tee pee gig, yo

I played a house show in Salem last night with The Underlings, Phantom! And The Shy Seasons. (Here is Ed Cole's take on the night, as well.) It was funky group house with graffiti on the walls, no interior doorknob on the front door, and chunks of foam and other assorted scraps sorts of bungied over a window opening. Alex, one of the residents, fried up veggie sausage while I played my set in the kitchen nook, mostly newer songs and some older almost-discarded ones that haven’t made their way into rock band sets in the last two years. I’m glad “hey hey librarian” has seen the light of day. I think it is a hit. If I quit playing acoustic sets I start to feel like I have mittons on when I pick it back up. Do a few and I feel more like I have gloves on.

The Underlings were fantastic, better every time. Tight, but relaxed and having fun. Great to see some Salem people getting into that. Phantom! was a local band and they kicked major ass, something like Mudhoney crossed with the Vines at hyperspeed with hyper psychic brotherly togetherness. I saw them group hugging right before they rolled out. They royally killed it and people were going nuts. It’s not something you see often, not enough. It’s the mushroom analogy again. Bands are like mushrooms, they appear when tenuous factors converge. Blink and you will walk by. Go looking for them and they’re hard to find. It has to be something you get inside, sort of, like walking in the same woods on a regular basis. The walls were sweating and the guitar player came close to knocking himself out on an I-beam multiple times, jumping around. The only time you could see the band clearly was when flash bulbs were going off. The Shy Seasons had a tough slot going after them--they are a more contemporary rock band, really good too, with cool textures coming from keys and well-played guitar effects. A band in the Radiohead lineage. A year from now that house may be razed. Hopefully bathroom will have been cleaned at least once if it’s still standing.

Also, there was teepee in back. This was my first tee pee gig ever, the fires within tended by an energetic young guy in a full buckskin suit. I heard some bongo sounds and an upright bass (tall tee pee). It made me think of Ken Kesey. Eugene has formalized quirkiness in a kind of dull way, but Salem is erupting with funky stuff, great bands, kooky flow. I took lots of pictures and some movies on my camera and hopefully they’ll turn out. Thanks to Ches’ke (of Salem instrumental duo The Insects, for hooking up the show.)

Tom and Lisa Nunes helped make the whole thing happen by loaning all four bands a mic, a cable, and stand, for use with an old bass cab that was serving as a p.a. Emergency gear bail, thank you Les Nunes. I kept my eye on the stuff and made sure it didn’t end up in the 5 gallon tempeh chili pot, nice to see them and talk a little bit at 11:30 before they went to bed. They’re working on a new record with a full-time drummer and Tom is staying busy recording bands.

Classic rock radio was in a sweet groove out of Albany while I drove home swigging a Blue Amp. 106.3 is a pretty good classic rock station. “Should I Stay or Should I Go” segued into “Song is Over,” “Tender is the Night,” and “Cut My Hair.” I was wired for quite a while and read my book when I got home. Watched two episodes of Saving Grace before hauling myself out of bed to get constructive in some way or another. Typically, an hour or so of TV in bed helps me fire full-tilt into serious putzing and chore stalking. (Joe Rudi the GMC is vacuumed, no cool ranch corn nuts under the seats.)

I am psyched about The Underlings write-up in The Eugene Weekly—it says it right. I haven’t chunked my morning writins into blogosphere this last week as I saw no reason to publish paragraphs of irritatability & sleep depro rant. Just one of those weeks, maybe if I go back and cut out some chunks. I’ve continued listening to the backlog of Watt From Pedro shows—yesterday was w/ John Talley-Jones from Urinals/100 Flowers, telling that band’s story and MW playing cuts from various records. The Steve Shelley episode was the same—good way to pick up some music history and get back in touch with radio as informative. Plus you get to make your own pictures, like listening to a song. The episodes of Jack Flanders radio plays are fun.

Yesterday I downloaded a record I’ve wanted to have again for a long time, Corrosion of Conformity’s Animosity, which I recall giving to Hoffy for his birthday one year in high school. It’s after the initial hardcore one, before their 90’s records. It’s hardcore enough to be fast and cathartic but metal enough to be in that creative crossover, where you can still smell the garage they practice in and the shows they play. It reminds me of Mark's orange bug with the patchwork fenders. It's a heavy record, and I've been in the mood.

I’m halfway through James Lee Burke’s Jesus Out to Sea story collection. I’m liking that a lot, enjoying his writing in the short form. Kind of in a similar vein I took my brother Neal’s tip on the Holly Hunter angel/cop show Saving Grace, which Anne Lamott could have written in collaboration with the Cohen Brothers. I'm liking that pretty good.

I had a fun jam with Charlie McClain and Cecil Zapata this last week. They are doing a strange confunction and I played some goofy guitar with it. Music's fun, don't let anybody tell you different.

Alot has been said about my Attempted Moustache--that's why I'm going to Fu Manchu Mountain Retreat for a rigorous programme of bucket showers and early morning bamboo stick sparring.

Writing on the deck again, it’s a little cool but not too bad. Last night we went to Mike’s cd release show—that was good. John Shipe played some slide with him and that sounded sweet. We had a nice day yesterday, rode our bikes over to Valley River Center and saw Pelham 123. Then rode over to House of Records and for coffee and to the grocery store. I finished Paris Between Meals and started James Lee Burke’s Jesus Out to Sea story collection. I haven’t read a book of short stories in a long time and I’m looking forward to that.

Pelham 123 was alright. Denzel Washington was compelling and likeable, as always, and Travolta played a tightly-wound psychopath who was pretty complex, a real nasty dude. The cinematography was interesting—choppy and fragmented in the standard post-MTV way, but composed differently. Somehow they’re able to wash the screen in high-tech, mechanistic lighting and still grab and define a gritty element of the frame—a face in passing subway car, for instance. There seemed to be a brief nod to 70’s cinema in the first twenty second of titles, before the whole thing went into the computer editing blender.

The movie I watched Saturday, Machine Girl, also co-starred technique—violence animated by computers. For instance, a face would sort of melt away into a gory pop-eyed skull as it was wittled by machine gun fire. Throwing stars would slice victims into neat sections which would separate like slices of aspic. The gore was ridiculous, though it served classic themes of revenge, family honor, and loyalty. I’m not sure what that was trying to say, but I was pretty bored, and watched the last twenty minutes of the movie on high speed fast forward. Once you’ve seen fifteen or twenty headless torsos spraying phony blood, a chainsaw fight is not over the top, but way under the top.

gnochi freaks unite

I got up early this morning so I could go to Saturday Market w/ Tracy and then walk home in the mid-morning. My plan is to watch a Japanese action flick, Machine Girl, in bed, on a Saturday—a most nihilistic way to spend 90 minutes, when I could be tending the moss on the roof. F that, man, it's gonna rain.

Last night I made a gnocchi dish with arugula, chicken sweet Italian sausages, roasted red peppers, and gorgonzola. It turned out. The gnocchi was out of a whadyacallit pressure-sealed package and was kind of slimy, once boiled, but still good. The best gnocchi I’ve had was at one of the Spoden weddings out on the McKenzie. It had a little bit of tooth to it, but was soft and not at all slimy or doughy. I think this was a Brian Keough production. They are a family prone to sudden violence so I had to eat mine under a table while brothers hit brothers with hotel pans and tiki torches. It was not the bride’s honor in question but rather which keg to tap next. The arugula was really good with the warm pasta—it steamed in a little bit but still had a good crunch with the gorgonzola. I forgot about the pancetta in the fridge, which would have put this dish over the top.

I am writing outside today, on the deck. It’s a little cool out here. Dozer is on her bed already going back to sleep after breakfast. Chris Ross and I were talking the other night about the ice dam that broke, what, 7 thousand years ago, and formed this valley, pretty much bulldozing the landscape with a catastrophic flash flood. A wall of water that carried boulders and debris like a sandblaster. It’s one of those things you think of once in a while in the midst of the 21st century hustle, Facebook checks, and oil changes. We're pulling the slo-mo wipeout with our fossil fuel problem.

Mucho groovage from the Grateful Dead live album I put on this week…it’s the first one, the one that says “dead freaks unite” in the liner notes, I bought it when I was sixteen or so, probably because the Hoffman’s were deadheads all and I wanted to know what this was about. It occurred to me that a thousand bands have tried to put that shirt on but the band that has really done it over the course of 30 years is Sonic Youth, on a musical level anyway. That’s kind of wild because the first SY show I saw was Bad Moon Rising and at that point they still would hit you upside the head like The Swans. I’d seen kids spazz out to hardcore bands but this was more primitive than that. Most of my posse was pissed off because Sonic Youth sounded like a skate punk band name, but Steve T and I stuck it out and that show changed our point of view, I’d say. I played some Dead on KWVA when I dj'd there and the phone rang off the hook. People were pissed! And what I played was the trippy jammy mid-set stuff...this was some years before indie kids got back into bongos and acid.

Look close and you can see U.L.'s toothpick

I’m almost through with A.J. Liebling’s book Between Meals: An Appetite For Paris. He keeps talking about calvados, which I’ve never had. I don’t know if it’s a wine or a kind of liquor, like brandy, but in his context it sounds essential. I’ll have to look that one up. Major sneezes early, this morning. When I’m sneezin’ while the neighbor’s rooster is crowin’, I figure there’s some serious pollen in the hills. I popped a Claritin while I made coffee and read a DIY piñata article in Bust. Not much energy this week, pretty zapped by family visit.

Last night we had cover band practice. Jamie’s work schedule got changed so it was just me and Chris. I played him some of The Embarrassment, and he picked an old Clash song “Stay Free” and a Depeche Mode “Never Let Me Down,” or something like that. We figured out a reasonable detuning to play a Sonic Youth song, and maybe we’ll do the Depeche Mode in that tuning too. He also spun a Johnny Marr + dude-from-Pet-Shop-Boys record called Electronic or The Electronic. Chris and Jen’s basement is just an awesome place to hang out—amps everywhere, a fully loaded I-tunes, twinkle lights, vocal mics set up in various places for prak, even a Flying V reissue. I’ve been playing a Seymour Duncan amp that is great.

I like my Ampeg but some of that is just loyalty to the idea that you make do with what you have, the amp you could afford when you got it. This relates to “Stay Free” and the often-slighted 2cnd Clash album from which it comes. When my guitar tone sucks, I rationalize it by saying to myself that the guitar tones on the first Clash album sucked too, in a cool way. People bag on the Sandy Pearlman production on that second record, but it got me good, back when I heard it, and the guitar sounds are pretty great. I’m not sure what I’m tryin’ to say here—other than, it’s okay to change your guitar tone. Stay free. Just don’t dabble compulsively and buy tons of crap because you’d be better off spending the money on fliers and gas and French lessons.

There should be a reality show where an indie band wins Slash’s guitar rig and gets to sell it and finance their toil for a year.

I played a solo gig last weekend at the Splinter gallery show (my woodworking buds from the old shop) and Bryce Krehbiel played with his friend Jeff on bass. Bryce is from Kansas and saw The Embarrassment lots of times. We were eating these great cupcakes that a lady brought and I was like..."Bryce, did you ever see The Embarassment?" It’s a Midwestern pride thing, I guess, like me saying I saw U.L. Washington’s toothpick, or Bo Jackson throw out a guy from the warning track. I got gushy like a valley girl: “OMG!!!” I was only twelve or thirteen when The Embarrassment were happening, and wasn’t even aware of them when I got into Big Dipper. The primo Embos anthology is out of print but you can get it on I-tunes.

new machine ritual

Another gray day today—the more typical June weather is back. Yesterday on the way to work I took a couple of pictures of the pedal path and one of the black sheep who hang out on the bank behind some buildings there on the slough. It’s a picturesque ride there, from behind Staples all the way out past Bailey Hill. I really enjoy it, but I don’t always enjoy the way bike commuting makes it hard to deal with logistics and errands and stuff. It definitely slows down the cash trickle. For me to stop at CD World on my bike, I have to cross West 11th at rush hour, such as it is, in Eugene. I haven’t been to CD World in like a week.

This is the third day I have written my A.M. pages on the computer. On both days I edited the entry down and posted it on my blog, which feels weird. The containment isn’t the same, of writing out thoughts, worries, stresses, petty angers, such and so forth, in the morning, by hand, and throwing it in a notebook not intended for anyone to see. I’d likely edit out the real petty stuff if there was a bunch in there. Or stuff like "I want to punch ****** in the face, but it's against the law." It’s just different when you intend to put it out there. Boring blogs are more boring than other boring things. A boring church service or a boring movie have their own dynamic with beginning, middle, and end….but a boring blog waves a sign saying “see me” indefinitely, on some server somewhere. A church you wouldn’t go back to at least has people in it, but a blog you won’t go back to is all alone without the feedback of church attendance records.

Anyway, I am going to keep up the typed Morning Pages for a week, getting more of a feel for the difference between introspection with no intention to share, introspection with some intention to share, or missive-writing in the form of journaling, shifted into blogging with a few key strokes. That tends to shift me over into comic writing as I manage less comfortable things with humor. It all started because my handwriting looks like Shelly Winter’s handwriting, when she’s swimming around in The Poseidon Adventure, right before she dies. I mean, if she'd stopped to leave a note, for her housesitter, or whatever. When Rollins gets a tattoo in a speeding dune buggy on Jackass, that’s like my handwriting.

This all reminds me of a favorite moment from The Wire, when the editor from season 5 zaps a writer’s piece, says “try to get that bullshit past me, mother******” and slams the keypad of his computer. He was one of my favorite minor characters. I also had a major crush on the campaign advisor, even though the character she played was hollow. "Who's your favorite Wire character?" definitely inspired the longest Facebook comment exchange I've initiated.

Last night I watched a little Danish movie called Kinamand. It was about a man whose wife leaves him—in a daze, he ends up in a Chinese restaurant, eating there every night, ordering everything on the menu consecutively and starting over when he gets to the end. He gets involved with the family and things take a turn from desolate to bittersweet. After all this is a Danish movie about divorce and the healing of social isolation, not a Spanish movie about casual sex between volatile tapas chefs. It was a quiet little movie with a slow ritual feel, really good. I have another one called Machine Girl, about a Japanese girl with a machine gun where her hand used to be, before Tokyo gangsters took it.

I heard some vintage Taj Majal on the Watt from Pedro show yesterday. I was blown away--like, what IS this? I had no idea.

pollen blow

This is the seventh day of a visit from my parents. They actually visit my sister, who schedules so much that I have to ask for dates with Mom and Dad. Last night we went to Ocean Sky for Chinese food. The plate of sweet and sour chicken was so big that Dad asked “did we all order the same thing?” He thought they’d piled it on a plate family-style. Ocean Sky was my favorite Chinese restaurant for a long time and we went there a lot. It has been plagued off and on by rumors of health department interventions—but I’ve always had good food there. (That was where my 3-year old nephew Sam held up a mushroom and blurted “that looks like a uterus.” In two months he’ll be going to The University of Chicago.) For a few years I went to Fortune Inn, but I haven’t seen The Meanest Waitress in the World there for a while, and things may have slipped.

Later I brought them back to our house, where Tracy had a cheesecake and some decaf coffee brewed. Dad saw our copy of Bust magazine and cocked an eyebrow. Did he think we were the kind of couple who keeps men’s magazines by the fruit bowl? How do you explain post-puritanical fem edge culture to your 84 year-old pop? This reminds me of the time Mom saw the Chili Peppers “Abbey Road” e.p. at my apartment in Iowa City—the one where they have socks on their packages. That's not something the Greastest Generation is used to seeing. Which reminds me of the time Steve Tulipana found his Mom in his room, reading the lyric sheet to The Meatmen's War of the Superbikes album, looking dazed, like she'd been hit upside the head by Leon Spinks.

Yesterday was supposedly the thickest pollen day since three volcanos exploded at once in The Great Yucca Forest of The Pleistecine and made all the triceratops sneeze to death. The fossil record shows dinosaurs sneezing while mating, sneezing while going to the restroom, sneezing while chomping VW-sized coconuts, sneezing while playing the bass line to "Radar Love." I was in a kind of low-cognition haze in the afternoon. Scratchy throat, slightly out of touch with reality more than usual. I came home and trickled water on the spinach and nasturteum starts. I could have done it a faster way but the trickle of water was kind of like the trickle of consciousness making its way through my stuffed-up head.

I listened to more of the Watt from Pedro show yesterday, this time out of Ogallala, NE. It started off with a Coltrane number and a Tripod Jimmy song from late 70’s Cleveland scene. I’ve hoped that Eugene would break out with that kind of wild, marginal scene, but the northeast stoners with mandolins and 7-string basses just keep coming, in waves, like a great army throwing itself in a trench. Bands with band photos taken while they are backpacking. Eugene is brilliant in a different way—the good bands are like shitake logs down in the basement. If a shitake log sprouts in the basement and no one is there to pick the shrooms, does it make a sound? Eugene is just that way.

Hey, wait a second, maybe I'll take a band photo while backpacking!