WELCOME TO YES CITY

The End of The End of the Beginning of the Now(Seattle to LA)

2010-03-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Portland, Oregon 2/22/10

I’m sleeping in the Tube Bar while the guys eat happy hour snacks and watch Zombieland. I’m walking down Couch street to find a coffee and an apple. I’m trying to put on make-up in a graffti-stained bathroom. I’m at the back of Backspace in Portland, having just come from Pete and Frank’s house on Bellevue Court East in Seattle. We got in to Seattle at around 9, got a car and drove to Franks house. The highways wind and the Space Needle helps to illuminate the city on the bay, the hills and the lights on ridge. Ferns line the roads and I feel far away. I have a home made lemonade with Vodka when I walk into Frank’s. Pete is blasting some serious soul in his music room lined with records. It’s Little Royal yelpin away, and it’s great. The Pepper Rabbit guys are there and they’re sweet as hell and I’m excited for our week together. We get up late the next morning, though I have so much on my mind these days I can’t sleep well, and it’s starting to show in my face and my pants are loose and I guess it’s just part of it.

We walk to the sound garden in a park that looks out over the water and the houses on the other side and in the far distance, the dormant volcano of Mount Renier. Its beautiful here, the light is golden and though the sound towers are closed off we still get a good hike in up the hill. We hit up a music shop and then home for a while as Pete shows me some amazing music; Bobby Gentry, James Carr, Sammi Smith’s Saunder’s Ferry Lane.

After the show we head back for some more lemonade drinks, Frank picks up some baking ingredients and I make cookies. Pete finds me in the yellow kitchen and he’s really supportive of us too and it means a lot. I get so tired I crawl onto the floor of Frank and Pete’s room and in the morning Am finds me there and lets me get in the bed with him and Matt. I get another hour scrunched up on my piece of the mattress, and then go up the street to get some coffee. It’s rare to get a minute alone. I call my mom. I’m starting to feel that slight homesick feeling and it’s heightened when I find a picture of my old apartment in my phone. I can’t go back there, its gone. The next picture on the phone is of a plant a friend gave me. It started as one of three, then number two died, but the last one stuck around a whole two years in it’s tiny plastic pot with the barcode sticker on the back.

We get ready to go Portland and I call Brian to check in about the Dr. Dog dates and get the happy reply that everyone is down and we’re doing the west coast leg of their tour with them, which falls right around our Morning Becomes Eclectic performance. It means I get to go out west with the band and I’m so happy and I’m so happy to wander around strange new places with them and hang out with Scott and the Dr Dog crew and my new friend Chris in Deer Tick who got a record at our show in Providence the other week. Frank joined us on this tour and he’s a doll and an amazing tour mamma and I’m blessed to be here with everyone. I know it’s corny to ramble on in this way but at a certain point how could I not.

4/2, 2010 – 35,000ft in the air, heading home from LA

Listening to a couple of demos and all of Bobbie Gentry

We start driving after Portland, spend a few very comfortable hours in a Comfort Inn outside Eugene and get back on the road. We see the state of Oregon in the crystal blush of day and its breathtaking as the light skips through the clouds and falls in and around the pockets of hills, casting itself over old cars, sheep and roadside homes. We get in to SF and drive over the Bay Bridge, into the city past the familiar Coca Cola neon sign and the lights of the houses on the hill ahead. We play an alright show in SF and Kyle comes and Matt and Jerimiah and we go home after the show and I pass out pretty much right away. I’m exhausted and feel worn thin and wonder how I’ll recover.

We have a day off the next day, and though I’m moody, I decide that I can have a bad mood day, I’ve been surprisingly upbeat most of the time, and we hang out in the morning, walk to whole foods with J and then pick up Tim and his friend and head to Muir Woods. Though I had been there once about 4 years ago with Tracy I am still overwhelmed and restored by it’s beauty and magic. Its funny to think when I was there with Tracy, in my senior year of school, I was just learning the guitar, just putting together songs. I was writing about Death Valley, going to a show at the Great American Music Hall where I’ll play in April and meeting friends on the street, and probably listening to Little Wings, Kyle’s amazing band.

Driving home out of Muir woods in the dusk we pass daring bikers, flying around steep curves down into the green hills we leave behind for the city. As we take a sharp corner I look back and see white dove sitting in bush. As we cross the bridge back into the city it’s still light enough to see the ink white ship in the port, with its red cross, turn blue in the evening light. We go back to Jerimiah and Matt’s house and make a pretty sad dinner; the cookies fall into the oven, we use string cheese for nachos, but the broccoli and rice are good. I have a long helpful talk with Matt about relationships and love, which I’m starting to think may actually easier than everyone has scared us into believing. I think about how easy it can be if you live it day to day, just choose that, like a friendship, like life on the road. I think I can do that. I wake up in the morning and Am is up early and Matt goes to work and I think how sometimes I want to rise early and go to a regular job and see the people in the morning hours and the light and smells of a new day I used to know so well.

We mess up and drive the long way, missing the scenic route from San Francisco to LA. We stop at the Jack Rabbit Café off 41, right where James Dean died. We go in to use the bathrooms and there are big juicy hamburgers coming out of the kitchen and homemade berry crisp in a blue metal tin and I wish we had stopped here to eat instead of eating another water lettuce pickle banana pepper salad from Subway. A storm looks like its coming as we drive up and through steep sprawling green California hills. We pass miles and miles of what I think are orange groves, with pink white petals that fall to the dirt floor below and look like snow. As we pass one grove I see a single black crow sitting on a tree, staring out over the highway, the counterpart to my dove.

We get going and make it in to LA just in time for load in. Frank is there and the Pepper Rabbits, and Xander looks real nice in his blazer and khaki plants. The show does really well, a bunch of people are there, and are happy and I see Shawna and Audrey and Jesse and Sohrab and I feel good to be here. We go back to Xander’s who has a party at his place in Silver Lake and then back to Shawna’s. The next day we go to San Diego, its raining and I’m spent but somehow we have one of the best shows of tour and the band who plays with us offers to set up a show for us on or day off in LA during our tour in April. We get back to Xander’s late and I wake up early. I call Shawna to come get me and spend the hour reading the news and Edgar Cayce’s predictions for our future, which feel prescient and terrifying as the world crumbles under the stress of cracking fault lines from Chile to Japan. I like Los Angeles, I like the weather, but somehow this trip, I look out over its neon culture, its youth as a city, its augmented breasts, its cars, fixations with both health and extreme thinness, with antiquated ideas of Rock and Roll, with slick backed hair, with aruyvedic cures, with its fixed summer; I don’t understand the city’s multifarious and complex contradictions. I get a little worn wrapping my mind around the $8 raw dried seaweed crackers, the $8,000 purse and the desire for a holistic life led in your new Mercedes.

But aside from this, I do enjoy myself here, and I enjoy my friends and I appreciate the ease of living here, even if I can’t understand it. After Shawna comes to get me I go back to her place, Audrey picks me up and Galen takes the bus and meets us on the corner of Melrose and La Brea. He comes walking toward us and I hardly recognize him. He looks tanned, healthy, he speaks swiftly and clearly, and he is not the friend I first met a year ago in a series of misadventures as we house hopped all over the county.

We get in the car and drive to a thrift store. Am calls to say he and Tim are coming to meet us, and Audrey is on her way with Jesse. Digging through the jean racks I finally feel deep emotion, deep happiness about my friend who has become healthy again, deep privilege for my situation, the healed friendships I have been fortunate enough to hold on to. Being away like this, in a new place everyday, its so much stimulus, so much new information that I turn on autopilot. I can observe the beauty of the world around me like a voyeur in another’s life. But if I dare to take it in, I think I would perhaps lose my mind. When things slow down, and I stop for a moment to take in the scope of the experience, it moves me like man pushing against a boulder, and I don’t know whether I’m the boulder or the man.

We all head to Cantors deli and sit in the old cavernous restaurant with its deep beige benches and long white table. Piles of deserts stack up in display cases in the front and smells of borscht, smoked fish and thick cut fries waft over our table as the waiter brings pickles and saltines. We buy some wine after dinner and all sit by candle light in Shawna’s new apartment. Galen sleeps over, a hulking 6’5 he wears 5’2” Shawna’s sweatpants and as Shawna says, looks like a man who went to sleep a dwarf and woke up a giant. Shawna goes to work early in the morning and Galen and I wander to get coffee, berries and an orange before he heads back to South Central and the guys pick me up for our radio show. Walking home I ask Galen about his life there. He says he doesn’t have words for it yet, but maybe he will when he leaves. I asked him what it looks like and he says it used to be the Olympic village in 60’s but it’s turned to shit now and its just concrete, high metal fenced parking lots, and barbed wire everywhere.

He says there’ve been 70,000 deaths from gang violence in the last few years. He says if this were any other place armed forces would have been sent it. It’s an epidemic without a voice. He says for the people who live there, most are on welfare and not many people in his neighborhood work, and that so many people there are so used to such a low standard of living, and have no example of bettering their situation that stay more or less how they are. No one helps anyone, no one who can help anyway, the city leave this ghetto a ghetto, and he says how insane he thinks it is that people think they can be heroes by going to Haiti to bring relief to earthquake victims but won’t travel 5 miles to do good work of a similar magnitude. Its infuriating to see that there is a problem that no one sees and I ask if he knows what will happen or what will change. He says unfortunately with the economic downturn its just getting worse. He thinks eventually there will be riots again, as people forced to live in such extremes with no help will eventually rise up.

We walk on and laugh about the incredible circumstances under which we met and I have a feeling that we may know each other for a while to come. After the radio show we head back to Xanders, absolutely wiped and later I get a very good Tarot card reading from my favorite guy Michael, in his Canadian hockey jersey at the Bhodi Tree. In the morning I wake up past my alarm, its 5:30 am and I rush over to pick up the guys. Somehow, and it always seems miraculous, but we manage to get on our plane on time, which leaves me here, listening to my favorite new songs sung by Bobbie Gentry: ‘I Wouldn’t Be Surprised’ ‘Courtyard’ and one I don’t know the name of that goes like this:

Rain on my Sunday shoes, pick up the daily news looks like tomorrow’s blues but its better than not, call on the telephone, knowing that he’s not home, I put on the Rolling Stones, I can have me some fun, start up the flight of stairs, stand up and comb my hair, try not to change things more than you can withstand, get into something new, stay for a year or two, pick up the pieces where you think they might land, every day goes another day’s gone, hate to say so but I’m getting older day by day, take off all your clothes, stand up and wipe your nose, cry for your dad lost so long ago, jump on another plane, today its all the same, you can catch me in Boston cause that’s how it goes, I’m in apt 21, somebody have some fun, say how ya doin you old son of a gun, look at a photograph, it could make you laugh, all those changes, what have we done, la la la la la la . . . . Sit down and write a song, wait till the days grow long, wait for the hour when to blow me away , la la la la . . .

The Adventure Continues, The Kindness of Strangers

2010-02-19T08:31:00.000-08:00

2/19/10 Main Room of Earth House Collective, Indianapolis, Indiana

play list: If Not for You – Bob Dylan, Lust for Life – Girls, Let it Be – Ike and Tina Turner, My Heart – Neil Young, Downtown – Petula Clark, Strawberry Letter 23- Shuggie Otis

Brad is playing jazz and cleaning the kitchen. Tim is on his computer watching Saturday Night Lights, my hands are cracking, I’m wearing the same thing I’ve worn for three days, stripe shirt, red had, black jeans, and blue jean vest, flannel jacket. It’s my new favorite outfit so I don’t mind, but I smell like a carton of Camel Lights and I could use a shower. Am just woke up and came downstairs.

Three days ago, three days ago I think, ya, we pull up to The Earth House Collective, an old church converted into a non-profit organic art space. We had a long drive from Nashville and are tired already. We have to stop at a Guitar Center in a strip mall on 31 North to get drumsticks for Matt and to try to fix Am’s pedals. I am anxious and ready to go and somehow get the good idea to put on the least wintered shoes I own. We pull up to the church late but it’s laid back and doesn’t matter. We park the van in the back, turn it off, decide to pull it up front, turn it off, turn it on again. Nothing. We can’t get it on so we go play. It’s a beautiful church space, and sounds great, but there aren’t many folks there to hear it.

We get done, I’m cranky and Tim goes down to the van to try to start it up again. He stands out there for a good while, inside, a drunk knocks over a $600 dollar sculpture, and then offers to give the van a jump. But nothing really works and so we leave it alone and Doug says we can stay at his house. I feel a bad about crashing there. A man named Rudy who work’s at Marsh’s down the block has been staying on Doug’s couch and I don’t want the four of us cramping his space. Doug and Brad and their friends say they’re making Taco’s if we want in, no Burritos they say, and we say yes but I head to the store anyway for my own stuff. I run into Am halfway there and he walks with me the rest of the day. Rudy checks us out at the help center because it’s late and the other isles are closed. It’s around one and he gets off in an hour but we don’t introduce ourselves. We head back and the guys are cooking meat. We talk in the kitchen for a while about bands that have been through Indie before they were who they are now. I stay pretty quiet and prepare a taco for my band mates. They ask if we want to watch a movie in the sanctuary, we say yes, they choose Clue and we pull all the biggest pillows off the couches in the main room and head upstairs. I fall asleep early, we’re not really supposed to sleep in here but Doug says if we fall asleep there’s not much he can do, wink, ya know.

We wake up at 9 when the place opens, I make some toast in the kitchen in the basement, the guy opening gives me a free latte and I call AAA. Tim comes with me to the mechanic shop. He hangs out with the mechanic during dialysis. The guy is apparently in his sixties, looks 42 and served in Vietnam. So we have a busted fuel pump, and its gonna cost me, and I have to come back in the afternoon. A lady at the shop gives us a ride in her white Navigator and I come back feeling defeated and still tired. I mess around on the piano a little bit, half learn one of my songs, and walk to get Cajun food for lunch with Am and Tim. It’s freezing out and these small black sneakers do nothing for me against the snow. The mechanic calls and tells me there’s even more wrong with the van and that we need parts from the dealer, which won’t get here until tomorrow. We have a day off today, thank god, but we were headed to Chicago to hang out with David and drop Matt off at the airport and pick up Nate who is replacing him for two days. Ain’t gonna happen. We’re stranded at this point, Matt’s changing his flight and I decide to go to the store, make some dinner, make some cookies and make the best of it. The guys meet me in there and we head back, eat, Matt sleeps on the sofa and we decide he is called the Scoranocle, a combination between an oracle and Scarano, and we ask his advice which always ends in him telling us to leave it alone or bring him food. Its just more dumb inside jokes, which we’re learning we may have too many of, but people humor us. Matt heads out and I bring my cookies upstairs to an event happening in the sanctuary.

We hang out with Doug, who looks like our friend and East is East drummer Pete Angevine, and he asks us what we want to do for the night. He offers that we go to a show being put on my Dodge at My Old Kentucky Blog, who I know and like a lot, and we say ok. Why don’t you play the show, Doug asks, but Matt has to leave at 4 in the morning, so we decline. He calls Dodge who says I should just pay a solo set. Around this time Amy, who is lovely, and tired from protesting all day in front of a health insurance office shows up. Brad is here, and now we’re a proper crew. I say yes to playing, practice my songs in the women’s room and Doug tries to get us a ride. Ok, we can use the cook’s car. A white Dodge 15 passenger from the seventies called the Torpedo. So I get my guitar and we get in the Torpedo, whose doors I don’t even know how to work, its freezing in there, it has two false starts and Doug isn’t sure how to turn on the dashboard lights. Give it a little gas, Brad says, and he does and we’re off. We’re bouncing over every bump, rolling down streets I don’t know, past gingerbread looking houses, long flat streets, perfect rows of lamps and trees, in fog stained windows, through a cracked windshield, past car dealerships and porn shops, fast food joints, a Mexican restaurant. We’re talking about sexuality and then debating what’d it’d be like having lunch with a member of the KKK, while Tim talks on the phone in the back seat and Brad’s laughing in his row. We get there and the place is for real, called Locals Only, there’s still smoking in bars in the Midwest, there’s a girl in ripped tights and a white fur hat, there’s dudes playing pool, a sound guy with long hair running around and Amy orders a burger. I play my set, some of the more somber ones I’ve got, under the stage’s Christmas lights while the bar tender pours $2 beers and male figure skaters compete on the small TV for Olympic Gold. We hang around for a while, Brad tells us some good jokes and eventually we head home.

In the morning I do some dishes in the side kitchen, make toast for me and Brad while he turns on his music and makes us all coffee. If ever I was cynical, if every I was skeptical, if ever I was jaded, it seems to have been erased by our stay here. The generosity of strangers is something of a panacea for ills of the heart. Its not about what they’re telling you about. Not really. I love New York, really, God Bless, but there’s something to be said for the kindness of these strangers. I mean really something. If it’s about anything, it’s about this.

Winter Tour Travelogue Part 2

2010-02-17T18:03:00.001-08:00

2/14 on the road to Boone

Trying to read Nietzsche. Its not the easiest thing to do on 5 hours sleep at the City Hotel, now sitting in the van listening to Rolling Thunder Review, on Valentine’s Day, staring at shacks and gas stations on North Carolina back roads. I don’t have a love or a lover, I think about love. Trying to block it because I know how those long drives can get. I think some folks make you feel so much, and that never goes away, at some point you just have to shut it off, or try, unless it comes back to you. Really comes back. I wonder how that would go. I don’t know how to feel that vulnerable right now, I don’t know how I could do it, and yet I could do it, and in a strange way it could make me happy. Eventually it all evens out. Things are going so well on this tour. We play to full rooms every night, the folks buy stuff, we have places to stay, we get fed, we’re happy. Something feels right. When I get back I’m going to finish up Yes City. And then onto the next thing.

2/15 – on the road from Boone to Asheville . . . 2/16 on the road to Nashville

Amnon points to a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I think we have a night off tonight unless we can work out some last minute thing, but I‘d welcome the break, we’ll camp out at Michael’s, get showers and make dinner. Anyway tomorrow is a long drive and a big day in Nashville.

* * *

We get to Michael’s house, its always so good to see him and I dream of a day I can afford to have a fifth member and get him playing with us. I make cookies pretty much as soon as we walk in, put them in the oven and take a shower. I’m still cold though, touring in the winter, man. It’s amazing how many places you can be in the course of a day or a week, how different they can all be.

* * *

Last night we played a show in Boone, a Valentine’s Day Ball, and it was full, and people danced and bought records and everyone was happy. We asked Travis where we could stay and he hooked us up with the Red Snapper kids. Red Snapper is a band from Boone. Three sisters, Sarah, the eldest, Hannah and Caitlin, who are both in art school, Sarah’s husband Krosky and Hannah’s boyfriend Brendan. Their parents are staying over at the house too; they’re in from Winston Salem. We follow the girls and their dad in a pick up truck after the show a few miles outside of town and drive up the hill past a sign for University Village, which, like everything else, is covered in snow.

We pull up to the house and their dad shows us up through the garage. We ask if our gear is safe in the van, he says ya nothings goin to get ya unless I murder you in the middle of the night. Pretty much the first thing he says to us since saying nice show. We follow him in the house with our sleeping bags and guitars. The house is long and smells like smoke and their mom is already inside rolling cigarettes with a Top roller and stacking them in a blue Zig Zag box. Two pictures of her as a high schooler are on the fridge and one picture of their dad on a day off while he was in the Navy. We sit in the den, with its big wood paneling, couches, art projects and Polaroids on the walls, old packs of cigarettes and Halloween candy in a purple plastic bowl on the table which by morning finds its way to the floor. Hannah walks from one end of the house to the other, and smiles at everyone who passes, with genuine kindness. She wears cat eyeglasses, high-waited skirts and looks like she’s from another decade. Brendan her boyfriend, is tall and lanky and reminds me of someone I’d meet if I were at a commune. We talk to Brendan, who sits by the fireplace smoking, and after a while a guy with a mustache comes in and introduces himself. Hi, I’m Hawk, he says. Sarah says, ya he’s called Hawk Kelly, doesn’t that sounds like an outlaw? I say yes it does, because it does and because he looks like an outlaw. Hawk Kelly wears a bandana and suspenders, chain-smokes Marlboro Reds, is 21, looks 28, is the lead singer in a band, and has a tattoo on his forearm that says something I can’t remember. Maybe its says ‘you can do this.’

After a while their dad comes in and asks if we’re herbalists, we say yes, and he passes the bowl but I decline. He offers us some Jameson, we sit around for a while, and soon I pass out. Half asleep I hear the Talking Heads start playing in the other room when the rest of the band and their friends come in. I’m on a chaise lounge and can’t move. We all sleep in a room off to the side of the living room with a giant couch and a giant clock and an egg crate as a curtain to another room that goes somewhere else in this endless house. We get up in the earlier part of the afternoon, their mom makes us coffee and we sit around drinking it and smoking Hawk’s cigarettes but I’m still wiped out. Kids come in and out of rooms, I’m not sure how many people are in this house or where they’re coming from, curtains and sliding doors separate rooms and everyone seems coupled up or married; partners float in and out. In the other room their mom is teaching Caitlin’s boyfriend how to roll while Korsky makes toast. She’s talking about UPS and how they have good employee benefits. I only see Caitlin, the youngest sister, for a minute in the next day when we get up. She comes in at 3 wearing a white blanket and sits in a chair next to the long window as snow blows across the yard. She doesn’t say anything but smiles as Hawk grabs her ankle. I eat some toast before we go, which tastes better than I can remember it tasting in days. I’m happy to get fresh air as we leave and drive back down the mountain, looking out for a pit-stop at Hannah’s BBQ which we find and I am mistaken, by an older woman leaving the restaurant, for a skier.

2/17/10

Heading north from Nashville to Indianapolis

Country oldies blast from a busted beige speaker over the Pilot gas station somewhere in Kentucky. This morning we woke up at Caitlin’s house on 16^th and Holly Street. We left before her to get there last night, too tired to hang around a smoke filled 5 spot. She gives me the key after the last band’s set and tells us to leave the kitchen door open. We pull up at an unmarked house. I’m pretty sure she says it’s the blue house on the corner. We’re looking for 1800 but we don’t see any numbers. Matt and Tim, tall and hulking in their blackness in the dark of the street go to the front door to try to jiggle the key. Am and I watch them, cracking up at our two fake robbers, hoping they get in and hoping they don’t get shot. They ask me to come up and give it a try. Nothing, the bottom is locked and the key on the top just twists back and forth. I remember Cato says ‘leave the kitchen open for me’ so I walk around back, get through the gate and find an already open door. I walk around front where a can opener replaces a doorknob, and turn it to let the guys in. Only when Caitlin comes home, with her tall beau from the other band, in her leopard fur coat, ‘I heart country music’ pin and dangly earrings do we know it’s really her house.

Earlier in the night Miss Caitlin Rose plays a gorgeous set, her voice rich and strong; it’s my kind of country. Am and Tim play pool and we bypass paying for drinks by buying our own bottles of Jack. You start to feel you’re south when every bar you go to lets you smoke inside. I forgot how different it is, folks standing around with their Winston’s lit, drinking and listening to countless bands take the 5 spot stage, all equally tight and pro, this is Nashville. A guy walks in from the back entrance wearing a thick wool cardigan sweater jacket, jeans, cowboy boots and looks real familiar in the dusty smoked, head illuminated by the neon Pabst sign. Pepi? He asks. Ya, I say, and he tells me he’s Johnny Corndawg. I get a flash of him in neon shorts and ragged t –shirt, walking around inside the South Philadelphia Atheneum, the giant warehouse in South Philly where are the neon punk philosophers used to live. Maybe they weren’t punks, they were a big group of artists, living in this huge space where they used to have shows, give lectures and skate on the indoor ramp they built. They eventually got kicked out. I think over 40 people lived there at some point, and when they had no where to go they stayed for as long as they were allowed, maybe a few days, camped out in Rittenhouse Park. Now I see some of them in whole foods, out at parties, on the street, and last night, there was Johnny Corndawg, who had apparently seen one of my first shows at New Planet, John, Justin and Jesse’s and now Sharon’s place, now Avant Gentleman’s Lounge.

I remember that show, I think TC, Anthony Campuzano, a great Philly artist friend who used to hang out with me in New York and hit up art shows with me, came and told me to add some delicate elements to my recordings, to which I replied that I already had. Caitlin also knew someone named April Glaser from Philly which is how I met her, how I ended up in Nashville last night. It’s funny to think of the early Philly days. There have been constant reminders of it on this tour, seeing Natalie who also shared a bill with me on some of my first shows, seeing Johnny and knowing how Am was there at the same time, we had a bunch of the same friends, and maybe he came to an early solo show as well but somehow we never met. I think back hanging outside New Planet, think back hearing about Scott long before we ever met. I think about all of it. I remember what it was like then, just like I’ll remember this time.

***

We go to 3 Meat and Biscuit with Caitlin in the morning and she tells us about Nashville and Music Row and an old hotel that’s now condos with a swimming pool in the shape of a guitar where the Stones and anyone else who was anyone else used to stay when they passed through Nashville in the 70’s. Her mom is a successful songwriter, and her dad’s a successful music guy too. I can’t imagine coming from a music family. We eat our grits and eggs and biscuits and get back in the car. I hope to know in a few days what April looks like in the west coast. I’m starting to get a sense of myself, and also how others see me, and certain feelings come to the front and other ideas fade away. It takes a long time and a lot of good work to do what you want to do well, and while it feels like a long way to go, I’m on my path.

East is East Winter Winter Winter Tour Part 1

2010-02-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

EAST IS EAST WINTER WINTER WINTER TOUR

2/10/10 – New York, New York

Sitting in a cloud above Broadway and 65th street, well almost, in an apartment my parents rent, DC canceled due to snow and I worry Baltimore may be more of the same. I moved out of my place and am in between homes. Camped out on the floor of my old place last night in my sleeping bag but needed a shower so jumped on the A train uptown. We'll reschedule these lost dates for April when we're more likely to have less chance of Blizzard. The whole of the eastern seaboard has been hit with snow like they haven’t seen in 90 years. Luckily we made it to Providence, played a real fun show there, people just started showing up, pouring in in their black ripped tights and short skirts, their art school glances, and hip haircuts, their leather jackets with bows sewn on the back, big scarves, long necklaces, red hair and pink t-shirts, beards, blazers, man they looked great. And they whooped and danced. We settled up, got in the van and drove to Nora and Nick’s. It was a true writer’s house, books everywhere, authors I had never heard of, a typewriter next to a computer at a small desk and big old chairs. Sometimes I think how amazing that must be to just need a pen and a desk.

Back in NY, we played Death By Audio last night, but then the snow started in. Now everything thing in the city feels like white paralysis, not much happening, something static. I'm not that far from the Dakota and every time I'm up here I think of John and Yoko and their walks in the parks or them hanging out in the kitchen with Sean.

2/13/10 – Richmond, VA, Matt and Marcus’s kitchen somewhere near Strawberry Street

The last week before leaving tour was good, as far as I can remember it. Went to see Frank Sherlock and CA Conrad, my poet hero, read at Zinc Bar. They quoted Ryan Trecartin in their book, its just a genius factory of artists around these days, people really going for it, and it made me excited to be alive in this time, and to know how hard artists are pushing it to have something true to say about this fantastic mess we’re in. I went to Eddie’s reading with Thusrton Moore at White Columns and missed the whole thing but ran into Jacob and Brooke, folks I knew from Philly days and this girl Julie from SF who lives in NY now. Chris and Mary met me after, we were all supposed to be on time for it and none of us were, so we headed over to check out that fancy hotel above the highline that’s known for people stripping in it’s windows. All we managed to do was use the bathroom before we walked to Le Poisson Rouge for a drink.

There was the night with Ben, went to see some art in Chelsea, Ruby Sterling or Sterling Ruby, don’t know, the show was bad the the book of his other work looked gorgeous. Got drinks at Trailer Park, went to O’s house and then went all the way uptown to 126^th or something, up to Ben’s studio where he was meeting Anna for practice, but I was falling asleep so I turned around and went back to Brooklyn as soon as I got there. It felt good though to be in the backseat, cruising up Amsterdam as we waited in the car for O to find his dealer who has sold him oregano or something, earlier in the day. And Ben’s been such a good friend to me. We started as something else, but he’s talked me through some weird times. Its inspiring to hear his take on art, to hear him talk about Trectartin and other artists he feels are going horizontal and vertical. They got spread, he says, and they got lift.

I go to Chris’s with Am’s the next night, we make dinner and I fall asleep while they watch a movie. It almost makes me never want to leave.

* * *

I can’t help but feel overwhelmingly grateful for my life. But it’s strange times indeed, reconciling the good and the bad of this place, global village la dee da. So much senseless violence, too much too fast, we should be more enraged, I should be more enraged, and yet sometimes its hard to feel it. And its hard to ignore all the good. So what do we have then? I don’t know.

I pass a field at night, driving South to Richmond. I see billboards illuminated in a field. Nothing on the wide lawns of grass but bright signs. Holiday Inn. Wendy’s. Funland Somewhere. The glow of the lights shining on them shows the hilly nature of the terrain and the car tracks of the truck that drives up to the signs to pull down the picture, do maintenance or make a new advertisement. It’s almost disgusting, but it’s alluring. Feels like the literal sign of our times, a hybrid between the bad and the beautiful, the sale and the message, man vs the nature of technology and progress vs the nature of nature vs meaning.

Last night we played Richmond, David was amazing in securing us a good guarantee, half off food, a case of PBR and a very comfortable place to stay with his Skyline band mates Matt and Marcus. Matt went across the street to his girlfriend’s house and I got to stay in a very good bed. I got up early and went for milk. I type as Amnon calls to the cat in the other room. Soon the guys will be up and ready for coffee.

* * *

The day before we rolled up to the Floristree, manipulating our way around huge piles of snow, residue from a storm the likes of which Baltimore has apparently not seen in the last century. Lesser comes down and shows us to the freight elevator. Matt and I make a few trips with the gear as Tim and Am park the car. The elevator gets stuck about three times and makes me panicky but I pretend not to care. People show up at the show, some having walked many miles simply to fight their cabin fever. It’s mellower than we’re used to but it’s fun. Natalie is there, haven’t seen her in 4 years. I talk to Lesser about poetry, we think the stigma is dying, its cool again man, its cool again, sell some records, and dance for a minute with Tim and Am, who have developed a one leg style for the night. It’s 2:30 in the morning. Am and I are hungry so we walk a few blocks through the snow to Massey’s. There’s a guy there who may or may not be blind with a giant digital clock around is next pacing back and forth, horizontally, in the narrow florescent hallway that leads to the register. There’s a guy with a scar on his face and I don’t know how you get that kind of scar. The food is greasy but the fries are real good and they put Bay Salt on everything.

In the morning we wake up, hang out with Keirin and a cat called Weekend, hit up an Italian market and I spill my lunch all over West Franklin street right before we leave. It takes over 6 hours to get to Virginia when it should have taken three, but we are in good spirits. The guys unload the gear when we arrive and joke about some bee-bop tune, carrying amps and singing. We park and walk past the clean Richmond streets, and I say how I want to go into one of the houses, make cookies, sit on their couch and watch TV. On tour, when we see nice neighborhoods, this is the overwhelming feeling. It’s all I want to do. I look at them as we pass the deli and realize that I am happy. That this is a lucky time in our lives, I get it, where even when it’s a little hard, there’s something about it that’s so easy.

Catharine's Pictures, Peace Mountain, Secret Falls, Grapes, Awe, Moonshine,

2009-09-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

Catharine is a new friend of mine. She is my friend Nick's girlfriend. They and I and ten more of us just spent a week in a cabin in North Carolina in the Highlands. The cabin was built in 1911, I think, and belongs to Jon Eaton's family. It was me, Nick, Catharine, Jon, Albert, Jon M, Sam, Joe, Thomas and Owen. I arrived at the Asheville Airport on a Saturday. Flew in, out of stormy NY, down the eastern coast, over green valleys, tiny school buses, houses, lakes, factories, red trucks, a school, a church, blue sky and cumulus clouds. When my I was little, my father was getting into flying, into soaring actually. And he would pull me up on his lap in his office, in his navy blue bathrobe on Saturday morning, or Sunday morning, and he told me about the types of clouds and which were the best for flying. I landed at noon and was greeted by Albert, Jon M. and Nick. We popped in a tape from one of the wood tape bins floating in the car on the floor next to a bag of uneaten pretzels and played in Buena Vista Social Club. The bins were all classics, and later we listened to Harry Nillson's The Point as we climbed to a 4,000 ft elevation. That night we heard Jon's uncle Robin, who was out visiting his friend, a famous actress, now in her late 70's who had starred in To Kill a Mockingbird as a young lady and is now dying of brain cancer, was coming home with chicken and corn. There was still moonshine left, and weed, that the gardener had brought over yesterday evening. The moonshine would soon get me drunk, moonshine drunk, and would become the topic of many a late night porch jam, for we were led to believe, and happily, that it was the infamous Popcorn Sutton's last batch before he ousted himself to avoid going to jail. So maybe it was Sam who began to sing it, but to a Harry Belafonte calypso tune, we danced around the cabin and the barn and the porch, singing 'I'd rather die than face the Moonshine crime." I indulged, we all did, Robin too, a former wild man who still wore his wildness with ease, now a Nashville producer, and we built a bonfire and lay by it and Jon Moses played songs we knew and we all sang along, and the group thinned out, went back to the cabin or the hammock or the barn, and soon it was just a few of us, and I tuned out and tuned in to the clouds as they passed across a near full moon. I had been going through such a time, a time where it was hard for me to distinguish much, make any judgement or place value on things, let alone happiness or beauty. I banged my head against my marble bathroom wall just weeks earlier, to try at anything to get it out, exorcise the lost me. Here under the cover of this vast North Carolina sky, as we saw endlessly, the blue Ridge mountains as they stretched into Georgia, I listened, and sang freely, and finally felt awe again for the forces, natural forces, which are so much greater than I. And the trip rolled on with a similar joy and ease, we made dinner together, sang on the porch, picked concord grapes from the lawn, trying to avoid poison ivy, sang songs in the barn studio, sang songs in the kitchen, in the living room, by the fires Joe built, played dice to Jon Moses strumming. We dressed up as wild beasts for Albert and Jon M's movie. Climbed to Secret Falls and I stepped on a bees nest in a root in the ground, three stung me, I jumped through a waterfall. We made a video for Lost River, and Catharine snapped her camera every step of the way. At the end of the week we drove down the hill. I felt I could have been gone for a quarter century, and it took almost as long to get home. We woke up at 5:30, left an hour later and by 7 arrived at Albert's mom's house in Bulter, MD. She served us great dinner, we all said goodbye and Nick and Catharine took me to the train in Willmington and from there back to New York. If I can perhaps later I will try to describe the spirit and life and humor of the friends I got to be with. It was a blessing, breathing in the air, singing, walking on the wood floors that generations had walked on before me, and eating meals together on beautiful old ceramic plates. I looked up Catharine's photos and they're just stunning, she took the one in this post. Check them out, really. Catharine Maloney. And also Jon and Albert's movie, www.thebeastpageant.com - its a real true testament to heart and creativity. Until next on Peace Mountain. Blessings!

Travelogue 2 - California Dreamin' in HollyGrove

2009-09-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

Oakland, 3301 Kempton Street - April 8 - late

The window is cracked and sealed with tape. I don't see anything anymore because my face is glued into the laptop to see the keys, it's that dark in here, and someone made a noise that sounded like hurling. I'm in Oakland and now suddenly the street lamp goes on and that same window shows no crack, no sign of weakness, only the dim-lit edges of trees, the most natural thing, save for the fact that the illumination comes from city lights, or the edge's of a city's lights. I am here now, in this in between, at one moment seeing every weakness, every strip of tape holding together this transparent view out into the great natural un/known and at the same time, dimmed by the darkness of a room, which in real time, which in kid time, which in my 25 year old this is who I am right now time, and even that last phrase sounds young, I can hear myself reading it in ten years and stickling, snarking, snarfing, are these real words, to me they are, and Jon and Am, all my friends too, they think so, and they're here with me, in this time, the great sort of Americanness of our lives, our dilemmas, this post Buddhist whatever, this infra-red war fought on TV screens, this lack of natural resources, this return to the land, this self-consciousness, this television, blogging, youtube watching self-consciousness, this put it out yourself, diy publish it online then Google yourself self-consciousness that leaves us, or me, rather, between the world of doing and watching, between seeing the tape, and seeing past it. Is it only in the darkness that we see the light? I don't think so. But when it's dark, and shit today was dark, well in that everything looks brighter for sure. What a sweet relief to turn off the lights then. I love the new pathetic, I embrace the pathetic, the weak, the vulnerable, but I also support the escape. I’m like you, some days I just I want the song I know, I want to turn off the lights, forget the broken window and see the trees.

We drive down what street? Valencia, are we on Valencia and 23rd? We are where? The Make-Out Room. Soul night? And who is djing? Padro? No it's Italian, the flyer is in my pocket. We see people making out. We came from the Korean BBQ, shit, ya know they're not allowed to let your bowl get empty. So your bowl is always full, can you believe it, your bowl is always full. Isn't that the most poetically human shit you've ever heard? When did you ever feel totally empty? Oh, right, when you thought ‘I feel empty,’ and all those thoughts on emptiness just filled you right up. Ya, we were there and dancing, I was drunk, telling Matt about this person, and some secrets. We're in Oakland but tonight we're in the city(SF) to dance.

Up and down these big steps talking outside the house. The steps look like the steps my mom shows me by her house in Montreal. I ran up them, talking on the phone, exacerbated but made calmer by Am, I was running up the steps, talking about who knows, thinking I was fine and found myself out of breath. You know what happened to me? Shit hit my fan, and shit hit my face, shit everywhere, till all I was was shit. Know what happens when you're shit and don't know it? You turn to dirt. Know what happens to you when you're shit and you do? You get a towel and wipe it off and go party with all the other shit stained losers, and by losers I mean winners, like you. We were at the Beauty Bar. We were at the Make-Out room. No we passed the Beauty Bar. Yes we ate Korean BBQ. Can you smoke in here? I asked the owner, sitting in a booth across the restaurant with all the wait staff, eating birthday cake and smoking. After ten, he said. What time is it? I asked. It's just ten, he said, offering me a light. I went back to the table to Jeremiah and Matt. We had cooked the rest of the meat, I threw on all the garlic sauce, and Jeremiah was eating the salad. What time is it I asked Matt and J. It’s nine they told me. We went outside to Matt's car, not really his own car, a loan car, his broke down. The car he has now is a fancy really fancy Audi, the loaner, a road trip vibe killer and you can't smoke in it for sure. And so I dropped the smoke on the ground and we made a song about it and got in the car and drove across the bridge like I did the last time I was here with Danielle. And I think about everything I set up for myself. And I think about the network that grew out, that makes up anyone's life, the delicate infrastructure. And how graceful and mangled it is. I think I'm drunk sort of, and what kind of man is Jerimiah and what was his seven year relationship like as we pass through the toll booth. What are the expectations we put on lovers, why must they be everything to us? I'm as much as I am. I found this out today. It was so ugly, so dark because I looked in to find something that would prove me wrong and there was nothing there. A blackness. And then there was nothing worse. I was not better than I was, than I am, but I'm no worse either. I'm not worse than I am. So I look up, from the futon on the floor in Jeremiah's studio, wrapped in a long roll of plaid orange fabric J uses for his designs that moonlights as my blanket, and now the light from the street turns on, I see the tape again, something moves and that throw-up sound comes. I looked up again and it is darkness. I see the pole and the tree, or the outline of the tree. I will see the tape again, the scars of the window crack, maybe not before night ends, but the light will come on, shining on our wounds. For now it is dark. For now I’m in Oakland. I have nothing to offer but we are all these things.

Met K last night and to great relief he was already a friend. He smelled of American spirits and looked exactly like his photographs, his embrace felt like his jacket. I had talked to Am earlier in the day, pacing on Kempton Street, swinging in the rope swing, affirming that it would be ok. Talked to Jon. It is ok. Perhaps this is the most freedom I've ever experience, it's hard to know what to do with it. What happens when you release something? Does it know how to walk away from its cage? I suppose you can spend a long time in a cage that you never find the edges of, and then, as if in some surrealist's mischievous film plot you go out on a expedition, make it as far as the jungle, inhabited by all kinds of strangers ghosts and beasts, till you push past that last oversized rubber tree leaf and find not a wall but the edges of a cage, with bars so wide you can walk right through. The funniest part of this cage is that it leads into another jungle. There is no telling if the iterations will be infinite, or if you have walked through your last and only cell, but things look different in the new jungle. It's filled with dancing, possibility, new waves of anxiety, longing, desire, with your friends, your bearded neo hippies, your surfers, your artists, your occasional suited guardian angel, a bleeding heart Nazi liberal, your insane faux lesbian bar dancer, your typical attention seekers, your soul grippers, your ideas dripping from the trees, your heroes staring up laughing, hysterical and tugging on the foot of their crucified selves, video screens with your past stepping out, your favorite specter, your mother, your lovers past and future, words come and write themselves in front of you, songs culled form the lips of everyone you meet, denying space and time: she says 'I" he says 'am' someone says 'going' someone says 'divine' he says ' to' she says 'end' he says 'of" someone says 'rascal' he says 'stomp' -a senseless poem is born out of a serious conversation, a serious conversation is born out of a senseless poem, a woman in a red pleather bikini, standing on a street, you can imagine her whole body bare. A man with a leg so short and another so long he looks like two bodies put together, and you imagine he knows as much as two bodies or more, lady gaga, Britney Spears, Tom Brokaw, Sadam, Obama, Stalin, Brecht, Leonard Maupin, Andy Warhol, the blind guy on your stoop, anyone you can think of appears, and wanders through the lush, heavy, green. You can talk to whomever you please, because until you hit another edge of another cage, you're that free.

Comstock Ave, Westwood April 11

Back in LA, Shawna heads to San Louis Obispo and I go stay with Audrey. She's just received a shipment of National Geographic’s from 1940-1990, oh and by received I mean some old man drove 'em down from two hours away in Orange County to deliver them to her for a whopping 25 dollars. So they are stacked everywhere in her downtown loft, amongst the horns and the plants and the feathers and drawings, the blowup mattress that started sinking beneath us and she's already started making her amazing collages, cutting out half bodies and rearranging them, she's got a monster on her computer, body cocked back, horns and head facing forward with a don't mess kind of look. We walk around Downtown during the day, to the Japanese grocery store where the woman yells at you for eating seaweed, down through the, I don't what, sunglasses district? Well I bought some heart-shaped red Lolita glasses wore them past the makeshift hot dog vendors, the push carts covered in cardboard obscuring the flame that worked to heat the dogs wrapped in bacon. Next to them were a smattering of sides, chilies, salsas, onions and the like, and everyone's cart was more or less the same. Past the piñatas, not yet stuffed, the balloon stand where balloons sat in other balloons, past the corn vendor, which was just a guy and a grocery cart and some cooked corn resting on cardboard, past the fading signs in different colors advertising sunglasses, dresses, shoes, purses, all lined up like some Mel Bochner drawing. Past the fabric district and the signs of old hotels, of theaters many years out of service, grand buildings that sweep the sky and continue on well past any activity of the streets below. Wore them into the fancy new pastry and deli shop called Valerie where Audrey bought tarts, two key limes and one cherry for the party. And what did we do last night. Oh ya that party was last night. We went to some family friends of hers house, it had a plaque on the door that said house of Dahl on the outside and a date, I think it said 1999. But I asked how long they had lived in the house and they said 6 months so Audrey said maybe they got the plaque for the wedding and took it to this new rental. Laura who owned the house was like a cheerleader with her reed hair and green dress like the school flag waving as her arm went up and her eyes widened in an enthused HI. Later I found out she was actually a cheerleader; she had started the cheerleading division in her school. Before her there were no cheerleaders. When we walked in there was a dog who looked like he was a dying cast member of the star wars movie. He was some bronzed and rusted ewok, staring up at us as a little kid ran by, double fisting cookies and cakes. It was Easter Sunday. So we just sat down with the ewok, because she was shivering, and it was loud from bad music, and she was dying. We covered he with the fleece Pirate's blanket and eventually got to drinking. Matt, Laura's brother came in as we were getting up from our second visit with the dog. He breezed in like a young movie star in training because he is one, although I don't know . . .

Notes - Topanga, the weird memory about the girl on the farm and the home-schooled siblings, was it real? 1. The fish shack, conversations on Buddhism, flakiness, conversations on genius, women talking about men, talking about facts, 3. Easter Square

1. The memory was of driving in Pennsylvania, I think we were dropping off Chris's friend, a girl friend of his, or she was picking up something from her house, a trailer on the side of a small hill on a farm that look like it had emerged from the mud. Two kids were running around in muck boot, ripped jeans, and baggy t-shirts, they had un-brushed hair. I remember him saying something about them not going to school. There were animals, I don't know what kind, buildings, tires, and a tire swing I looked up at a low tree overhead as the car hit a pot hole driving out of there. I remember the feeling. I don't remember if it was real or a dream.

2. Flakiness was A's handsome actor friend who looked like a piece of smiling glass. And Topanga. Shawna and I went back there today to walk the trails, the brush poked out of the green wheat stalks making a purple color across the hills.

3. Everyone held hands and ran in a circle. East circle someone called out. We broke hand and landed in various places, the ground, a chair, from tiredness. East Square!! Audrey called out.

April 13, LA

Feel paralyzed by this evening’s ‘genius’s’ conversation. It stumps me. Literally seems to cut off my limbs, robbing my ability to branch and reach and stretch, the categories of classification, the who is and who isn't and who might be. The awareness of its existence and the distance to it. It's funny, the gift of awareness. I think it's a double edged sword, to both understand the idea of intelligence, to understand what it means to be intelligent and to be intelligent enough to recognize you could be more intelligent. But isn't this the great equalizer? I see what fit is and yet I see that I am not fit, so I will make myself more fit, but I will never look like Gisele, or a gazelle, or Raphael. So we can choose to expand our minds, but their contours, shapes, elasticity, that is all predetermined long before we are old enough to know we're not enough, or not old enough. But this mind of ours, with its endless areas of gray, what if we were to cultivate the unused - what if we were to grow our minds - is it possible? Do people get smarter or just more educated? And what of those inspired ideas - they're rarely found in a book, more likely they are found on a tree, before it becomes a stump. There are certain cruelties in life that no amount of Buddhism will eradicate, and I think the cult of genius is one of them. Because I don't even know how to begin to think about genius in the fields of math and science, my eye turns to the arts, where I am once again perplexed, but for entirely different reasons. This time, not because I do not understand various circuitry, programming, thermodynamics and the like, but because the line between art and culture as been so blurred, so expertly photo shopped into seemingly no line, no, please go back - there is not no line but rather the line has seized and absorbed both art and culture, media and message. We have become so post post post modern, so fractured, so fast, and so vast that the various groups that crop up may have their subsets of genius' but no where have I seen an artist who hovers singularly above the line, the void, the black hole. I don't know if its because of the proliferation of information, or the fact that it feels like we've crossed every border and returned, but no where have I seen the artist who knows how to tap into the zeitgeist because the zeitgeist is terribly splintered, a splintered stump, constantly re-growing and changing, hyped on genetic modifiers and plasticized proteins. The zeitgeist is the artist of our time, so massive, so elusive, so hard to pin down, that, oh shit it the same as any other collective unconscious, it is the most radical, most holy representation of a civilization; a color, a time. Perhaps there is no artist as genius because its no longer necessary, we have every look, every color taste pulse, fact, and feeling at the press of a button. And then again maybe it never feels necessary. Isn’t that what they say about good art, you didn't know you were missing it until you found it? So when she comes along, maybe he’s already here, maybe they are many, yes, in this edit I’m making, removed from yesterday’s cynicism, I’ll say there are either none, one, or very many who are making sense of it all, imbuing every breath, every step with a crystalline vision of the Everylife, we will know her/him/it as our genius - I think the terrifying truth is I'm looking for the messiah. I think Noam Chomsky may be disappointed in me. Unless he would agree.

Footnote- Everyone is flaking out and I suspect Heroine. Shawna says when her friend was high he would buy all kinds of underwear, red, gold, leopard and run around in them.

Footnote – People are unflaking. It’s not heroine, it’s time.

April 17 – Formosa’s - Hollywood

Sitting at the bar with pictures of dead celebrities lining the walls, on red leather banquettes in the front room, which we opted for as opposed to the back dining car where a couple was making out, we drink hot whiskey, hot toddies, at Formosa’s, and Shawna has come back from dinner with her dad. The conversation turns to fear of open spaces, something Shawna attributes to the Manson family murders, which she thinks carry a residual fear throughout the county. Perhaps it’s because of the proximity of the crime to her own family. Her uncle was supposed to be at the house that night, his best friend, Jay Seabring did go and was subsequently murdered, while Paul opted to stay at home where, as her grandfather put it, they were having a great time, great party of their own, singing around the piano, and Paul didn’t want to be pulled away. Amos, who was once Jay’s valet, came to work for Shawna’s grandparents, and at 86, has been there for 35 years. It should be mentioned that Jay was the original ‘Shampoo’, one of the early proprietors of a luxury haircutting salon, and Amos parked the cars for his costumers, in addition to fixing radios and anything else broken. Amos, who I hear almost every morning, in his work suit, with extra jean pockets he has adorned to the outside, whose collar he cut off, lugs industrial size garbage cans up and down the steeply inclined steps of the house’s three levels of gardens, which he maintains. It is the garden to the house where I’ve been living, and is itself a living breathing, and very spacious, gold shag carpeted homage to yesteryear, “the birthplace of porn” we kid in the car, if only for the wide long couches and that infamous rug. Amos has lived many lives, born on a cotton farm in Alabama in the 20’s, he moved to New York in the early 40’s where he worked in the garment district for a short time, then returned South, then back up north, working on car production lines in Detroit, steel mills in Cleveland and god knows what else. I’ve had every job a poor man can have he says and smiles. In the seventies, after Jay was murdered, he was one of the first suspects they took in, apparently they tried to beat an admission out of him for two days, and when finally it failed they kicked him out onto the street. When I see him in the morning he talks about how grateful he is for his life, his good health and the Los Angeles weather. We’re all sick, he says, we make ourselves sick with our stress and our television. And we’re so blessed. Without pause he tells us how anything can be gotten through. He is taking classes weekly to learn how to write so that he can record his memoirs.

Whatever fear of open spaces Shawna has described, I caught. The spaces are not physical but rather psychological, although I suppose they always are, still though, my life, as open as it may have seemed, operated within the confines of perimeters I had either naturally or artificially erected, and while they were not obvious to the naked eye, I could feel their boarders and it kept me safe. Now, here in California, with my future as unpredictable as ever before, but seemingly more so, without ways to define myself as I once had, as a New Yorker, as a songwriter, as a maker of toast and coffee, as a lover, a fighter a friend, a dreamer, a loser, a champ, here with almost every thought strung out, with my net cut, I feel the fear of open spaces, a pervasive and deep anxiety over my newfound freedom. And here I find myself at once, bemused, inspired and oft terrified of Olympia, the maid, who with drooping skin and thick middle, on first encounter two mornings ago refused to acknowledge my presence in the kitchen as I shuffled downstairs for coffee, avoiding Kiki the old tea poodle’s pea puddles that frequently spot the floor. More than avoid me she scowled at me, for reasons unknown, I think because I had bought grapes, which Shawna’s grandpa can’t eat, among other things, such as she is crazy. This morning she was better as I tried to tell her in my best broken Spanish that I would put my laundry in when the others had finished but I still could not trust the glass container with a taped on label that said allspice and had another note in Spanish on the back. This morning, as the coffee huffed out it’s last brewing breaths, note: it had been sitting in the filter since the night before, it made an unusual crackle and I wondered as I went to sit down mug in one hand and looking at the‘Allspice’ jar in the other, straining to read the Spanish handwriting on a paper taped to the back, if this mornings mug would be my last huff too.

April 19 – 3301 Kempton, Oakland

Well something changed. Olympia never killed me. Kiki the toy poodle who lives at 601 Comstock started peeing in the kitchen even more frequently. I guess the record is coming out in August, which must have calmed my mind considerably. I’m in Oakland again. Matt and I just came home after a five-hour drive from LA, he’s on the opposite couch. I think we are supposed to be looking up three things that piqued our interest; brain swelling, fever, and it’s effect on hallucinations and night terrors, Morrissey’s Cholo fan bass, and the prevalence of violence against women in Lou Reed’s lyrics which I never noticed until Matt pointed it out to me today. The house I’m in is that old arts and crafts style. There’s a nook that I’m eyeing that is obscured by the plant in front of it but this couch is comfy and I’m too lazy to move. It was a good car ride. It was a good day. I made cookies after promising myself I’d quit sugar. This was inspired by dinner with G who made an amazing salad dressing of seaweed, apple cider vinegar, hot pepper, hummus and tahini. That was actually an amazing day as well. I just ate a chocolate. Ok I really am going to quit sugar. Lets start from G’s house, that visit. Time out here is passing like summer in August and all that sticks out are the eureka moments. I went to G’s house. It took us a while to get it together, after a string of emails that lasted maybe a year and text messages lost and found and lost and then found again, an address was sent, a meeting time established and I headed to his place Thursday afternoon, which keeps feeling like yesterday, around 3, and stayed till one thirty that night. It was easy, G’s time passed in a way that was so comfortable and unfamiliar. We were in Eagle Rock, in a red house on the top of a hill, shaded by the surrounding wildness of trees and rocks and shrubs. We talked on the patio about everything, or lots of things, as a cat screamed from another yard and dogs in cages next door barked. Beaded peppers hung from the umbrella over us as I got buzzed on wine. G told me stories about his parents, of his dad, an art teacher, who met his mom when she was in high school, and how they ran away together to a remote part of northern California and lived in the woods, and eventually landed in Nevada City. How he dropped out of high school at fourteen and moved to Oregon where he worked as a baker and only ate cake for fours years, only to get another baking job in Eugene, making baked goods for a group of older men, all with fake names. He was supposed to collect the money he made from the day and put it in a box at the top of the stairs, they said he could go get it anytime he needed some cash. One day the lawyer came around and asked if he had ever read the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, he sad no and the lawyer suggested that he did. Turns out he was making cookies, brownies, cakes for those characters, and whatever they didn’t get got picked up and delivered over to the Grateful Dead family. He applied to RISD and Brown and got in on full scholarship and stipend, went there and set up his own factory, well, his own Warholian factory, with the money they gave him, throwing warehouse parties, hiring kids to make cardboard cities. Now here we are, figuring out what to make for dinner, he shows me a box he unwraps. This guy I did some design work for couldn’t pay me so he gave me a used Honda civic, he says, pulling the tape back from the box. What’d you do with it? I asked. I gave it away, I don’t drive. He gave me a guitar too. That I use. Then he says, this guy calls me and says I have a check in the mail for you. G picks up the box he’s showing me, says: Ya I hold this thing and say, this doesn’t look like a check. He starts to unwrap the plastic bags. Weed. Everywhere, huge box full, then another box. How much is that I ask. Sixteen pounds. I say shit what are you gonna do with it? I don’t know he says. He doesn’t even smoke all that often. Give it away I guess, he says, to friends, I don’t know. He shows me more, and more, deep and endless boxes of marijuana, some not even dried, most untrimmed, I’ve never seen so much in my life. How much is that worth I ask. Ya sixteen pounds he says, 28 grand worth. Some friends come over, Shawna comes by and we go to the store, we come home and all make dinner; too much, guacamole, enchiladas, salad, baked tofu – its twelve thirty by the time we eat and it’s a feast. We sit on the patio, its LA but it’s so cold, I smoke half a cigarette to try to lessen the fullness in my belly, and we talk, yawn and it’s late, so we drive home. I’ve got a few more days here in LA before I leave for SF. Sunday comes around and I pack everything and I walk with my bags and guitar to the end of Comstock and plop down in front of the fancy high-rise on the corner. Matt sees me and stops, he’s wearing short shorts a Cholo guys compliments him on at Coachella, we get in the car and drive down the Grape Vine, on 5, through the valley of all the states main agriculture, a straight shot home.

Notes: abandoned house with rainbow windows, half eaten cookie on the side of the van, David Byrne has Aspergers, whole foods = whole world, hot pink of the flowering trees, sitting in the back overlooking the highway as a guy washes his sneakers

April 21 – Kempton House

Sitting in the kitchen, our four o’ clock break, and now, wow, it’s nearly 7:30, I can’t believe it. It’s getting darker in here, I should have guessed. J and I have been working on ‘Down’ the first song of the Peptones EP, I’m typing as he’s making a breakthrough. Today he is wearing bright yellow. Or, as I write this that was yesterday already and we are on to a new song, taking a break, he is laying on the studio floor, which doubles as my bedroom. But yesterday, in all yellow, in the kitchen, as the golden light acts on the house and on the room, with the turquoise paint on the banister of the building across the street peaking through our window, and Will talking about his construction job and his girlfriend and the air in the room so still, it was a painting and a moment Id been waiting to fall into. Still, there is some anxiety that I feel out here, that I’ve left Brooklyn in way that I won’t be able to return to it. I feel wide open and grateful but still, after a long day of working, with the promise of heading to the beach, I want to see the water, I walk down the street and it is too late maybe for me to be walking alone, and I walk slow and smell the gardenia’s and I walk past the rose bushes and wonder if this is what I traded for New York. I had asked Will about walking around. Just don’t go by the liquor store he said, and as I neared the liquor store a man in a van approach me slowly and as I sped up he spun his van in my direction. I started running and didn’t stop until I got home. Matt was gone so eventually I went in his room to sleep. Today J and I have a song on the burner about vibing hard with someone and feeling fast awake. Yup. Tonight I’ll head to see K at the beach.

April 22, The Sunset

Take the Bart at MacArthur to the N Judah, take the N all the way to 46th Street. Walk one block to Irving and 45th. I live at 4500 Irving. I walked out down the back steps and looked for Piedmont, crossed over the small creek past a row of houses. A car stopped and I asked where I was. You’re in a no man’s land really and you’ll have to call a cab. I get on the first bus that comes. The driver tells me her shift is about to end, to get off at Ridgewood Ave, the next driver will tell me where to go. The next driver comes on. She’s wearing new cowboy boots. She logs into I’m not sure what on the dashboard, adjusts her seat, has a bag of Frito lays in her left hand as she steers with the right. Getting the Bart is easy enough. On the platform a guy looks like Scott. I don’t think of him much these days, it’s been so long, and a beautiful girl with long hair and cotton brown dress waits too. She is what I imagine Galen’s hometown to be full of; striking California neo-hippies. Bart is fast and waiting for the N is slow. I’m nervous and hungry. I don’t know where I’m going. The bus won’t come. I wait. I ask more one person about it. It comes. I get on and soon I ask again how I get to where I’m going. The driver yells at me for leaning on his window and an Asian woman with a grocery bag tells me she’ll show me the way. Our bus stops and we’re made to get on the one ahead of us. I’m afraid I’ll lose her. I pass a group of punks. ‘Hey, What’s your name’ the girls sneers. The young kid to her left, I don’t get a good look. He says, I kill for peace. Peace.’ And flashes his peace sign hand in the air. I move closer to the front and pass an awkward teenager with greasy bangs, headphones and a white sundress. Today is unseasonably hot for San Francisco. K calls. Hi. I’m close. Ok good. Are you hungry? Starving, all I had today was toast. Rad, lets grub. Do you want Mexican or Thai. Thai. Perfect. I find the lady again but I don’t need her anymore, really, she's a;ready told me how to go and K tells me too. A man walks on the train, covered in enough silver buy a Honda with, and a silk coat with pink embroidery. He looks like an aging musician, his shoes are nice enough, but his jeans are filthy and he has cuts all over his cigarette holding hand. A lighter is in the other, with a scar on his knuckle. We get off the train together, me and him, and I pass him as I head into 7-11 for some tic tacs. K is walking towards me as I approach his place. He lives above the surf shop. We go inside and drop our bags off before dinner, he puts the bag of oranges insides and cracks open a beer, hands it to me. Where is your room I ask? Up there he says and points to a small hole in the ceiling that sits above two ladders, I later find out there is a third still. We eat pumpkin curry and chicken lob and drink Singha and continue on our way. Everything in the Sunset is ‘in the Sunset,' I live in the sunset, the sunset is so friendly, the sunset is calm, the sunset has the best surf. The Sunset is a faraway place filled with tan surfers, stoners, artists, musicians, and purveyors of fine coffee. The streets were wide and everyone knew everyone. K seems to preside as the resident singer and overall dude, he has a serious vibe walking down those streets, wearing a blazer over a sweatshirt he was given for free from some older ladies who gave him a bag of clothes last time he was in Big Sur. I don’t think I like this look, he said, but its warm. He reaches into his blue bag and gets out a pair of socks, slides them between his toes, throws his flip-flops back on. Cool, ok, he says, let’s go. We make it to his friend’s house where kids are on the floor playing boggle and surfboards covered in their dirty wax line the back wall. We all go out on the back porch and K plays songs from his new record. Under the blanket that stays on the chair for all weather, I think, they are some of the best songs I’ve heard in a long time, about black grass, all kinds of black, all kinds of grass, a Nike Christ, more things I can’t remember.

K’s house is a cabin, a nest-like room, a hidden room up three ladders, the shape of a Mongolian hut, buried in the ceiling and a window opening to the roof. He has plugged the nails sticking out of the wall with wine corks that polka dot the place, pictures, images and notes, hang on lines and the desk is filled with drawings, leaves made of wood hang from the beams and a paper bag of chocolate chips sits in the corner, later to be consumed.

The first time I was in San Francisco, I met a wild and amazing girl named Giulietta on the street, or I have no idea how we met. But we met, I was with Tracy with a grant from school, basically to go listen to music, and we became instant friends. G was working and helping musicians at the time, booking shows, booking bands, and we bonded over our love of Neutral Milk Hotel and Deerhoof. We sat on her apartment floor going through records as she told me about her time living down at the Elephant Twin compound. She had ideas and energy and a gigantic mastiff named Rudy that tugged her around the city and walked me home when the night got too late to walk home alone. The last time I was here Giulietta picked me up in her van, Rudy was gone, too big for the city. She was biking everywhere, swimming at the beach every morning by 5 am, and wanted to start a coconut and coffee shop. I don’t know what happened but we lost touch and I often thought about her and the Trouble Coffee card she had given me, which I always held on to.

When K came to my show a few weeks ago and mentioned that he lived near the beach I asked if a girl named Giulietta ever opened her shop there. Oh ya, he said, ya she’s pregnant with twins! The shop is the only place in the neighborhood to get good coffee, she’s with her man Byron, and she’s, ya man, she’s great. I went to Trouble and found it closed due to a flood (later I learn the espresso machine needed repair) and a local guy who had had a stroke and is always stoned was sitting outside, he knew K well, he knew everyone. Somehow he had beat us to the coffee, got in before the flood. I emailed G as soon as I got home and we spoke later that day, she sounded so grounded and calm and what I’d imagine being pregnant sounds like.

I meet Jerimiah the next day in the city, he’s on his bike sitting outside Amoaeba. We walk to a thrift store and try on capes and boots and leather skirts, leather jackets, sunglasses and shorts. We buy rasberries and blackberries for 99 cents a box at the grocer next store and walk all the way downtown, making up songs along the way, one of which is going on the ep. We walk to the farmers market, past the market cinema, a show girls club, and J stuck his headphones in my ears. I listen to an 80’s Fleetwood Mac love song and finally appreciate what a daze I was in. We stop at a dumpster full of old cds and books from the Virgin Megastore, and J finds a book called 'The Bigger the Better,' about huge breasted pin-up women from the 50-70’s. It’s been a fixture at the mixing desk; ladies with guns, baking cakes, next to cows, all topless, well most. We walk to the Bart, got off at downtown Oakland and wander around Chinatown on our way home. We’ve been working mostly. I’m tired I guess, I’m in something, or I fall in and out of something, an I don’t know what, some kind of magic hovering right above my life. I dip in, dip out. It’s the realm of all things possible and it rarely feels as tangible as it has in certain moments out here.

Crestwood Terrace, Eagle Rock La, 6am

Snaking my way to the upper Height I call Shawna and pass a myriad of coffee shops, laundromats and street punks. What I notice this time is how many kids they have and I wonder what the hell it’s like to grow up on the street with you parents only fifteen, no money, no house, no prospect of a job. What happens to those kids? Last night we went to Harley’s house and recorded all the vocals to our Peptonez ep. He has a bolt on the front of the door, a contraption with a long metal pole that sat on a diagonal to the door, the other end fit in to a latch on the middle of the door. Apparently not even the police can break it and I don’t bother to ask why its there, I just know that it works. His studio is on the bottom floor of a house, it feels like being at a construction site in the night, with pieces of the wall shining through. Harley runs the beer department at Star market and has, what looks like every kind beer sitting around the grafftied studio walls. We make it through seven songs and leave by 3:30, I’m so tired I get a tired hang-over the next day and decide to wander the streets trying to sort it out. But I run into a wall when I’m too hungry and muddled to make my way through my self-pity. I feel sore and defeated, though I bought new short jean shorts and feel happy to be walking in them. I head back to exactly where I came, this time a different way, to the mission, to 16^th street and pass all the people I couldn’t find so easily in Los Angeles, anyone with an indefinable ethnicity, or deep scars on their skin or limp in their step, or craziness in their mind, or emptiness in their eyes or hole in their shirt. Not that parts of the mission haven’t become another gentrified den of hipster reverie where foodies come to sit outside in the mild air and sip wine from down the highway and eat what looks like the best pizza and open-faced sandwiches I have seen in days(disclaimer: I am a friend to good food, and while I can recognize it readily, this food looks especially good seeing as I’ve been surviving on cookie scraps, millet bread, yogurt and coffee since moving to Kempton Street, and this is my own doing. But the saving grace of it was an incredible meal with Matt and Chris and Denise at a fancy sushi restaurant in Japan town where you aren’t allowed to ask for extra ginger and Chris and Matt helped pay my way). But, here amongst the old buildings and their relic-like signs, and the girls who still where over-size hats, and boys walking dogs, sporting flannels and puffy, well grown beards, I wander and wonder about how to gather the pieces that come together, float apart and come together again so easily in my life, and as I later find out, most lives. I get home and get a text from K that he has lost that wonderful apartment I described but he has found another place, and agrees about the up and down of it all. I call Shawna and Audrey who are making Shawna’s famous pie at Audrey’s loft downtown and I start to write a song that comes together and falls apart again by the end of the hour. I talk to Matt who tells me this is all normal, I decide to stay in for the night because Jerimiah has the tape deck set up and is amped to record Peptonez live. He hands me a mic and calls in Will, their room mate with a thick British accent, to come in and say a little something over the cheering crowd samples J has found on the internet. So I get up on a chair, behind heart sunglasses and a hoodie, mic in hand, as Will yells : From Across the Pond, Live from Albert Hall, It’s the Peptones!!!!!’ and the cheering starts, and we go.

I wake up after a warm night on the air mattress in Matt’s room, and he says we will go to Cole coffee, my favorite coffee, where they weigh your beans and you get an individual drip. We buy a baguette and J is deep in thought and we ask him what he is thinking about but he says he never tells anyone what he is thinking about which sounds about right. By the time we get home, I have to leave. I ride the Bart, passing by the dulled rainbow of houses on the hill. I get to the airport and talk to my mom and watch a man get a shoe shine. I sit down next to a 61 year old woman named Denise who was a flight attendant for 39 years. She says she moved to Canada from England when she was eight, that her parents left ahead of her and that she and her brother came a few weeks later. They had to stop a few places in the plane on the way to Calgary and she said she knew right then she wanted to be a stewardess. Our plane took off and then dipped down. I gasped and she told me that was right, that we were on a grade E flight. What’s a grade E flight? I asked. Oh, have you been to Disney World? I told her I had. A grade E ride is the best one, it’s the scariest one where you think for sure something bad is going to happen. Oh I said. Denise looked radiant. She had such clear skin and seemed to be built only of kind bones. She stopped eating sugar and dairy a year ago and she lost twenty pounds. Her daughter lives in Australia with her boyfriend Richard, who also like’s their dog Emma, which is very good.

April 29, 6am, Eagle Rock

I am at Galen’s house now and it’s 5:45am, no it’s 6, I feel very awake, we just finished the art for the face of the cd and maybe I’ll go to bed soon. The cat is feeling social and stretching next too me, and has just cut my leg. I’ve been up for close to a day. Galen doesn’t sleep and rides in the magic that hovers right above life. We are about to embark on a project involving the record that I’ll keep mum about for now. We are in the red house on the hill, but the owner is coming back from Germany tomorrow so we are moving to his girlfriend Dakota’s amazing apartment in West Hollywood. The sun is up. Dakota is coming by to help clean up at ten, thank goodness. We have to leave at one.

Fountain Ave, Dakota’s Apt, West Hollywood

No, Galen doesn’t sleep. It’s pretty amazing I’ve never met anyone like him. He gets maybe an hour or two a day and besides that no sleep. I call it a night/day at about 6am and curl up in the bed of the couple whose house we’re staying at. I wake up again at ten and Galen is still on the couch, right where I left him. The house is a bit of a mess and Dakota arrives about an hour later to help clean up. Dakota wears shiny black tight pants that fall just past her belly button and a black tank top. She reminds me of someone but I’m not sure who. She helps me get the house organized and after a few hours and a visit from the ten year old neighbor Malik, we are ready to go. The house looks good. We get in the car and Dakota drives to the grocery store with Galen in the front and I sleep in the back. We are moving to set up a studio in Dakota’s studio or in her living room. We arrive at the apt, a chateau style place with arched doors and a winding staircase that leads to her bedroom. It’s out of time, perfect with its hard wood floors and country house furniture, art all over the walls, a Raushenberg, a Damien Hirst, and green tiles in the kitchen. I’m not totally sure what’s going on. The plan is to make the album art for East is East and record an album of covers of East by West coast artists. Galen, who as I mentioned before, never sleeps, and there for has 24 hours to do what most people do in ten, so I’m adjusting and trying get my bearings on what is going on and what will happen. Only time will tell.

At Dakota’s I watch tv and sleep under the fur blanket she had laid out for me. I am so tired and so wired and she tells me to sleep and take it easy, that it has been a stressful day. I wake up and we all stand in the kitchen and talk about love and marriage. I hear about her Brazilian bombshell mother who had her first wedding with over 1,000 guests in attendance. Galen has made delicious hummus and we unpack the car and soon Dakota leaves for dinner at her folks house.

Dakota just got home, I am on the small seat in the dining room as I did not want to disturb Galen, who after about a month of an hour or two of sleep every night finally passed out after a stressful call from some girl who is obsessed with him. He wakes up and we sit in the dining room and soon I go back to bed. The next morning Galen has finally slept, he says he is afraid to sleeo sometimes because he’s not sure the world will be there when he wakes up, but Dakota is the only woman he has every been able to sleep next to, and its all a beautiful thing to hear. We wake up slowly, Dakota runs to work and Shawna comes over so we can plan the photo shoot, we decide to shoot at the beach and I’m excited for what will come out. We spend most of the day talking about West is West and who will contribute, then Audrey picks me up and we go to an insanely huge dinner of Korean BBQ, I’m so full after hardly eating for the last week I go back to her apt and fall asleep. Tonight I play a warehouse party with Peptonez and after that, well on and on.

On the Anniversary of Our Completing Something, 2 yrs later, approximately

2009-09-05T22:15:00.000-07:00

I am wearing the sweatshirt we bought the day before we left. Its blue, and soft and I remember as I pull it over my shoulders how they teased you at the table in the airport restaurant in LA that it was a girls sweatshirt, and the next day you gave it to me. Today its 2 years later, or close, since we finished something, and then since we became a we, and then a 'you' and a 'me.' I went to the mountains to a cabin with a barn that had been converted into a studio with a bed a kitchen and a 180 degree view of the Blue Ridge mountains, and couldn't help but think of you in August, and then you texted me when I came down the hill, at 1:11, you said, and I knew somehow you would, as I had written and you were due, sometime, to get back to me. And there you were again, a universe away, and I having gotten that far too, was for a moment slung back into you. There were still things to uncover, still are it seems, maybe not with 'us' but with 'you' and with 'me'. I still turn certain events over in my mind and wonder about what really happened, what was happening, how much younger I was and why it made me so overwhelmingly sad at the end, but at the beginning so ecstatically happy. But that is me being naive, because that's as simple a story as plays in any movie. I now have my theories and positions, my rogue philosophies. I can still feel you sometimes, if I try, through the thick glass we molded between us, still hear you breathing, or see you carve an initial, spell something backward in your smokey breath as it collects on the pane, but I don't know if we'll shatter it again. What once was a mirror we stood on one side of together now stands between us as a thick and ragged as a rough sewn seem. I think perhaps you saw something in me, you found me, somehow, well, in the same way that you would stumble upon this one day, at a borrowed screen, daydreaming, and wondering. But what was it exactly? Perhaps you used me as an escape and then when you felt too out of control you quit me, and I wonder if you ever did see me, even though I felt you could see me. I wonder what I did to you, how did I use you? That perhaps you embodied some of my dreams, because you wanted to, and could, hear me. And you became inspiration to me and since I am still waiting to find someone who so violently shakes me to feeling. I wonder what made us 'we' back at the beginning, and I suppose and hope it is a few things. One, that whatever we thought we saw in the other, was and is there, and I do believe that's true. And then, that whatever it was I got to feel back there, two years back there, as we completed something, and whatever you got to feel, was more than our afflictions and addictions, or any of our superficial musings. It was joy of love or love of possibility. I don't know if we'll ever be that for each other again, in certain moments I miss you and miss you being that in me, miss your generosity and miss the things I could see even when you didn't want to see. And I miss how you saw me when you were willing to see me. All the cliches, I miss Z. But I let you go, because freedom really comes when fear can start to breath. Or if its a rope we're sometime tied to, we gotta know what we're cutting to get sailing. Be it corny. I hope that we find that again, however we do, that joy of love, that love of possibility.

Travelogue 1 - Last Year's Tour Archive

2009-09-05T20:16:00.001-07:00

FROM DAVENPORT TO ANOTHER DAY ANOTHER CHICAGO

Sept 10, 2008 – Rock Island, IL

Wow – so here I am at Huckleberry's in Rock Island after a very long day that won't end anytime real soon and that's ok . I just finished up at Daytrotter and will play a show here very soon at this fine pizza joint– it's neat to be on my own but strange as well – it feels, well as you drive in a certain light on the highway, listening to Allen Ball talk about Vampires, and his life and loss and movies and funerals and his dead mother and sister and sexuality, you feel, no I felt, almost nowhere. My guitar was late arriving and had to be sent to Rachel's house, then, out of stress I guess, I left my bag at the car rental place. Oh man! So with nothing much in tow save for Marc's little amp and my wallet and a phone that could not be turned on in an effort to save battery I drove to the Quad cities, giving in to the temptation of a cigarette and somehow resisting persistent memories which had of late kept me, not nowhere, but nowhere I needed to stay. And so perhaps this entry is written through the filter of tiredness, with a sense of humor about the fact that sometimes stress wins and you can fight back by laughing, by pulling out of the gas station and almost hittin' the car behind you, by having to answer a question about a song which somewhere I must have said was about not 'growing up'. I didn't mean it that way, and I explained myself, I meant resisting, out of fear, growing out of old patterns, growing on, growing into, grout out of, and plain old growing – and somewhere in there I think I said that that it was noble to try for that and damn hard sometimes as well. So here I am one salty salad and a tomato soup later – feeling like I've never felt before – which is a blessing, because that's the high I guess, of going to new places, of being no where. And then here's the amazing part – by tomorrow this cowboy in the desert mentality will quickly fade I'm sure as I meet up with Ra Ra and Walter Meego, see the lovely Geon and my cousin Rachel, stay at her amazing apt and then, and then and then – man I get to be blessed with the company of some of my best friends on the road ! Amazing ! Audrey and Sarah and Danielle – man I am lucky and so excited. I am in Rock Island and I got to get on to go sing some songs now.

Bye,

Pepi

Sept 12, 2008 – Minneapolis, MN

Another day, another Chicago – I almost can't believe I was there this morning, last night, just yesterday. Played the first leg of the tour with the Ra Ra Rioters and learned my first lesson from them – make-up. Well I borrowed some really amazing shiny green eyeliner and it may still be on my eyes, hanging around the bottom rims, or it is my tiredness, I'm not sure, and I'm not even sure of all I'll say here. Tiredness I find, is like a drug, talking to friends from home is like talking drunk without words slurred, profundities are not profound, nor stupid, they're just some other sound uttered form your tired mouth that find themselves in the mix of the minutes you spend trying to get your way from the counter and your coffee to your table. This morning I woke up at 6:30 and Rachel, my brilliant and kind cousin was making me sandwiches, two kinds I later learned, cream cheese with tomato and cucumber and egg salad. She also threw in a ginger ale, a plum, a banana and three chocolates, oh and two shortbread cookies. Rachel is a Phd candidate at the University of Chicago in Yiddish Literature, she has many books and is very neat. She has soft big brown eyes and answers the door first with a quick 'hold on' from behind the door and then opens it with a welcoming and excited smile. And so off I drove, through the city, watching the neighborhoods change as I approached the highway, and the railcar that runs along it, folks standing on the platform, a girl in black, going somewhere, cars stuck, going nowhere. The clouds were too heavy, too melancholy for what was supposed to be a fresh day and I took out everything in the bag and tasted it all. I drove down 90W for what seemed like forever, maybe it was forever, but probably not. I think if you love or hate something that something feels like both forever and no time at all. I think I both loved and hated this drive. Against a backdrop of cornfields which had turned from the summer sun, frayed at the edges to an almost toxic green, past yellow wild flowers and brush that looked purple as the light changed, and trees whose thick leaves were already blood red, I made my way through Wisconsin, asking myself big questions. What I found was a gas station, another bathroom and the conclusion, at least for the hour, that the decision to go or stay, to do it, or walk away, call or not call, write or leave it alone, these things we think will keep us in control – they are no-thing at all. It doesn't matter. And to be somewhere, as fighter planes fly overhead, thin as paper, drawing invisible lines in the sky, well to be there and think that you could be anywhere else, maybe we are fooling ourselves, at least I was. No amount of thinking, I don't think, will change the light. And as I made it then to 94W, my last 200 miles that took me to Minneapolis, the sun came out, as it will. And it was hope and it was life and it was also just the weather and the land. When I landed at the college radio station, 7 hours later, a whole bevy of really awesome students set me up and I sang the songs I tried to write to get me into better weather, and it was fun, ya know, thank you K radio, thank you to the lovely gal who boosted me into the tree to take that cool Polaroid, I was smiling and I meant it. Sarah must be getting off the plane now, maybe she'll meet me at this coffee shop and I'll be so happy for her company.

Des Moines, of Where?

Sept. 13, 2008 – Des Moines, IA

Here we are seated in the long and cavernous Java Joes in Des Moines. Today we came from the cornfields, where we, Sarah and I, stopped for a listen to the cicadas, and tried to capture on film the way the slight wind blew the crops, green, yellow and gold, like coastal air blows the water in a bay, discreet and quiet and glad to be of use. This breeze and the electric hum of those long-necked insects is the closest thing to the ocean I have found in this dense midland. A golden dome on the top of a city building blinds you as you drive in to Des Moines, but gives itself away, too proud and too obvious to offer the promise of anything but the glory of it's own reflection. There is not much in this downtown, though that could be unfair, why would there necessarily be more 'life' in Brooklyn, but the buzz on the place is quieter, that much is true. There is a hotel, the Randolf, where we had thought to stay. We received word in line, waiting for a pick-me-up that, The Randolf is home to the town's most derelict, down and out drunks, druggies and bed-bugs. Sarah and I looked at each other. Bedbugs? No. Thank you. A 24-hour bail bonds place, is on the corner of this street and a building, The Jewett, ha!, whose windows are boarded up is here too. College somebody's are getting drunk on something and sporting their college somewhere t-shirts, cheering for someone, and the bums are talking to us from hidden eyes behind red-tinted shades and leather jackets and sneakers and studded belts and the meters don't care about your quarters.

Post Script – Went to the Randolf to check it out. Turns out you can access Bail Bonds through the lobby. I think the place is run by its tenants.

From Downtown to Downtown

Sept. 16, 2008 – Denver, CO

From downtown to downtown in a daze. From Minneapolis to Kansas, through the plains, past Custer's House, the cows and horses, black and tan against the green, and the wild flowers with centers like black hearts and petals like pollen. To the Family Inn diner in Colby and then to the lobby of another downtown, this time in Denver, in the din of morning TV broadcasts, in the middle of feeling nowhere and feeling too sorry to breathe right. When we pulled into this city we passed by anyone who couldn't make it, in the midnight hour, with hair matted and dirty, with the lights of the city and the new buildings, each one looking like it had been built on the same day as the other. The roads felt so wide, so new that the car was a toy. Those lights of the city, so bright after the hours of black flat surfaces - the plains, these were the lights that 'they' were talking about. When ‘they’, you know them, drove into these cities from the mind of nowhere, from no sleep, from medications and free drinks and trucker speed. From hours of longing and loving and defeat and looking at and deceiving, themselves and anyone who would buy their ten-cent stories. Their lights were so bright and so clear in the mountain air, their burn fixed a halo around them but no two halos touched. And nothing touched them, cloaked in that numbness, a halo in its own right, we glow with what we think we're hiding. I too was glowing, wrecked by quips in the car about who knows what, and realizing, seeing finally that what was acting on me, the ghost force of memory, keeping me down here, Jesus Christ, well this weight, this weight I was bringing, it's acting on her and him and them and I didn't want to see it. I'm sorry. Well the lobby is cold and the coffee is free. Upstairs Sarah is sleeping. Someone I loved is half destroyed and we all need to grow up. And this year I faced every sleeping daemon I ever needed to know and watched as they shined my shoes and brought me tea and kept me here, comfortable and unable to leave. Let's move this place. Take these these mountains, this border surrounding us, you and me. Move this place, shifting and creaking, move these mountains, stretch out the horizon, pray, and let it be easy.

Joe Bob Browning

Sept. 17, 2008 – Santa Fe, New Mexico

Sitting in the Sub, the dining hall at Santa Fe College. Danielle set up the stage with a woven rug and a fur throw. She'll come with us, me and Audrey now as Sarah is leaving tomorrow, down through Texas and into Oklahoma. Today we drove from Denver here, stopped off in Maxwell, for a coffee, ironically tried to get a coffee in a shut down store called Maxwell's House. I made a joke of it but Sarah was in the phone booth and Audrey was taking a picture of a dead bird, eyes still open. No coffee, but gas, and a sweet mastiff pup at the station. The colors changed along with the landscape and the hour. Flat land and the distant promise of the range gave way to tall flattop rocks, and green shrubs, antelope, windmills spinning silver in the afternoon sun which cast itself across the plains wherever the clouds would let it. We saw a turn off, an exit maybe, or just an old nothing, a chance to leave the highway and find the train we'd seen. What we found was a long dirt road that led us to a bruised red trailer and three cowboys, staggered in age, one of who was staggering. The eldest introduced himself, well I'm Joe Bob Browning, this is Mike, the one with the glasses and this is my son, Colby Matt Browning. Joe Bob has a leathered, weathered face, welts on his hands, big old cuts and is holding a beer. There are cans on the ground and the men are all grinning. Can we take your photo? I asked. Oh sure thing he said. And what should I do? He asked. Oh pretend I'm not here, I said. But how could we do that? He asked. Y'all are the prettiest things we ever seen. And he told us we could stay forever and they would show us a real good time, Sarah he would take camping. His eyes were thin, unfocused, and his mustache was the opposite, thick and full right up to his cheeks. There was white mess coming form his eyes, like they were running with chalk and I wondered about the hours he spent in the sun to turn his skin so brown and his hat so dirty. And how long he'd been on the drink, and why he couldn't stop tearing. They took us into a field to show us the cattle. Colby rounded 'em up in a pen so Sarah could get close. He was our age, 25, or a year older. And Mike disappeared for a while, maybe it was that Joe Bob was a show stealer and it was hard, near impossible to compete. We followed the cattle around the pen, trying to get a closer look at their shit stained sheathes and their big soft eyes and the sun on their backs. When you take a picture of Joe Bob he says, well thank you darling, thank you darling.

***

Here at the college Danielle is setting up. It sounds great. I miss her clear voice and the sweetness in her eyes and how her shoulders move when she sings. We lived together when I first moved to Brooklyn, in a tiny apartment across from the gas station and the downtown jail, with a roommate Nick and his cat Spirit, thin as a slat and she couldn't stop shitting. And we read Passage to India to each other in her oversized blue chair, wore wigs, smoked Lucky Strikes, worked at the same place and drank a lot of tea.

80 miles outside Santa Fe I realized with a greater clarity how certain sadnesses were running me around and it wasn't just me, it was acting on the people I loved, the people who are good to me. Was that the face of the bottom of the rock, the one I hit in Denver? Time to grow up, cross a new border. I don't know if what you do unintentionally can act on you, but what you don't do, even unintentionally, don't listen, don't ask, think it don't matter, well it starts to seep in, to everything. When you go there, you've gone to that invisible wood, thinking no one sees you, even if you are as exposed as a hawk walking the empty road. And when you look up, face to the dulled sounds of a car pressing the wind, oh well, then you thank god for your wings.

Pecos, Jean Sherman, That Old Familiar Joy

September 18, 2008 – Fort Sumner, NM, 3PM

Jean Sherman drove rock candy from Chicago to New Mexico and down into Texas. He met Hank Williams and some other country singer and got around in his day. He's 85. His brother's living outside of Buffalo. He's living in Fort Sumner and will bring us coffee, he says, if we land in jail. We're driving on 60, heading to Lubbock. Stayed at Danielle's place in Pecos last night, slept inside the beautiful empty red clay house on warm mats and woke up early to Sarah knocking at the door with allergies and a swollen eye. Drove over to the restaurant to meet Shayna, Emiliano's not not girlfriend, to eat Huevos Salvadorenos and then dropped Sarah off at the airport shuttle. Last night we drove home from Santa Fe under the giant moon just past full. Edith Piaf sang as Audrey and I tried to imitate her 'r's' and I tried, in between turning left or right, to glimpse at the sky, almost unreal, so wide and so metallic bright. Danielle bought a pack of Lucky Strikes, and driving past the ranches, behind an old school bus, we sang along to Shelter From the Storm and I caught myself in the passenger side mirror, smiling, filled with a sense of renewal and that old familiar joy.

Lights in Trees

September 19, 2008 – Denton, Texas

Grain Mills. Oil rigs. Cattle. Corroded iron livestock pens. Signs for Jesus. Town square. Pawn shop and a neon sign. Village green. Christmas lights in all the trees. It looks like a blur. My eyes are drying and puffy and the waitress at the restaurant on the corner of the street asked about if I was ok. Denton, Texas. I cast off a long brewing spell. And exercised those buried incantations I'd been saying to myself without listening. I feel for the first time in too long, awake, not tired any more, free. It was a phone call and it was an understanding and it was a blessing. Somehow I had chosen to walk away from myself for a long time. I was trying to walk backwards, thought that if only I could access a memory, a void, a history, not really access it but stand near by it, awkwardly, waiting for it to reveal itself to me, I would not have to do the work of moving into the day, into the sun, beautiful though searing. Down deep, in the place of spells and blessings I realize my legs carry me. Danielle and Audrey told me about how life is silly and we ate ice cream, got some wine and Danielle got us glasses from the wine store, real glass, and we sat in the park under the lights, their halos, those halos, burning as a man talked in a strange voice for his dog, and a little kid was trying to spin to get dizzy. And I spun to get dizzy and plopped down exhausted next to them, Audrey, the quiet storm, Danielle the mystical beauty.

enton, Norman, Torrie Resurrecting the Dead

Sept 20, Norman, Oklahoma

Comfort Suites sitting on the bed with Danielle and her friend Israel and his friend Joshua from Arkansas. Audrey left today and tomorrow Dani is leaving. We played at Opolis and went to Waffle House, put a pickle in the grilled cheese. I talked to Matt today for a long time. He amazes me. I don't know how he got like that, Jesus, man. Right now we are listening to Israel's songs about his home town. His voice is moving.

Earlier today D and I bought cheese, three kinds and dates and crackers and sat with the rest of our wine by the tracks as trains passed us carrying vans, cargo, it was the Santa Fe line and as we ate, D told me about bike rides in France. Later we did a tarot card reading. I asked my questions and got the card of Death and also a green fairy lady who was all about re-growth and creativity. Death in cards means letting go over what's been holding you back.

The night before we got to Denton, before I finally just let go, tendered my resignation, hey you, good man tinged with tenderness and your mean things, my mean things, our mean things, I was in Lubbock, hearing stories from Torrie. Torrie is 29, a folk singer, a real great guitar player. She has pale skin and clear, pale gray eyes and has lived in Lubbock all her life. Now she lives in a house whose door is carved like the moon so when you are sleeping on the couch you can look out the door and think you are looking at the sky. Torrie is beautiful. After the show we went back to her and her girlfriend Brooke's house. Torrie told us she'd tried to open an art space, tried to get people to see the choice in things. But over and over again the town shut her down. Her friend Ariel who was also there had been beaten to black body, gay-bashed in a town where cops don't believe in gay bashing. They said in Jasper there's a sign, a billboard as you drive in that says if you're black you better not be around when the sun goes down. They said Lubbock was the kind of town that could crack your spirit in half, but they couldn't leave. Torrie's mom lives down the street, and like a Tornado you know is coming, you refuse to believe you can be hurt in a place where you were raised to feel safe. She said god was word for most of her community. That there was one way and it was the bible and that's what most people she had known growing up were taught to believe. Maybe she could be an example, she said, of a new way to be free in mind, spirit and body. And Handler, their crazy kitten wrapped his small arms around the legs of the couch and darted across the room, as Torrie lit another Malboro. She said when she was in the church she came into a relationship with another woman who practiced there. When her father died this woman told Torrie that if she prayed hard enough she could bring her father back from the dead. So she went to his body. She put her hands on his heart and held them there. She prayed as hard as she knew how, just stood there, praying, reciting. I knew the bible back and front she said. I knew every word, I said every prayer I could. I stayed like that for I don't know for how long and he just lay there. Nothing. Then I woke up. That's when I started looking at everything they had taught me. And I could see the bible and the passages and point to them and I said this is bullshit and that is bullshit and then that was the end of it for me. And Torrie, who was wearing a t-shirt with Elmo on it, who's dirty Burt and Ernie tee was laying in a chair in the bathroom didn't want to change anybody. She just wanted to live and by example let it be known that there were others ways to have faith and be free. Let it be known, that thank god, no amount of love or praying was gonna wake that sleeping body.

Situational Extremes Revised: Crystal’s Singing on Main Street

September 22, 2008 – Dekalb, Illinois

Outside a young kid with dreads and an earring and a headband, who is supposed to be at work, is tracing Crystal's body in chalk on the street. She's shoeless. She has her guitar and she and Jordan played their songs as a train cut across the town. One song was about love making you crazy. Crystal said all the train activity was because of gas prices. And maybe she'll leave school early. She doesn't want to be around to pay loans when the depression hits. Earlier today I was wishing I were on Dekalb Ave, Brooklyn. I have thrust myself into situational extremes, joined a new tour last night in Omaha. A happy hippy was riding around on a scooter when we got here and said he was looking forward to the positive vibrations of the evening. Back outside, after the show Crystal asks if I'm from Brooklyn. Ya, I say. Let me ask you my one Brooklyn landmark. Pratt University? I say I know it. I lived in the campus dorms she tells me. Was your dad a teacher there I ask? No, she said, he was an architecture student until we ran out of money. Then we moved here. I asked if he got to finish up somewhere but she said no that he drives trucks. She's beautiful, short hair, skinny, dirty feet, a tattoo on her left leg she designed of her and her girlfriend's names, two C's. Jordan is wearing a silver shirt and shorts, she has a video camera. She's full of spunk and talks about moving to Norway to sing and also about the survey she has to finish for gender studies. Crystal and Jordan restore me. We take a picture when they leave. A big sized man on a bench gestures in his leather jacket to somewhere across the street. I watch as his arm falls against the brick, lit up yellow by the glow of lamplight and again a train is passing.

These nights I'm dreaming vague dreams. Driving through Iowa I saw wheat stalks with tips the color of the palest lace pulsing in the breeze. And every bird in this country loves a wire when not flying. The wind energy towers were not spinning, I'm doing everything I can to stay dizzy. When I eat I eat ravenously. A band is practicing above the Lincoln Inn and a sign that says Bakery. There goes the happy hippy, redhead with dreads, riding his scooter in his shades down the street.

Stray Cats, Sunset, Football, Peanut Butter Tacos, My Favorite Jukebox(the Ghost!)

September 25, 2008 – Cleveland, Ohio

Oh man, here I am, out of breath the at the Beachland Tavern, just finishing dancing to the best dance set of the tour, provided by my new favorite Jukebox Ghosts, ok ok Jukebox the Ghost. I joined up with Ben, Tommy and Jesse in Chicago and have been riding with them for that last few days. Today we took pictures down by an old person's home on the beach and saw a whole family of stray kittens, played football and got us some exercise, finally! I feel good, it's been such a long year and I think I found the light, not sure how but man oh man, it's finally ok again. I am so excited for the future of things, new approaches, blessings, and wings on the wind of wings. It's band time again, it's California soon. I almost can't believe the lightness in my heart(the red bull in my veins) and what this levity will mean. Cheers to new friends who feel old, to old friends who feel new, to cool friends who will hold on and those who see you through. Cheers and love from Cleveland. See you in LA.

OBAMA-NATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Category: Life

Nov. 5, 2008

Pecan groves and cotton fields, white white buds on long black stalks. We made it through Virginia, into Raleigh, NC and then to Mount Pleasant SC. Played at a bar, and after I cried watching Obama, turned the volume up on the screen as loud pop songs played over the speakers and a girl jumped up and down after winning at a deer hunter video game. I felt an enormous relief. I hugged my band mates.

We pulled into the hotel and got high and drank our free beer in our sleeping bags watching the pundits. In the morning I wandered into the parking lot in my pajamas and asked the maid her feelings. She smiled and said she was happy and I felt her and it seemed to be such a proud day. There was a card for her tip in the room. It said Thanks - Gi Gi and had two smiley faces on it. I put on real clothes and drove to the grocery store with Jon. I tried to ask the checkout girl what she thought about the election but she said it was store policy that she wasn't allowed to talk about it. A quick drive back to the motel and I noticed how the trees were a mixed bag, half spruce and half palm, somewhere between my childhood and my idea of what was possible down here.

We got on 17 and drove under weeping trees covered in hanging moss and drove past an old plantation that looked perfectly entact , white fence, a sign and those overgrown trees lining a long driveway we could not even begin to see the end of. When we stopped at a gas station, it wasn't Ashepoo but it was close, it was quiet. And there were two men in a bright black acura with tinted windows, Louis Vuitton luggage in the back, and one of em was wearing some kind of leather whip around his waist. And it was just so quiet. And the night before we'd been at a gas station somewhere between North and South Carolina and a bunch of cats were hanging around the pump. A baby kitten let me pet her and I thought about what it would be like if we took her with us. Apparently they get addicted to the fumes, they're huffers, strays. Onto Tallahasee. We stopped at a BBQ joint next to Wendy's and a gas station. A guy named Trent had gold teeth and his name carved into the gold. He was working the big cookers, said the meat cooked for 18-24 hours and you could see that by the skin of the chicken Jon ordered and the moistness of Matt's brisket. And he said to the white lady in the jumpsuit that he agreed it was a great day as we did have a new president. But he said to me wait until they try to shoot him because he said some shit was gonna go down. That Bush was a puppet, that the real men running this country are 170 years old, that they don't want to get their hands out of the cookie jar and they're trying to figure out ways to live longer. Said that they throw punches at united nations meetings which is why they aren't televised anymore. He was a former tattoo artist and was a starving tattoo artist at one point and was from Atlanta and I guess now lives in that border town and isn't hungry anymore and they gave me and Am tea for free.

My Very First YES!

2009-09-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

WOW what do ya know - I now have a blog - well hello!