmont and it should be fun. So I'll be there. And if the subject of Alizee comes up, bonus.

Speaking more generally, my feeling now is that any promotional efforts aren't going to do much until Alizee herself starts taking an active role, and I'm not sure she has any desire to. Mexico was practically handed on a silver platter, and even that only resulted in a few concerts. Sorry if this offends anyone, feel free to disagree, but it's why I'm sitting on the sidelines until we see more activity from Alizee herself.

[Scruffydog777]

Originally Posted by Ben

Agreed. Not gonna go guns blazing, but I'm curious to see Chateau Marrmont and it should be fun. So I'll be there. And if the subject of Alizee comes up, bonus.

Speaking more generally, my feeling now is that any promotional efforts aren't going to do much until Alizee herself starts taking an active role, and I'm not sure she has any desire to. Mexico was practically handed on a silver platter, and even that only resulted in a few concerts. Sorry if this offends anyone, feel free to disagree, but it's why I'm sitting on the sidelines until we see more activity from Alizee herself.

I agree with Ben here as far as promotional efforts and I've been probably the most hard core case of promoting her. We need some help from Alizée. We can't do it on our own.

[Iwillmeether]

Originally Posted by FanDeAliFee

Alizée strike force

You've got my attention.

I'd go but it's kinda hard for a 17 year-old to fly several states over for a couple days.