Sunday, September 6, 2009
Catharine's Pictures, Peace Mountain, Secret Falls, Grapes, Awe, Moonshine,
Travelogue 2 - California Dreamin' in HollyGrove
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 16th 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.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
On the Anniversary of Our Completing Something, 2 yrs later, approximately
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
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.
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