A little blog catch-up...probably the biggest deal right now is that I traded out my Clinton-era maroon high-top Chucks for a new pair of charcoal grey lows. I have to say I'm really digging the low-top feel in a color I've never had before. Typically I ride to work in my cons, and half the time they get a little wet...but they dry fast, once I put on my cushy New Balance work boats. The chucks dry fast.

On musical fronts, we had a fine show Friday at Sam Bond's, ending with a two-bass version of "joy." Dave and I are now both proud owners of Gretsch short-scale electromatics. We jumped off stage, put on matching outfits, came back, and it kind of sounded like the Melvins little brothers trying to sound heavy. Very fun. Both Bryan Free and The Stagger and Sway played good sets.

Much writing lately, enjoying my drum set, and learning that if you play the drums along with your own songs, it's pretty hard to sound wrong, and it's a mellow way to learn. And playing along to the mighty CCR double greatest hits is helpful. It's just plain fun to make stuff--if you're looking for metrics of what success is...drumming is like guitar--those highly technical, virtuosic role models intimidate everyone into not doing it. And that's why punk rock did so much for our collective beginner's mind...you don't have to be Keith Moon, you just have to do it and be present to win. Get physical with an instrument you don't know how to play and you'll do it your way. And that concludes this month's "ask dan" response to a non-existent letter...

Somewhere in the last month, Laura Nyro's music took over my Ipod, then my turntable, then my whole body. My sisters' had her records when I was growing up but "New York Tendaberry" was just too funky for me, as I was worshipping Billy Joel and later The Police, at that time. Some things happen when the time is right...she's one of those artists who took on pop forms and idiom whole, then operated well outside them, apparently effortlessly, in a kind of charged, naked, unschooled way. When I realized she's been gone more than ten years, it was weird, like missing a star you can see in the sky. She's up for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, along with The Stooges. Speaking of which, I saw All, Nomeanso, and Bob Mould in October, and Mission of Burma hits Eugene later this week. It was a good month, but I'd better go see a new band of young skinny guys with beards play folk rock, if I really want to know what is up in upsville. Has the name Cougar Paw been taken?

No, All!

Saturday I drove up to Portland and saw All at Dante's. It was a one-off show for lucky Northwesterners....My Name was also on the bill, along with My Life in Black and White, Neutral Boy, and a band called The Squids (no, not THOSE Squids.) It was solo date night for DJ and the first thing I did after parking downtown was find some chow, an asada taco for starters, followed by a Vietnamese-style sandwich from a cart called Lady Thai. I'd never had anything like that--lots of cilantro and shredded carrots on small hoagie-style roll that was soft on the inside and kind of crunchy outside. Good and tasty, as the first cold wind of the season was whipping through downtown PDX, giving hipsters that Kafka slump, which can be contagious. (At least I wasn't going to see a band with a bad drummer and novice accordian player.) I was a little road-shocked and hungry, not having eaten since a somewhat immoderate breakfast at Cafe Sienna in Eugene. Then I hit Voodoo Donuts for the first time and had this one called the Grape-Ape, a raised donut with what tasted like Grape Kool-Aid icing., and grape sprinkles. Damn that was good. Real intense. All the wild flavors and bacon-maple concoctions aside, they make amazing donuts...chewy but still somehow light. This chowdown was a necessary extension of All-O-Gistics. It had to be so. Later I went back and had an Orang-utang.

All hit it hard from the get-go and played maybe thirty songs, half a dozen from The Descendents book, alot of stuff from "Allroy's Revenge." I think everyone there felt really lucky to hear those songs and that chemistry again. It was flat out fun, and a really warm vibe. I bombed on home late and worked the classic rock dial to stay awake. Sunday we were walking around and I said "it's kind of like the day after Christmas today, getting to see All last night." The kind of day where you take a long walk to get a loaf of bread and some coffee and then go back to bed and watch a movie. (Eternity and A Day, directed by Theo Angelopoulo.) Best All song of the night: "Skin Deep." That riff is like punko-pop Robert Fripp on 8 cans of Jolt.

Yesterday I watched "Serpico" for the first time. The third film in an unintentional Netflix trilogy featuring "The French Connection" and "Get Carter"--70's grit, with Pacino demolishing the Age of Aquarius as a finale. All three of these films seem to have contributed to what we now take for granted in cop shows, cop movies, and so on. So much dark water under the bridge at this point that the stand-up idealism of "Serpico" almost seemed stock, or wooden...but his performance sparked it. And all of the character actors in the movie make it special as well. I would add "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" to this, and make it a quartet.

Konking hard today with a cold, watching Anthony Bourdain eat pigeon in Egypt.

We saw "Julie and Julia" yesterday. I liked it alot, though it came close to feeling like an episode of "Mad About You" grafted onto a pitch-perfect biopic w/ Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci doing all the work. (In Dante's coldest circle of hell, "Mad About You" is the only thing on TV.) Feeling puny but wanting to cook something, I came home and made mashed potatoes w/ one clove of garlic and a bay leaf, half a stick of butter, half and half, and tons of black pepper. What's up with pubs calling mashed potatoes "smashers" or "mashers"? (Has "turbo-accelerated spudular units" been taken? By Devo, maybe.) This went real good with a bucket of KFC. And if you are sick at home with a cold, that last piece of cold fried chicken the next day is like a beam of light shining down from Heaven. Thank you Colonel, can you use your juice to promote free-range KFC?

With some time to groom my Netflix list today, I got a little jammed up by Too Many Choices Syndrome and ended up googling "Pauline Kael's favorite movies," "classic Greek cinema," and so forth. I harvested a number of movies off Steve T's list, including the Jackass "Tribute to Evil Knievel" movie. Maybe I should take a class. I took one at LCC once but all the movies were so damn depressing I stopped going. I guess I was in kind of a deep funk at that particular time in my life, and Swedish art movies about sexual abuse and suicide weren't needed as much as, say, joining the gym or eating more fresh fruits and vegetables.

My blog has fallen by the wayside lately, eclipsed by Facebook probably. Back to the old-school (circa '07) mode.

Today I went over to Eric Sutton's house and we recorded a podcast for his System You Radio site--it should be up there within the next couple of weeks. That was alot of fun--I started callling his garage studio the Honeycomb Hideout. So far he has not gone so far as to set up System You as a streaming internet radio site--that would initiate different licensing issues--but he does have a bunch of podcasts up there--his two shows, La Belle Machine (eclectic) and Modern Mono (punk, all styles). My show is going to be called "After the Original Style," after a Slovenly record. Today I played Ornette Coleman, The Damned, Bo Diddley, Beltline, Volcano Suns, and all sorts of stuff. We also broke the story of "white pepper punks," a narrow subculture of punk rockers who atomize white pepper with bike pumps, so that they can sneeze on bands rather than the traditional spitting or "gobbing." This was funny at the time, but now that I put it down in black and white, it only seems funny to me.

Reading Cara Black's mystery Murder in the Sentier, set in Paris, part of the Soho Crime series. I'm liking it alot. Good atmospheres.

We watched an unholy ton of Anthony Bourdain shows this week. Colombia, Tokyo, Laos. I got a major grump on this morning, after a hippy breakfast at a neighborhood place. Unsalted, unseasoned rice and beans...the kind of stuff Eugene has had going on for so long...a straight shot of early American sensual denial in the guise of rainbow power. Yuck. That's not the Phil Zone, man. I didn't want pork belly or anything, just some cumin and garlic in the beans. Lucky it was nice to be with my sweetheart no matter the grub, read the paper, and enjoy the morning sunshine.

Two weeks ago we went to Kansas City for a short visit and had a good time. I really dug seeing the hardwood truck pull up to the back of Arthur Bryant's. So much depends on that truck, maybe the whole universe. Also a trip to Winstead's, and a nice little restaurant on Westport Road called Pot Pie. Was truly lucky to play a show at The Record Bar with Arrington De Dionyso, who is on tour with a new album of trippy post-punk throat-singing...Malaysian-language versions of Blake. He performed almost a capella, with a little resonator box and a couple of pieces on bass clarinet. Like Archie Shepp and Richard Hell at a Tuvan throat-singing ritual. El nutso-rama, what a blast, true art-making. A bunch of the hometown gang came to the show and that was really sweet. The weather was fine, and we got to a Royals game with my nephew Aaron. Zach Greinke pitched eight innings of shut-out baseball, then the bullpen blew gnarly chunks. Sort of felt like the 20,000 fans there knew it was coming. If only we could have harnessed mental power and channelled it into accurate heat, low in the strike zone, and good defense. However, since our visit to the stadium, the Royals have been on a minor tear, sweeping the Tigers and winning eight out of ten. Billy Butler seems to have settled into the number three spot in the lineup and is hitting .300. It seems like nothing about that team settled in this year, other than Zach having a Cy Young year on an underperforming team.

Since coming back to Snooze Valley we have played some fun shows w/ Beltline (check out Rob's new 7" w/ Cure covers), Red Jacket Mine, and Drew Grow and the Parson's Wives. They were a wild band--four people opening indie/psych/folk-choir taps full-bore. Not something you see every day. Bands don't generally act as conduits to listeners that way. It's thrilling when they do.

The cherry tomato plants continue to give big, the September sunshine is pristine, and I did it, I bought the Gretsch Catalina '64 reissue, 4-piece kit and am having a hell of a good time 4-tracking and writing songs on it. Who knew "going to a movie on the moon" would even exist before I started beating on that floor tom?

My pal Dearl Poore recorded the Squids two weeks ago and what I heard on the phones that night sounded really great, as far as the recording. I'm sure I rode on the clam caravan quite a bit that night, but spirits were high...

Catching up today...buncha tomatoes out there to pick, and I promised Shaug I'd watch his Pink Floyd live at Pompei DVD weeks ago, since I borrowed it months ago. I mostly like being grown up but I used to have alot more time for dicking around and zoning out.

Enjoying this album this week--something deeper than these changes by Stew. Guest Host is really one of my favorite records of the last ten years, so I'm catching up on others. I described Guest Host the other day as..."like, uh, if Paul McCartney had written Berlin." This is wildly inaccurate but could work. Not the guitar aspect of Berlin or the depressive aspect of Berlin, but the narrative proximity to psychosexuality aspect of Berlin. But really funny and healing. Or maybe I'm just thinking about that record because I watched the live DVD of the album tour, with Steve Hunter slicing and dicing with zero guitar bullshit, so refreshing.

I finished the Sonic Youth bio. Kind of weird to see the book winding down with a sense of the band not having quite "made it," on that big time rock level. That had never occurred to me.

Making progress towards a solid batch o songs for a new album due in whenever. I was pushing the french press plunger pretty hard and getting alot of grounds in my nose. Now I'm on the slow putz and demanding maximum enjoyment from a song before it makes the cut, whatever "the cut" is...I rhyme light with night too much, and have a bunch of songs with flowers and animals in them.

A new demo called "Old Orange Tiger" up in the Daily Records MP3 Vault. I been bashing, thudding, synthing...muttering and cussing, having some late summer fun. Pictured above is my gear crush du jour. Also kinda intrigued by the Kustom Defender amps. (Defending against sciatic attacks from carrying heavy crap.) Digging the Sonic Youth bio Goodbye 20th Century and a spiritual book called The Law of Attraction by Esther and Jerry Hicks. Clearly we are more than what we eat. That's good--I just ate shrimp, fig preserves, italian dry sausage, goat cheese, beets...it goes on and on. Got aggro with a certain kind of common ivy today, wondering aloud on Facebook why it is not branded INVASIVE SPECIES. And Barb tells me it indeed is. A huge floating shrub-tree of this ivy at the top of the arbor vidae hedge, fed by this creepy inch-thick runner of ivy root system wrapping around the trunk of one of the trees. Later, a trip to the mall, where we found a Superman coffee mug at Ross and new aerobic shoes for t.