Count Down From Seven

it's been a long time since I diaried. i am still struggling with the idea of Living To Blog. i hate the nagging voice that says, as I live me life day-to-day, "Blog ME! I'm an Interesting Event!"
fuck that. it can't be healthy. anyway. here I am, to Update.


the time in the studio was hard, to say the least. now that i have some perspective on it, i can see what happened more clearly. we pulled up to the bottom of The Mountain on Sept 10th and were booked to live and record there until Sept 20th. i felt something odd right away, the minute we started driving up the zig-zaggity road. cue the music. it was JUST like the opening scene of the Shining. and the place, though it was beautiful, had a definite shining/agatha christie vibe. my head started to spoin a little. i couldn't put my finger on it. the next morning i felt bizarre. here we were, in the lap of luxury with a private studio and ten days to record and make music, and all i wanted to do was escape. i just didn't want to be there. the guys needed to get drums sounds and i had most of the day off, so instead of hanging out and getting myself acquainted with the facility and checking out the swimming pool and the woods and the fridge and the blah blah blah, i left. i just drove away. i drove the volvo down that mountain feeling like a bat out of hell. the nearest town was Woodstock, so there i went, found a yoga studio online, took a class and asked around for a cafe. and I got some tea and sat down and wrote and tried to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me, why i was so afraid. i still couldn't put my finger on it. i drove back to the studio later that day and called a friend, and tried to figure it out. "Are you PMSing?" No, there's no way, "What, what is it?" The best I could come up with was that I was just anxious and felt the pressure on my head, the pressure was too much to be contained within this superficial idyllic setting, and I hated the idea of being in close quarters with brian and these few other people with little contact to the outside world. that plus the fact that I felt weird about all the songs we were about to record they all seem too impersonal, and why are we up here at Major Label's expense in the bajillion-dollar studio....is it necessary? do we need to be here? when the fuck did THIS happen? it felt strange, foreign, Not Right. i tried to sleep it off and Calm Myself. As the days went by and we worked and worked and recorded, i tried to shake it but I couldn't fully. the days were packed, i would wake up and drive dwon to woodstock and do yoga and tea and then get back and we'd record from 2 til around 11 at night. work felt like a distraction, it was completly backwards. in good moments i could lose myself in some music-making, but not often. i felt like an alien in a strange land. the silence up there was deafening. i felt everything i wasn't. not a Rock Star, not a Person Who Loves Nature and loves Getting Away, not a Musician who loves immersing myself in music and music all the time. i just felt like a mistake, mis-cast in some surreal play. the days wore on and i adjusted and tolerated but never felt at home, and i was glad to leave. i felt guilty for feeling that, for sure. ach, poor little major label recording artiste.


coming home, i faced the longest stretch of time off we've had in a while. piles of Shit To Do towered on my desk and i attacked them with a viscous fervor, cleaning and organizing like the OCD person i never was, or never had the luxury to be. it's been nice to let myself off the songwriting hook, since i'm piano-less. there is a grand-sized space in my bedroom where the piano once stood, since it got shipped off to the various studios where we've been recording. we eased ourselves back into a rehearsal schedule, barely playing with each other and instead tending to our Real Lives and our relationships. everything is moving sort of slowly, but the future is barreling in. it's a strange feeling. did i mention that i've been feeling really strange? we go into the studio about every other day now, recording vocals and polishing the tracks at sean and paul's studio in cambridge. it feels like a job. it's so much different form the first record when everything felt so do-or-die and immediate. this is so relaxed and easy and non-immediate. i wonder if it's good or bad. it's so odd to be going through this process sand simultaneously trying to write the introduction and notes to the sheet music for our last record. chronicling this whole experience from three years ago. the differences between then and my life now are so glaring and refuse to make any real sense of themselves. i just sat in the middle of my bare bedroom with the grand-sized hole and listened to the first 8 rough mixes of songs on my stereo. they sounded empty. is it me? the songs? the recording? my speakers? am i losing it? i hope i'm losing it. that way there's a much better chance that that songs sound Brilliant and i'm just not noticing.


but music. i've been to some great shows in my few nights off. i went to see the white stripes, which was educational, and MIA, which was radical, and Antony and the Johnsons, which was above all...genius. he sings and my heart needs a chiropractor. that....and i went to see jaggery play (www.jaggery.org) and i am reminded again and again how the human voice can just transport you. it all makes me excited to tour again in october. the tour is going to be amazing, all of our friends on a bus together and an easy schedule with only 16 dates....how could it be that i've changed this much? i'm actually looking forward to going on tour, to get back to the grind. but the grind doesn't seem like a grind, it seems like an opportunity, an escape from this, a chance to connect with the world again. the strangeness i'm feeling, it;s kind of a loneliness, i think. i have found some excellent new teas. white tea with blueberry. green tea with pear. it's the Shit.


last night i made a major mistake and watched the movie "Seven". i stayed up all night shaking and couldn't get the images out of my head and finally asked my date to drive me home, where i didn't get to sleep til four in the morning and awoke with waking nightmares in my head. i tried to remedy this by motivating to the store this afternoon and buying DVDs of "Pretty in Pink" and "The Dark Crystal", which will hopefully sooth me and erase all traces of evil-knife-bondage-dildos and baptist serial killers from my sensitive brain. what the fuck? i experienced this same sort of trauma when i watched "requiem for a dream" about four years ago at my sister's house over thanksgiving. i couldn't talk to anyone normally for a day or two. it makes me think about how much we're at the mercy of the incoming. what do i see, hear, experience just riding my bicycle to the store and back and how much garbage is in my head, the sirens, the poverty, the city and it's callousness....wreaking havoc?

the woods are obviously not the answer. so?





a





p.s. book time
this is the book i've been reading lately, and it's Amazing: "The Inner Game of Tennis" by W. Timothy Gallwey. It's basically a Zen and the Art of Tennis book, applicable to anything in life but using tennis as a springboard to explain how our bodies instinctively learn and will perform at peak levels when left alone and not judged. don't worry, the irony is not lost on me.

Out of the Closet and into the Studio

we leave boston tomorrow for new york state, where we're going to record Album Two. in the woods. it's a far cry from the urban wasteland of brooklyn where we recorded the first record. for weeks the only wildlife i saw were ferrel cats and pigeons and the only green was the poor, abused park (the size of a large postage stamp) a few blocks from martin's....and occasional weeds straining out from under their sidewalk oppressors. typical city shit. this will be the polar opposite...the studio is On A Mountain and there is nothing but woods and deer. i may go into shock.

i've been easing into it, however. i spent the weekend in the country and now is where i have to fully come out of the closet. first of all i must state for the record that i am NOT A HIPPIE. ok i've said it. i do not like the dead, i don't believe in crystals or astrology, i generally hate tie-dye, i DO own a pair of birkenstocks but I find them very UNCOMFORTABLE so I never fucking wear them (they always fall off my feet...what's up with that?), i cannot hackey sack, and I do not smoke weed or play frisbee. i am not a hippie. i'm also not a goth, or a punk, or anything else very categorizable. i'm......a slob? that works. that's just fine. but not a hippie. godammit, the guys on NIN called us hippies and i supposed everything's relative. they never went around barefoot and they spent more time on their hair than we did. and probably collectively shaved more of their bodies than i did. but i am Not A Hippie. OK. enough. i do, however, do lots of yoga (this we know) and I meditate almost every morning. i've had a growing interest in zen buddhism and meditation for many years and every so often I will go to western massachusetts for a retreat. people always wonder and ask what I do there.

so here goes. i am coming out of the zen closet. the retreats last from anywhere from 3 to 8 days and basically you practice sitting meditation, walking meditation, mindfulness, and that's it. you eat. and sleep. the retreats are conducted in complete silence. you don't read, or write, or discuss, or do ANYTHING, you just clear your mind, pay attention to every little breath and detail, and it's incredibly difficult but also wonderful. to explain is hard. the place itself is beautiful...a transformed turn-of-the-century monastery that was bought in the 70's and has been a functioning vipassana (insight) meditation center since then. (you can go to the site: www.dharma.org) it's buried in the woods near a small town, the grounds are gorgeous and the building itself has tons of character. This was my fourth retreat. i found myself in tears the morning i left, reading about new orleans and the government and the people dying and the general mess. our country is sad. so sad. what to do? go to the woods and sit in a zen center.

So, without going into painful detail (and believe me, i could....Details upon Details about the pattern of the floor in the meditation hall...which i stared....at........for.........hours..........), I spent three days in silence, sitting on a cushion or walking on wooden floorboards staring at my slow-moving socks, watching inside, watching what was most apt to creep into my mind. it's a fascinating experience. to try to know yourself, to watch your mind, to allow quiet to enter a place usually so noisy that even in an empty room the volume of your brian chatters so endlessly with nonsense that you barely even notice that you're alive. especially lately, with all that's been going on, I was interested to see what would come up. We just went through personnel changes in the band and i think i've decided that the most unfun part of this job is hiring and firing crew. It just plain sucks. We're leaving to record the next album and I figured my mind would be filled with ideas, worries, anticipations and changes but actually, i didn't think about it at all. I think I'm Ready. We've been playing the material so much that I could record this album with my eyes glued shut. No, what crept into my head most was relationships, past and present, and occasional movies and songs. going to see avril recently proved a major disaster, as "Sk8r Boi" (which I'm not that fond of) and "Complicated" (definitely better) both bounced around in my brian relentlessly. this was so hilarious to me that I don't know where to begin. buddhism and avril. do they mix? zen would say so. zen would say: "the tree is green. the sky is blue. avril bleaches her hair."

I also found my brain wandering to the scenes from the DVD footage, which was sealed and delivered the night before i left. I feel strange about it. It is certainly not at all what I expected it to be, yet it's not bad. It's just very different than what I'd planned, and the day and the footage seems foreign. I was in a serious mood that day, so I look serious. That's the way it works. Is that who I've become? Some serious person? Maybe I have. On days of shows I tend to talk less, play less and take everything a bit more seriously. it was a stressful day...brian's drums were MIA on a plane somewhere, the power on the block went out, the problems piled up higher and higher....but unlike hollywood or reality TV, there was little drama. Just shrugs and "whatever. shit like this happens all the time. we'll figure it out." certainly the best life approach, but not such gripping cinema. my mind wandered over the scenes I had seen, replaying them in my head...wondering how it will look to other people. to make myself feel better I think of it as a snapshot rather than a portrait. a snapshot taken with a disposable camera in a drunken stupor...when you capture the spirit even though the lighting ain't quite right. the DVD tugged at my brain. think about me. think about me. fucking. i would often get caught up and then snap back to reality ten minutes later. back on the cushion. back with the sound of my own breath and 80 other people all quietly watching their own little dramas, their own mind-movies, gently pulling themselves back. practicing together. important.

There were about 80 folks on this retreat; the average age maybe 40 or so. there were a few incredibly old people and it was so inspiring to watch them moving through this rigorous schedule...with the pain in their bodies and the natural slowness in their step. in total silence everyone ate together in a large dining hall, wonderful vegetarian food prepared lovingly by the cooks, in total silence everyone sat and meditated in the hall. everyone stays in small dorm-type rooms with a bed, a chair, a sink and a mirror. the schedule is the same every day. every time period is announced by a bell-ringer (volunteers from the retreat, I rang for work period at 7:50 am) and it's a gorgeous sound, a thai bell struck with a rubber mallet. i would walk through the halls and grounds feeling like paul revere not in a rush. hey. you. wake up. the british aren't coming. i love ringing the bell. listening to it reverberate for minutes...as bill hicks would say, it squeegeed my third eye. without mushrooms! back to the schedule....wake at 5:30, in the dark, and sit from 6 to 7. breakfast from 7-8. then work period, in which everyone had a different job to help the upkeep of the center, mostly cleaning and cooking (i scrubbed pots...mindfully and slowly). another sit from 9-10, then walking meditation (basically just walking in a ten foot space back and forth as slowly as possible while focusing on one point and keeping your mind clear....it's very funny to watch people doing this en masse outside....it's looks sort of like Night of the Living Dead, except pretty). then back to the meditation hall for a talk from the teacher (who was a wise and wonderful 83-year old german woman...just amazing, though somewhat senile), then lunch, then a brief break (I usually grabbed a nap or went for a walk in the woods). 2:30 more walking meditation, 3-4 sitting, 4-5 walking, then more sitting, 6-7 dinner, another talk, then more walking, then a late sitting and then bed. then wake up and do it all again. It's fantastic. It's monastic. It's....a meditation retreat, what the fuck? I don't know, this is really hard to explain. before I dig myself into a hole i will leave it be.

i've spent the last few days just taking time to myself, drinking tea, catching up, going to lots of voice lessons and rehearsing with brian and sean (our Esteemed Producer). we've narrowed it down the 16 tracks and we'll probably end up ditching two so that the record ends up with a total of 14. in the morning i'll pack my bags and drive to the woods, where we will make a record. wish me luck. i will be pretty much offline for the few weeks there, but i'll check in occasionally to make sure nobody's dying and that new orleans hasn't been secretly transformed overnight into a giant army base.

love


a

p.s. a final note for some reading: all i will say is that i would recommend meditation to anyone even remotely interested. i've never seen meditation NOT help anyone with anything in their life be it stress, scatterbrained-ness, depression, existential crisis, whatever. know thyself. it all starts there and then everything else slowly changes for the better. it's important to point out (since some people know Nothing about meditation or buddhism) that meditation is not religious, or even spiritual. it's practical. it's literally just the practice of sitting and sharpening your awareness. that's it. there are no rules, no rituals. you do not need to believe in anything. all of the trappings of religion and chanting and mantras are secondary and useless. it's pretty foolproof. one of the early books that hooked me was "Dropping ashes on the buddha"by seung sahn. he is a korean teacher with an amazing no-bullshit writing style....i read that back in 2000 and it cemented my desire to practice regularly:
www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0802130526/qid=1126244714/sr=1-1/ref=sr_pb_a//103-0641062-3907866?condition=all
another great book for the curious is "Buddhism Plain and Simple" by Steve Hagen. awesome writer, direct and a good quick read: www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0767903323/ref=dp_olp_2//103-0641062-3907866?condition=all

avril at the man center

last night, avril played in town at the summer shed venue (it used to be called Great Woods but emily named it The Man Center since it is owned, booked and run by The Man) and i was giddy as a school girl. i got there during the second opener (gavin degraw, wins Most Wholesome Boy Ever award), found my seat, released my judgement and waited to have an Avril Experience. alas...poor avril, she looks pretty bored up there. but she's certainly giving more than she was on the DVD, where she looked kind of like a punked-out wind-up doll who barely left the microphone, myabe due to the newness, maybe due to nerves, maybe due to just what she was....but last night she smiled more, addressed the crowd, clapped her hands and seemed to be more comfy. she's grown. despite this, the show was still pretty repetitive and i spent the majority of my time looking at the audience, which was fascinating. there were huge numbers of girls under ten (yikes) and the two standing on the seats to my left knew EVERY SINGLE WORD of EVERY SINGLE SONG. there is something surreal, terrifying and yet deeply satisfying about seeing two blond 9-year-old girls singing "I CAN'T HANDLE THIS CONFUSION" at the top of their lungs. i was instantly transported to the whipping nostalgia of my first concert, seeing Cyndi Lauper at the Worcester Centrum when I was 12. I went with four 12-year-old friends of mine (my kindly step-father escorted us and sat pretty motionless beside us, observing the whole affair with a kind of athropological query on his brow and his hand under his chin a la "the thinker" statue...what a trooper). we were so far back that cyndi was about the size of a little ant but i'll never forget the pound-pound in my heart and the rush of adrenaline being part of the Concert Expereince.
so i watched these girls and felt my heart go pound-pound because i knew their hearts were going pound-pound and i think that's maybe why i went to the Man Canter. not to See Avril so much as to See People Seeing Avril. i am jealous. i want my pop childhood back, i guess. i will continue to work on it. but i will not put out any terrible 80's-nostsalgic solo records. i promise. i promise.

avril played the piano (a steinway grand) for a few songs and for the encore she sat in on drums while her band covered blur's "song 2" (the WHOO-HOO song). she's a renaissance girl. nobody truly understands my feelings about avril. i wonder who she is, i wonder how she is able to handle never having had a real adolescence, i wonder what this touring and recording life does to you when it hits you at 16 and not 25, when it hit me, i wonder whether she actually has an original musical voice under there that actually feels heard beneath the veneer of pop and celebrity culture that surrounds her like a toxic moat. i was unable to personally give her my "together" DVD (www.dresdendolls.com/music/karaoke/index.htm) because my request to get backstage was strangely rejected from her management (theory: we think she's actually aware of the video i made and thinks it's Mocking Her, which it's NOT, fucking...it's a Heartfelt Work Of Art). i went to bed feeling very empty. i wanted more. i wanted to feel.

C'mon Do the Vegetarian Haggis

So off i went, in the company of only Emily "Wizzle" White, tour managress deluxxxe, crew-less, brian-less, bold and ready to play three solo shows in the land of my kin, bonnie Scotland. The flight over to europe was very auspicious, we were seated in front of 23 members of The Young Ambassadors Brass Band, an almost all-male, definitely all-british crew of brass-playing hooligans who had just finished a tour of their own in the states. They immediately asked us about the band (after Emily accidentlaly spilled 45 Dresden Dolls "bad habit/girl anachronism" sampler CDs out of her bag) and asked if we were "like taTu". taTu is a russian teeny-bopper band of two underage girls who make out with each other. We said no, and informed them that emily wasn't actually in the band, but that we would make out with each other if they gave us fifty dollars (each). They declined but one of the dudes behind us grabbed the samplers and asked if it was OK to try to sell them to everyone on the plane for a dollar. Fine with us. So he went from the front of the back of the plane trying to sell our samplers like an unstoppable drunken force, pausing only once to run back to our seats and ask us what the music sounded like. He then resumed his enterprise and earned us $21. Awesome! The rest of the flight involved him and his friends throwing shoes at us and sneaking up behind me to put clothespins in my hair.

The first few days in Edinburgh were vacation days, and I wandered around in ecstasy, soaking up the the marvels of the fringe fesitval. For those unaware, the Edinburgh fringe is the largest fringe theater festival in the world....it spans the month of august with over 200 venues, thousands of plays and events and endless activity.... it's basically disneyland for actors and artists. Everywhere you go and everywhere you look there is something happening, street performers everywhere, theater at all hours, music seeping out the cracks of the sidewalks. I almost wept when I started reading through the fringe schedule and realized that I would probably have time to see two or three out of the 26,478 plays being put up. That first night we went to a stand-up show of my wonderful old friend Eugene Mirman (he's opened up for us in Boston, and has toured with Modest Mouse and other rock acts around the world....and he's VERY FUNNY: www.eugenemirman.com). The most hilarious yet disturbing part of his act was a found magazine that he presented called "Revolve": it was The Bible in "people magazine" format to make it palatable to teen girls. Even the inside layout was the same as teen people or elle girl magazine (including pix of hottt teen boys and girls!)....but it was The Bible. THE BIBLE. I won't even go into it. He also played some wonderful tape-recordings of a phonecall he received from a Christian Phone Company that was trying to get him to switch away from ATT and MCI because "ATT and MCI support Gay Marriage". Eugene asked politely if he switched, would gays Just Go Away? The woman held it together pretty well, seemed to empathize with Eugene who went on a theatrical rant about how Gays Should All go Away, and the conversation that ensued was priceless. We almost peed our pants. After the show, Eugene took us to the Library Bar, which is an old university library (with old wooden and glass-door shelves and books and chandeliers and the Whole Deal) but during the fringe it's converted into a VIP bar for the comedians. I was Good and did not drink. The next day we pitpatttered around and I went to rehearse my piano parts at a friend-of-a-friends apartment. Confronted with the friend-of-a-friend, it turned out that he was a musician named Mr. Andy and he started blowing wonderful music out of his trumpet. I met a few of his housemates and one was a beautiful girl named Ms. Ruby who could tap-dance and within a few minutes it was determined that we had to do a trumpet/tap-dancing version of "Coin-Operated Boy". We rehearsed. Then at night we met up with Eugene again to see Daniel Kitson (www.danielkitson.com), an insanely funny comedian whose whole fringe run was sold out. Highlight of his show: his description of the terrible feeling you get when you find out that someone you hate loves the same band you do. Equally great: his description of sitting in a train car with a swarthy teenager playing annoying techno music off of his new-fangled phone for his girlfriend and the triumphant mutiny of the rest of the passengers. I can't do it justice, you have to go see for yourself. Tell him amanda says hi.

The next day was a train trip to Aberdeen for the first show and I savored the Scottish countryside and the clickityclacking train sound that I love so much. I love trains. I love airplanes, but I love trains more, because you can move around in them more and there's more things outside to watch. But I love both. Testaments to what's left of a civilized society. The Show Itself was nerve-wracking but I played well and people, who came out in good numbers, seemed totally into it. There is a part of me that feels amputated without brian, even though there is a sense of freedom. I wasn't a solo player for long enough to really have the right perspective, and playing solo has always felt like it's somehow not legitimate. I think this trip pretty much erradicated that feeling. I attacked the piano with a ferocious determination and ignored the fact that my left hand was unsupported by the thump of the bass drum and that I had no-one on stage to communicate with. I communicated directly to the audience instead and it felt even more personal than usual...sonically and emotionally naked. I fell asleep thrilled and exhausted and we caught a train back to Edinburgh the next morning.

I ran straight over to Mr Andy's for a final rehearsal of trumpet and tap-dancing and when I got there found more friend-of-friends, so what was once to be a tap-dancing a trumpet version of Coin-Operated boy turned into a full schedule of collaborations that included "amsterdam" with Mr Andy on upright bass and new friend-of-friend-of-friend Mr Nathaniel on guitar and what the hell we arranged a whole new song from scratch that Mr. Nathaniel had written, called "Hold Me". It was a sort of old-timey ditty a la "honey pie" by the beatles and the lyrics were written from the point of view of the last man on earth who has survived the Apocolytic Reign Of Fire to find that he is the only survivor, except for one monkey and an all-girls choir. We added a breakdown in the middle that involved me playing the piano with my left hand and strumming the guitar with my right, while Mr. Nathaniel played the frets with his left hand and used his free hand to slap Ms Ruby's ass in time with the music (while she tap-danced wildy, of course), and she in turn played the strings of the Upright Bass with her right hand while Mr. Andy used his free hand to take a trumpet solo. If it sounds confusing, it was. But it was beautiful.

We had been offered a slot at the all-night Bongo Club cabaret by a friend of an ex-girlfriend of a friend of a friend of a friend, so we decided to meet there later that night. I told them I would try to bring Regina (The Ms. Regina Spektor), who had a show scheduled that night. She and I met up for lunch before her soundcheck and I brought her to the forest cafe, which i had discovered a few nights earlier (on recommendation from a great band i met called terrafolk - www.terrafolk.org - who played super-tight gypsy covers of beethoven and van halen). it was a classic anarcho-punk co-op cafe with a big leaf-and-branch-filled room for sitting and the most delicious vegetarian food. we ate and got good green tea and shared stories and woes and then went to her soundcheck and tried a little song together, which we played that night at her show which was, of course, fucking brilliant. regina spektor is a piano-playin-poety-from-another-planet-singin-bad-ass motherfucker. i watched her in complete awe and was bolstered in my opinion that a piano can indeed stand on it's own three legs.

I took Regina over to the bongo club and we stuffed into the overpacked dressing room surrounded by sequined girls and flaming gay MCs before heading down to play. It was very reminiscent of the Old Dolls Days when the PA never worked and the sound was always horrible, but we managed to pull of a pretty good impromptu show. I played a few songs on my own, Regina and I did a reprise of the song that I has sang with her at her show (titled "UH-merica" and a beautiful song it is....) and then my new band took stage and all hell broke loose. After a bit of celebrating and meeting many new people (a bunch of regina's fans came over from her show and were also headed to my show the next day) i called it an early night before I got myself into Beer Related Trouble (i did not have such luck the next night). Goodbye, Regina....i always wish we could be friends all the time, but we're always in different places. That's what this is like.

The next day was Show Day in Edinburgh and I skipped soundcheck (how rock and roll)....to go to the circus. But This was not just any circus. This was the circus that puts them all to shame. This show makes Cirque du Soleil seems like complete pussies. They had their own tent and the show was a cross between Cirque Du Soleil, de le Guarda, beetlejuice, city of lost children, the dresden dolls and amadeus. There was no fixed seating, and the crowd (about 300) was directed to move around the tent floor, and the show took place at every concievable place at all times...at any given moment there might be a girl in a victorian nightgown flying on a trapeze above you while a woman ran flying by you pushing an old baby-carriage filled with apples and soap and ribbons and two men on the other side of you played along with the house band on beer bottles that they would then toast with and drink with maniacal laughter. Meanwhile, the lights were stunning and the atmosphere was just completely electric and twisted and beautiful and tragic and....just epic. I resolved then and there to drag them to the states with every ounce of energy and every penny i could muster to tour with us next year. a complete pipe dream, but who wouldn't want to come see the dresden dolls in a circus tent with the best show on earth as a double bill? c'mon. the website of the company is www.nofitstate.com and the show is called "Immortal2". if you're at the fringe, get tickets now and go see it. they also tour, so check out the dates. send them my regards. I left them a love-letter on the reverse-side of a letter that had fallen from the roof of the tent (with hundred of others, in a snowy letterfall) during the show.

Inspired by my orgasmic circus experience I played an even more maniacal set than the one before, and the crowd was wild and the club sold out. There was a wonderful pair dressed as bloody surgeons with a beautiful doll (they were supposed to be part of a larger "Mandy Goes To Med School" - inspired living installation, but i think the rest of their cast chickened out). The opener (Lapsus Linguae - i can't find a site for them but they opened all three shows) also tore it up. I kept these sets very album-oriented, unlike my solo shows in boston which are usually used as a testing ground for new material. This is sort of a frankenstein of the set i played all three nights, with all the songs smusched together:

Manner of Speaking (by TuxedoMoon)
Modern Moonlight
Missed Me
Bad Habit
Perfect Fit
Coin-Operated Boy (with Ms Ruby on tap-dancing and Mr Andy on trumpet at all three edinburgh shows)
Me & The Minibar
Bad Habit
I want you, but I don't need you (by Momus)
Sex Changes
Such Great Heights (by The Postal Service)
First Orgasm
Lua (by Bright Eyes)
672
Half Jack
Girl Anachronism
Amsterdam (with Mr. Andy and Mr. Nathaniel)
Hold Me (ditto - written by Mr. than)
Truce
Ampersand (yes, the very one)
Hallelujah (by Leonard Cohen)

To top off the night, i got a last-minute invitation to haul my self and the whole impromptu band over the Spiegeltent for a late night show starting at 2 am.

The Spiegeltent deserves a few words. It is a magic place. I saw my first Spiegeltent (which means "mirrortent" in german) when I was at the Adelaide fringe festival in Australia in 2000, shortly before I met brian. I was over there to See The World and try to make some money as The Bride. The business was bad there that year (at least according to all the other street performers, and I barley covered the cost of my ticket) but I saw some great World things and one was the Spiegeltent. There are actually about 20 of these tents in existence, and they travel around parking themselves at festivals and bringing cabaret joy to the people. They are so indescribably beautiful that one should just go look at www.spiegeltent.net (there's a really cool 360-degree virtual tour photo up there), but suffice it to say it is a 1920's-era wooden dance-hall tent bedecked with velvet and mirrors and stained glass. Pretty Much Heaven. There is one top company called The Famous Spiegeltent that book the entertainment and it's always a late-night destination for racy cabaret and amazing music at any theater festival. The staff and bartenders wear gorgeous weimar-cabaret inspired clothes and the whole thing is pretty much an amanda-palmer-wet-dream. so to be invited to play there was a wonderful treat, and i sat down at that shiny black grand piano at 2:15 am with a feeling of bursting joy I can't describe. The tent was full of late-night, drunken, tired, sparkling hazy applause and beauty. People sat down on the dance floor and with my broken and tired voice, I played a few songs and attempted a "Mrs. O", which always sounds better on a Real Piano, and then my impromptu band (by this time someone - at the Bongo Club, i think - had dubbed us "The Cabaret All-Stars") played our numbers and we were finally caned off stage by the management. This is the point where I started to get into Beer Trouble (and Wine Trouble, and a little bit of Cigarette Trouble) and in retrospect, I should have eaten more than just lunch that day. Skipping dinner proved to have been an unwise decision as my little yogacised body was not so Into the idea of all of these liquids, and even though I only drank about 4 drinks over the course of the night it was probably about 3 too many.

Suffice to say the next morning was a little rough but I actually felt pretty good as we caught a ride to our last show in Glasgow and I ate a sandwich to absorb the small trace of Hangover. Evil Sandwich! It made an appearance in my hotel bathroom toilet much later that night, after the show. I think playing a show is a bad antidote for a hangover, I stirred up many emotions (and the sandwich). But playing in the face of adversity, loathe as I am to admit it, always makes for the best shows. Without fail. Facing my guilt about Being Stupid and Not Taking Better Care of Myself gave birth to an Amanda vs. Amanda show and I threw myself into the songs with every little bit of anything I could muster. And it worked just fine. The house was sold out, again, the crowd was fucking incredible, and I left stage and collapsed immediately on a couch and Wizzle needed to pry me off with a spatula to get in a cab back to hotel, where i briefly re-visted my sandwich (evil!) and fell into a sweet slumber. I felt much better in the morning and the flight home was uneventful, save for running into the Bravery at Heathrow. They are the omnipresent Band who we run into No Matter Where We Are. I mean, it's uncanny. They were on their way to Florida and I was on my way to the Tie Rack where I had left my boarding pass like an idiot while buying a scarf.

Brian, like a true friend, picked me up at the airport and we drove straight to Whole Foods (which is like Mecca in the world of the Dresden Dolls, every day at lunch we chant and prostrate ourselves towards the Whole Foods in Austin, TX which is like the mothership that will take us all away when the Man finally takes over the World). He tried on the vintage kilt and jacket I got for him (wicked sexy and no underwear to be authentic, but then again brian would look sexy wearing a dropcloth) and then we went to our old haunt The Lizard Lounge where a great local band that Brian recently discovered, Humanwine, was putting on an acoustic show. I was almost passing out from jetlag but it was perfect music to sit and be exhausted to...a gorgeous combo of guitars and haunting singing (go see: www.humanwine.org). Brian seems to be much happier now that he's Had A Rest.

All in all I give this trip an A. it would have gotten an A+ if not for the Evil Sandwich and the Beer Trouble.

I am so happy to be home and have re-established by relationship with my yoga mat and kettle. no more Beer Trouble until after the record is recorded. she said.

Oh, and for anyone who has ever travelled, ever, or for anyone who hasn't, i highly highly recommend "The Art Of Travel" by Alain de Botton. His previous book, "How Proust Can Change Your Life" is also brilliant. They are both quick reads and sort of humorous yet deeply profound pop-philosophical wanderings that make your soul go "yes! yes! fuck! yes!"

I would also like to publicly state how awesome Dan Savage is for giving us a shout-out in his sex-advice column "Savage Love" (www.villagevoice.com/people/0534,savage,67087,24.html). I've been a huge admirer of his ever since seeing him speak in 1997 and now he's helping us take over the world! I love him. Return the favor and read all of his sex advice, because He Knows.

Breaking and Making

Such a strange mix of feelings.

We've never cancelled a single show, and now three days before the flight we're pulling out of an entire tour.
Brian doesn't want to go, is going through his own thing, and I am very supportive of him....while also going through my own understandable frustration about it. I know, deep down, that we've made the right decision and that things could be no other way, but then I find myself plagued with haunting visions of a girl from FInland showing up at a Festival that she's spent a years allowance on a ticket, defied her parents orders and driven 23 hours with her best friend who is dying of leukemia only to arrive there and find, a la the Wally World scene in "Vacation", a tattered sign scotch-taped to a chainlink fence, blowing in the wind: "Sorry, Dresdin Dolls show is Cancell". She the bursts into tears and forthwith curses my name every night before she goes to bed until she dies. fine fine. maybe it won't be that bad.

We've done a complete 180, Brian and I. I remember back when my nickname for him used to be Mr. Get In The Van because he was so gung-ho about touring. I, on the other hand, was always dragging my feet and really reluctant to leave. Now I've acclimated and Brian is feeling the reverse. It just goes to show, nothing's ever the way you think it will be. I am still going to go play the shows we were scheduled to do in Scotland, alone, which is slightly terrifying but should be fun. Emily is coming with me and it's fringe-festival time in Edinburgh, which I've dreamed about going to see I was a Wee Bairn. I'm bracing myself for a flood of emails about Why The Tour Is Cancelled and Are You Ok and Is Brian Ok and general What The Fuck and am deeply considering coming up with some kind of auto-reply to spare myself typing the same email 148 times. Meanwhile....I spent the last three days just keeping body and soul together, drinking tea and staring at the wall a lot, while everybody hustled and bustled this way and that and tried to come to the right decision. I stepped back. I took long bicycle rides. I did no work. I sat by the phone. I went to the movies. I finished two songs. I met with old friends. I tried to remember myself. I tried to find some love. I tried to get my mind off of everything. The movies really do help you do that, I noticed, after I left the theater. I didn't think about my problems at all for two hours. No wonder ticket sales for movies skyrocketed during the depression. So I went back to the movies again. I highly recommend "Me and You and Everyone We Know". ))<>(( Miranda July is a woman I think I would marry if I were the lesbian type and the marrying type.

The Recording is supposed to start in a few weeks and I'm feeling cautious but also looking forward to it. We recorded 19 songs in Sean and Paul's new studio in Revere (nicknamed "Severe" around these parts; not the savoryest part of Boston but certainly has it's charm). They've jsut moved in there and nothing has been touched (or cleaned?) since 1957. The control room looks like the Brady Den, replete with wood and fake-stone paneled walls, like a ski lodge. There was an old mason and hamlin piano in the corner but after cutting a few tracks with it it was just impossible to play, and sounded icky, so we ended up cutting all of the tracks with the Kurtweill. Another 180: I used to abhor playing a keyboard, now I'm pretty much committed to the conclusion that I am not a piano player but a kurtweill player and it's possible that the album will be tracked with keyboard And Piano and that's just fien with me. You couldn't have gotten me to agree to that a few years ago if you'd held a paintball gun to my head. The material sound really, really good. My relationship to this new batch is a weird one. These songs are, generally, a lot less personal than the batch on Record#1 and for some reason that makes me feel very funny inside. I'm just not as attached. On the last record, every song was The Song and had been The Song for some perdiod of my life. Bad Habit was The Song for a few years and so was Slide and so was Half Jack. But on this record....none of these songs have rooted themselves inside me and festered. So they feel.....well, not Not As Good but maybe Not As Real. I think this will be the case for every record I make from now on. I think the first record is like the first true love, or losing your virginity. For better or for worse, i don't think you ever feel that way again, ever.

Still, I am taking care of myself, meditating every morning, doing yoga every day and drinking my greens. My voice is getting stronger and I'm laying off coffee and cigarettes and alcohol and yes of course all that crack cocaine I usually smoke, and it's sounding pretty good. Pope and Z are away in vermont and Lee is back from the hospital (he's fine), so things here are quiet and peaceful. The rain has been bashing down and I got caught in it yesterday while riding my bicycle and it felt really good to be poured on and I got home sopping wet and put my bathrobe on and there's nothing like that feeling of walking around in your warn apartment wet from the rain with your bathrobe on and the sky dark and your wet clothes hanging on the shower rod.

yesterday i read a new set of lyrics to a friend and he liked everything except the part where i mention an ampersand. he said nobody knows what an ampersand is. i found that impossible to believe. so my activity today is to ask everybody if they know. and if i get at least a 50% positive response, the ampersand stays. if not, i'm fucked and need to find another word for ampersand, which there ISN'T, so i'm just fucked, plain and simple.


&

a

japan - day 6, billy corgan & home

I ended up skipping tink tink (dammit) in favor of going to see billy corgan at a tokyo club. my interest was especially piqued because he had been quoted in some magazine or other saying that the dresden dolls had influenced his last record. what? ok, maybe. stranger things have happened. i know very little about the man and his music, other than seeing the smashing pumpkins open up for the chili peppers in 1991 (along with pearl jam, also then pretty much unknown - i touched eddie vedder's leg when he crowd surfed!! whoo!). one interesting thing about my musical history was the aparent bubble i unwittingly lived in during the nineties. i didn't really learn about nirvana until kurt cobain was dead and i never listened to the radio or watched MTV so i was (and still am, for the most part) completely clueless about most of the rock icons of the nineties. i see this as an advantage most of the time. at least i can still discover the best of it (when i finally bought Nevermind in 1999 i was like "holy shit! nobody told me this was GOOD!"). i continue to astound brian (and emily, especially, the true child of the nineties) with my ignorance. Stone Temple Pilots....they were a rap band, right?

no-one else was interested in coming, so emily and i arranged tickets and went off to see what Billy Corgan Solo looks like. and it looks very beautiful, turns out. the light show was a genius set of folding screens behind the minimal keyboard and drumpad band, whose instruments were encased in flowery, hand-welded art nouveau sculptures. for better or worse, the music blew my mind: it was as if someone had taken me and transported me to a random nightclub in 1983. it was not derivative...it was more like being in a sound museum. very mid-tempo, very joy division, very intense. every time mr. corgan looked in our direction, i felt bullet eyes piercing my brain. whatever kind of music he was playing, the guy had an unbelievable stage presence. afterwards we said hello and hung out for a minute or two, talking about japan and japanese culture. mr. billy corgan seems very deliberate, that's the best word i could come up with. a guy who has spent a lot of time thinking and working through and measuring carefully. turns out he had found out about the dolls through an agent we know who passed our disc along. things happen. they keep happening.

our last morning in tokyo i woke up early and wanted nothing more than to just be alone and soak up the last few moments. i took a long walk around our neighborhood and paid a visit to a nearby temple, where i sat in a chair for a while, half meditating and half watching the monks going through their rituals, and then took a walk through the cemetery. there were lilies in the garbage. i took one that wasn't too wilted.

13 hours on a flight to new york and then a 3 hour layover and 2 hour delayed flight to boston.
i watched the wizard of oz (cried four times, mostly towards the beginning) and million dollar baby for the second time this month (cried twice). flying means there are a lot of movies. i never used to see any of them, now i am in touch with the culture.

home.
there are no lights on in my apartment. the power is out. go downstairs, where pope and zea are still up working. do you know why the power is out? lightning? ok., fair enough. go back upstairs, head for bed. there are british people in my bed. go back downstairs. do you guys know why there are british people in my bed? houseguests of lee (our benevolent landlord). ok. where's lee? in the hospital, with a terrible flu. ok. is there beer? yes. time to drink some. i try to explain, sitting on the stoop drinking beer, the double mindfuck feeling of not only seeing your apartment in the complete darkness when your'e not used to it, but also being able to vaguely make out the foreign-shaped belongings of strange surprise british houseguests. i see something on my kitchen table that doesn't live there, but i can't really see what it is. foreign amorphous objects in the bathroom. all will be revealed tomorrow, when the sun comes up. for now i am camping out in lee's bed upstairs and finding comfort in the familiar glow of my mac, which is one of the only sources of stability in my life lately. i awoke the strange birtish couple. no, no! stay in bed, you look very comfortable. we'll meet tomorrow and in the meantime, keep sleeping. good night.

morning.
i am home again. i am happy. already i have drank three cups of tea and played the piano and gone to my yoga studio and sweated my brains out. the piano is like an anti-magnet but i did finish one song that's been bouncing around in my head for the better part of a year now, and it represents a real milestone for me because i actually finished the lyrics On The Airplane, which means On Tour, which means Away From Home which I can traditionally Never Do. So maybe now i can creep out of my nasty habit shell and actually start writing a little more on the road. i can only finish writing lyrics when the song is more or less finished in my head and i just need words combined together and filling in blanks, but it's a start. music is all in my head, it's not in my fingers and i need to remember that i can do whatever i want. i'm honestly like fucking rainman when it comes to songwriting. i need to cure myself.

currently listening to spiritualized (ladies and gentleman we are floating in space), i forgot how brilliant that music is for calming nerves, and it's starting to feel a little tiny bit like fall, so i put on my Nad Navillus CD (iron night) which is one my favorite fall CDs of all time, to, like, kind of prepare for fall coming. so i'm not surprised. fall always scares me a little. because then comes the winter. anyway.

japan - days 2 3 4 and 5

a little background is necessary here, so please bear with me. i have an old friend, david franklin (aka manta), who i met back in 2000 through pope who was, at the time, shooting neovoxer (www.neovoxer.org) and i was acting in the film and being part of the general mayhem. manta is a performance artist and a martial arts instructor for an esoteric japanese style called shintaido, and after being invited to attend some of his boston classes (which were often held outside in random parks) i was really turned on to the practice. i went to one weekend-long shintaido retreat back in 2000, where i found the whole shintaido community very tight-knit and welcoming. there are probably less than 1000 folks in the united states into shintaido. there are other small communities all over the world, but japan is where the style originated and where the largest number of folks practice. a brief history is difficult, but you can go to www.shintaido.org and get a basic idea. it was founded in the 1960s as a reaction against the violent and careless direction that karate and other japanese martial arts were taking, and was more or less developed by a bunch of artists through a long workshop process. watching someone practice it looks like a combination of karate, tai chi, primal scream therapy, and modern dance improvisation. on our second european tour, we invited manta to travel with us on the tour bus for the purpose of videotaping (it was on that fateful journey that the avril lavigne "karaoke verite" video was born) and kicking our asses awake in the morning to practice shintaido. some of my fondest memories of that tour were of running "Eiko" across a field in blackheath, england at dawn, screaming "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEE" at the top of my lungs at the rising cloudy sun. anyway, as soon as we realized we were coming to japan i wrote manta straightaway to see if he could hook us up with some shintaido folks over here, and indeed he shot right back that his friend, jet, lived right near tokyo and would probably love to come to the festival and do some practicing. as fate would have it, there was a "waterfall training" already scheduled in a nearby town right after the festival, and jet invited us to come along. i knew little about this but figured it could only be interesting and probably wonderful, so i said fuck yes. everybody else but brian bailed out (emily wanted to stay at fujirock and see bands; sean slade, joel and robert preferred to have nothing to do with a potentially freezing cold waterfall and their potential submersion Into It and instead chose to go to tokyo and look at girls and temples) so we got on the train the next morning with jet and his friend mr. oi and began our journey.

jet spoke some english, but communication was limited to the basics. we took two trains, buildings disappearing and rice paddies growing, and then took a taxi from the last train stop to the mountain, which has been a holy buddhist place for centuries. there was a large shrine across from our small inn (which was run by a kindly old buddhist monk) and a path along a rocky stream leading up to the waterfall. during the day, it was an obvious tourist destination for japanese and there was a handful of families with kidlets bathing in the stream. our inn was very spartan and beautiful; each room was in the old japanese style, with only woven straw mats on the floor and one low table, otherwise no furniture, no beds. we slept on thin futons that were folded in the closet along with the quilts and pillows. after we arrived, we met the other shintaido folks who had made the trek to the mountain for the training. there were five other men besides jet and mr. oi and two women, everyone mostly in their 30s or 40s. we met goro, a beautiful long-haired guy who was the waterfall training leader, and we headed out to a beautiful clearing in front of the shrine to practice shintaido for about an hour in preparation for going up the mountain. mr. oi was the sensei (the teacher/leader) for the shintaido practice and gave his instruction in gorgeous broken english for our benefit, which was very kind, since my shintaido was fucking rusty and i'd forgotten a lot.

then we went to the waterfall. this is where things started to get very interesting. one woman who spoke excellent english interpreted everything that goro told us as we prepared, one by one, to go through this process which apparently has roots stretching back ages in the buddhist, shinto and japanese warrior traditions. all eleven of us walked the paths and stairs up to the base of the waterfall, which was about 20 stories high and loud as hell. on the way up we bowed at the small shrines built into the sides of the mountain and purified our hands and mouths (via swishing) with the water from the shrine, which was trickling directly, they said, from mount fuji. above the waterfall itself was built a wooden balcony on a gorge that overlooked the place where the crashing waterfall met the earth, and this is where we prepared and left our belongings. the trees and flora on the mountain were thick and rainforesty and there were luminescent black butterflies and spiders flitting about everywhere. goro passed out sandals made of rope that we tied to our feet for traction while walking in the slick, rocky white-water; then he determined an order in which people would enter the waterfall - basically from most to least experienced....there were men there who had done this training 100 times and a few total novices like us. a small wooden box of sea salt was passed around and we rubbed the dry salt on our bodies for purification ("private parts" area - very important). there was a short meditation and then we descended altogether into the rocks and water and goro took his place at a large rock that faced the waterfall (whose base was probably about ten feet wide). as we stood there, deafening waterfall bits bursting in our faces, goro began the ceremony with what i assume was a kind of blessing of the waterfall, though it appeared more like a exorcism. hands clapping powerfully together, japanese words shouted and muttered, the rest of the sea-salt scattered, a bottle of water from the mountain shrine splashed into the spray, and then mr. oi entered the water (fully dressed - we were the only ones not wearing a full "gi" - the traditional white martial arts uniform).

i don't know if you've ever tried to stay erect under a massive waterfall, but it's fucking near impossible. even the masters like mr. oi would get violently punched over by the sheer velocity of the water and have to re-find their footing. most stayed under for less than a few minutes; the hardcore would remain there, locked to the earth like human edifices, for what seemed like ages. it wasn't a question of man vs. nature with man emerging triumphant, it was more a vivid display of man triumphing over the division between man and nature itself. a teeny woman before me was knocked down four or five times and finally made it through a few moments in the waterfall without tumbling. my turn came, i waded through water and rocks trying to completely clear my mind, and i stood in a very light part of the waterfall (i knew we'd be returning the next morning and i figured it wold be ok to be a pussy the first time around). the water hit my head and i raised my hands. it all made perfect sense.

when everyone was finished we convened back up on the platform and bowed to each other and the water a final time. then we descended back to the inn, where we had strict orders from goro to spend fifteen minutes in the baths. so i was alone in the women's communal bath with the two japanese shintaido women (whose names i never knew), and we soaked there, naked in the big tiled tub. i talked to them a little about how grateful i was to be, finally, around people who were taking care of themselves. they listened and asked questions. i told them about Rock World and the many self-destructive and harmful people we encounter. then i went up to our room and fell asleep. everybody left except jet and goro, who spent the night in the inn with us. we all ate a late dinner together in the inn dining-room....the best food i've eaten here by far. the kindly monk prepared it for us and it was a lavish spread of sashimi, soup, tempura, salad and tofu. a smorgasbord of orgasmic food, eaten with jet and goro who were now my two favorite japanese people in the world, talking about Everything and laughing. after dinner the monk cut up a watermelon for us and proudly showed us the pictures of the sumo wrestler who got filmed by CNN doing waterfall training outside his inn. then we all adjourned to jet and goro's room, practiced sitting meditation for a half hour, and then went to sleep like logs (i was a log, at least. i think brian may have been more like a quaking aspen).

the next morning we awoke and ate a similarly incredible breakfast, then went to the temple clearing to prepare for waterfall training: day two. jet showed us a few good exercises to do before stage (they really liked our show by the way - "very strong. very powerful energy. yes. you two - very important - stay soft and connected") and then i sat and watched the two of them do some symbolic sword-fighting using long wooden staffs. the two of them would occasionally get locked together, each facing the sky with swords pointed heavenwards and clashing upwards like two coital birds.

then back up to the waterfall we went....rope shoes, meditation and preparations, salt, excorcism. this time it was only the four of us. i resolved to become a human rock and i entered the water (which was colder than the day before) and after getting knocked over multiple times i managed to stand my ground for a few minutes. your mind has no choice but to clear. maybe a stray thought to keep your balance, but there is just you and your body getting eaten and reborn by thousands of gallons of water pummeling your meaningless self. i knew it was time to go when it was, and i let myself get spit out back into the world.

we were exhausted by all this and went to rest again in the inn, we left a dresden dolls CD with the monk and thanked everyone there for taking good care of us, then started to head back towards tokyo with jet.
we talked about japan and america and europe. it's a small world while being very big. japan has been wonderful for me because it has forced me at every turn to be so humble. everybody here is very quiet and
respectful and i am overly self-conscious about seeming like the Ugly American. this has increased my general mindfulness about everything i do, from the volume at which i speak to the way i eat to the way i sit
down in a chair. this is good, this is very good.

after returning briefly to tokyo we went to kyoto by train, with robert and sean, to visit my friend zach. he's an ex-pat i went to college with briefly, now married to a japanese doctor named maki and fathering a gorgeous one-year old boy named gen. we were welcomed warmly into zach's house and got to commune with the youth a little bit (gen was pretty freaked by us strangers) and listen to zach play his shakuhachi, a traditional japanese bamboo flute that he's been studying on and off for more than ten years. then we spent a quiet night in a veggie-centric kyoto restaurant in a converted traditional townhouse, where we shared our large low table (completely coincidentally) with a band from okinawa called tink tink (pronounced "tinku tinku", a double reference to "twinkle twinkle little star" and the sound a shamisen makes when you pluck it). they were hyper and adorable and we took pictures and traded CDs and promised to try to make it to their show a few days later in tokyo. we spent the next day in kyoto staggering through the heat getting awestruck by temples and shrines and beautiful things. i bought some socks. we ate some sushi. i love this country.

back in tokyo now, everyone seems to be in great spirits, especially sean slade (our esteemed producer). it's been wonderful to combine the journey with a few scattered conversations here and there about the upcoming recording (we start september 10th) and choices we may make about this and that. but generally i haven't been giving a fucking thought to music. the only thing i've listened to over here is my "the best of fad gadget" cd, which is all i may ever need for the rest of my life. i love fad gadget. i do i do i do.

i have seen the collision of goth and disney and it is harajuku.

in japan - day 1

japan. in the DD east-side posse: yours truly, brian (excellent drummer), joel (our esteemed sound engineer), emily (our US tour manager and girl friday), robert (our romanian-born-german-and israel-raised-london-dwelling-jewish tour manager and die-hard kylie minogue fan who insist my life would improve if i shaved my legs), sean slade (our esteemed next-record producer and closet haiku master) and eric sussman (an old friend and american expat living near tokyo, who used to wear adam ant war paint to dresden dolls shows).

my knowledge was limited to general american chatter and stories from friends, lost in translation, gung ho!, the last emperor, memoirs of a geisha (great book), assorted films by akira kurosawa,
my japanese classes a few years ago, a book on etiquette that i read last week and a book on the hostess industry in Japan that i read in my early 20's while briefly fanasizing about moving here to work in the sex industry where apparently you don't always have to fuck your clients. you could just charm them, act wonderful and make a killing. mom: this idea lasted briefly and i didn't do it, did i. do not email.
the toilets (even some of the the public ones at gas stations) do warm your bum and play music and squirt water at your bunghole if you press a special button. everyone bows constantly. people are incredibly humble and gracious. there is, contrary to my assumption, a shitload of meat available and it's harder to find vegetarian food (i've been a pescitarian for ten years, i no red meat or poultry but i do eat fish). pork is everywhere. the tea is awesome. i am testing green teas by the bucketful. so far, i love this country. the language barrier is intimidating.

we flew into tokyo and were driven directly to the fujirock festival site (a door-to-door total of about 23 hours or travel - yay ambien) and checked in to our festival-provided hotel rooms at the ski lodge.
emily and i shared a room, as per usual, and she charged out heroically to see to see the foo fighters and coldplay, leaving me to slumber in solitary bliss. i don't think a disinterred beatles reunion could have kept me from collapsing. i received an unexpected middle-of-the-night visit at 3:30 from a british rock star. there was wine. not too much wine. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. i'm recording in six weeks. fuck. we're back on the road. it inspired a good song and i went back to bed at 6:30.

we ate a cafeteria-style breakfast in the morning (half pseudo-western, half japanese) and started to get our bearings. juliette lewis ate across from us, wearing sweatpants. yesterday turned into a meeting-lots-of-fancy people day for me, which i assume must often be more likely when you are among other whitey rock people in a foreign land. set time was a ludicrous 11:30 am, but the entire festival was up and happening and our tent was full - about 2000 people. we had no idea what to expect...none...our record came out here 4 days ago and we knew nothing in terms of what had been done to promote it. then we found out that it had already sold 2000 copies, the video was being rotated on MTV, and there was already press in 2 major rock magazines. this is why being on a major label is awesome...things like this happen without us knowing or lifting a finger...the machine is at work while we sleep.
so. we took the stage and played a kick-ass show. one-off shows like this can go either way, i've found....very rusty or a burst of pure brilliance. then a day full of non-stop japanese press in the festival press tent - 7 or 8 interviews and 2 photo shoots and 1 video shoot in under 4 hours. every festival has an area like this. it's a large cattle-like tent where the press camps out and artists show up (with their label representative, generally), vaguely scheduled, and make the rounds like a press-buffet. The "label rep" is an interesting phenomenon that is also a huge perk of being on a major. Everywhere you show up - any country any time - there is a label rep to ferry you around and take you to do your promotional bullshit. Roadrunner has reps who cover entire countries or chunks of states (there is a woman, for example, who covers 13 states of the midwest). if they have no reps in a particular country or continent, they borrow reps from universal, who is their parent company. when we toured in australia and new zealand all of the reps were universal folks. what they do is simple. they fly to meet you wherever your show is, they greet you at the airport, they herd you into a rental car (sometimes with a driver), and they take you to your hotel. they usually stay in the same hotel unless they have friends in town or happen to live in the city you're playing. then their main job is to insure that you do your press and get to your show (though this is basically the tour manager's job) and basically act like spies for the label to report on how you were received by the natives. if you are a label rep for roadrunner your life consists of wrangling the nine guys in Slipknot and making sure nobody sees them without their masks on, then going to the airport a week later to pick of 3 Inches of Blood and getting them some special decaf coffee, then making sure Deicide are safe and sound and checked into their hotel. it's a weird fucking job. but god love them, they make our life so much easier.

that was a gigantic tangent. back to japan.

after the press was a little bit of dinner and then a signing session. we met a bunch of japanese fans and perfected our japanese "thank you". i found myself instinctively bowing my head a great amount. then the work day was over and we got to see the festival, which was an aesthetic masterpiece. it's nestled by a ski-resort and so every backdrop was a misted-over mountain covered with lush trees. i couldn't stop looking up. the lighting was brilliant and there was en entire field and wooded area covered with sparkling light from disco balls that were hung 20-50 feet in the air and illuminated by lights suspended elsewhere. there were recycling stations every 100 yards with 5 or 6 different boxes for very specific items, like paper cups and compost. there were boardwalks though the thick woods and big glowing blow-up creatures growing out of the forest floor. it was heavenly. within the space of a few hours, we had seen my morning jacket, gang of four and beck. beck took the cake by far. his band was tight as hell and he had a dancing dude in an eighties short-shorts warm-up get-up, sweatband and blu-blockers dancing around like a maniac, occasionally busting out a good-sized ghetto-blaster for no reason. but the highlight of my entire night was when beck started playing his solo songs. as he picked up his acoustic guitar, his band (instead of clearing off stage) sat down at a long table behind, which was set for dinner, him and started to eat. they just ate. while he played. the table was mic'ed and you could hear the perfect and comforting sounds, ever so slightly, of glasses being filled, forks being lifted and food being shared. genius. when he broke into the first track from "sea change", the band very gradually started to play the table (one banged forks onto wood, one started shaking a fruit shaker, one struck glasses that were perfectly tuned to the bells in the song) and by the end of the tune they were all in full swing. it was sheer brilliance. i can't wait to have a budget for a stage show. we are going to do some WHACK-ASS shit. the japanese audience were wonderful....completely into everything and loud and wild and smiling.

i had split up from brian, who favored seeing dinosaur jr. over meeting mr beck (or "Bekku" as he's known over here) so emily and i headed back into artists land and gave him a disc. he complimented the artwork and we chatted and emily was very happy because she had had a junior-high school crush on bekku. then we headed over to the dinosaur show, where we caught the very end of the very loud set. lou barlow approached me with the line "hi. you stole my melody", and indeed he was right. the melody for jeep song was ripped off shamelessly (but unconsciously, i assured him) from "skull" by sebadoh. he was very funny about it and we talked a while about how everything is essentially stolen. he quoted me the old adage "talent borrows, genius steals", and i felt much better. at any rate, the fact that lou barlow likes "the jeep song" made my life. i got to meet kevin shields, an old hero of mine from the My Bloody Valentine era of my life, and was pleased to find out that he had seen us at the patti smith meltdown festival in london. this man, as far as i am concerned, is an Actual Genius of Sonic Bliss and i sort of felt like an insignificant piece of fluff in his presence. it was pouring rain and time to leave and i managed to score a ride back to the hotel with all of these folks, plus the dude-singer from primal scream, and as i sat there in the van surrounded by all this great rock royalty someone pointed out that is was a Historic Rock Van, since there were so many generations of musician and they sort of looked at me, the kid, and i thought....wow. i am validated. my band is real. and that was also a very nice part of the night.

then i collapsed again.

On NIN (and, Being Home).

It's so very hard for me to imagine what I would be doing with my life right now if I weren't sitting here at my kitchen table, bags packed and laundry in the dryer, waiting to go to the airport at 6 am.

i've spent the majority of my time in these past three weeks (the longest stretch of time off we've had - absolutely no dresden dolls shows - in almost a year) fighting an interesting fight inside my head. Fighting the urge to feel Constant Catholic Guilt about what i was Not Getting Done.

The first few days back were the inevitable freak-out and readjustment period. Then i was faced with the feeling that my time was up, i was no longer at liberty to freak out as there was too much work to be done, and this revealed
a deeper urge to freak out. i am not organized. i am not a grown up. i leave my clothes in a pile in the middle of the floor when i walk into my apartment, i leave pieces of paper scattered all around my life, every surface area in sight is covered, every turn i take begs a paper to be filed or an email to be sent or a project to be finished. my to-do pile covers my stove, my sink and every square inch of floorspace. it is inescapable. if i am home, i am doing. i find it almost impossible to do anything leisurely outside of bed. if i want to read a book or write in my journal, i can't sit on the couch (and not just becaus eit in generally piled with Crap). i leave. i found myself leaving a lot. i had a short list of two important things that had to get accomplished. one was to start on the sheet music book for the songs form the first album (i sort of did, but didn't get very far) and the other was to start arranging piano parts and re-writing lyrics for the new record. i basically ignored that one, but brian and i did have a few productive, albeit short, rehearsals. as is often the case, we ended up chatting, arguing or eating during the majority of the time we had set aside to rehearse...this is one many perils of being in a duo with your friend.

But despite my inner voices often simmering up and yelling at me that i am a lazy, unorganized piece of shit, i put forth a very solid effort to ignore them and think that i may have actually succeeded for the first time in my life. I attribute this almost solely to the fact that i have biked my sorry ass down to the power yoga studio every single morning. yoga is The Shit because it makes meditation easy for people like me who have very little success with sitting on a cushion in the kitchen. it is a disciplined chunk of intense exercise with a teacher constantly reminding you every minute to let go of the outside world and just pay attention, truly pay direct attention, to what you are doing. after about the first week of getting myself on this hardcore regimen i found myself often successfully ignoring the Constant Catholic Guilt voices, eating only when I was hungry and shutting my mouth more often than I was used to when i was about to say something hurtful or stupid. a miracle. speaking of shutting up, i will do that right now before i start to sound like a yoga evangelist. but my mat travels with me. when we were touring with NIN, i would break out the mat every morning and find some random place to do an hour of yoga to a CD i brought with me. most times we were at the venue beofre hte band showed up and the crew were very kind about the fact that we didn't always get our own room due to the small venue sizes, so they let me use the NIN space. i'll never forget the very peculiar feeling of doing yoga in trent reznor's dressing rooms. it took me only a second to place why that peculiar feeling was so familiar....an old, old, familiarity....the way his clothes were all set out for him and his dresser all set up with all of his toiletries and his big bouncy exercise ball and special trent reznor power bars and aromatherapeutic candles and whatnot. then it hit me: it was the exact same feeling i used to get as a wee child when going into my parent's bedroom when they weren't home, and looking at the sundry (and possibly forbidden) items on their dressers. creepy.

speaking of NIN, i never really got to explain what that was like day to day. We were sleeping in our tour bus, whereas the NIN folks all travelled by tour bus but stayed in hotels. trent didn't like sleeping in the bus (or so the lore went) and so the band always slept in a hotel in one city, drove through the day, and showed up at the next city for soundcheck. in cities where we had two back-to-back nights in the same venue, the dresden dolls and their crew would live in the venue parking lot like city lizards and hope to find a place to take a shit in the morning (no shit on the bus, only liquids....eeewwww). this caused occasional hilarious solutions. i will not get into it. anyway, for the most part our morning view was a chain-link fence and post-industrial wasteland and i think this added to the general tour malaise significantly. our bus driver for the american leg was a sweetheart ex-cop from philly named bill who always said "godDAMMIT" every time he made a wrong turn. the day for the NIN crew would start at around 9 am and the lights were the first to get set up. watching these guys work was fucking fascinating....sometimes the stress level on that stage during the day was so poisonous you didn't even want to be near the building. then the sound would start to get set up and the PA tested with this HORRIBLE HORRIBLE soft rock music that the NIN sound guy always pumped through the speakers to EQ them. really, really terrible stuff, like, nightmarish. I always found this very poetic, as ten hours later these same speakers would be pumping loud loud loud hate hate hate, but for now it was Ooo Baby elevator music. lunch for the crew (and us, the starving urban lizards) was catered in the club and usually very delicious and healthy, unless we were in mexico in which case it was terrifying mystery meat. by around 4 or 5 the NIN-band would arrive and say their hellos and get to their soundcheck. by this time i would be back from any random excursion i may have taken into The Outside World, and would start to warm up my own voice for our soundcheck, in case we got one, which we did about half the time (though we'd rarely get more than 15 minutes). the whole NIN crew were very very kind and wonderful to us, they always tried to help us if we needed guidance and jason, the keyboard tech, even happily fixed my falling-apart black shoe after i had seen his skillful expertise at gluing and applying 7 drying clamps to a destroyed Trent Reznor Army Boot. The band was also very kind and we developed our own private jokes with each. Alessandro, the italian keyboard player, had three (THREE) mac tattoos. one of the mac logo on his wrist, one of the "sad computer" error icon on his forearm and another one i never saw. Jerome Dillon the drummer was tall and his angular hair made him spottable at a considerable distance. Every girl in our crew developed a crush on his at one point or another and he often came out during our set to play Karma Police with us, which always brought us Great Joy. Aaron North the guitar player was the youngest of the bunch and I always got confused, because NIN put out an album in 1989 and yet the guitar player was 4 years younger than me. this is where it is important to point out that this band was not A Band, but more a collection of hired back-up musicians. there was never any sense of NIN-camraderie. these guys were here to kick the shit out of the music every night and that was their job. there was no high-fiving and laughing and trent-reznor butt-pinching. the atmosphere was about at serious as it gets. and i always wonder if Trent Reznor wants a Band or prefers things this way, so that NIN remains Trent Reznor. Jerome, i think, was the only one who had been with him on the last tour in 1999. Jeordie White (aka twiggy ramirez) was almost aloof as T-Dog himself and rarely made conversation. the members of the band had apparently all gotten into a private joke of singing "Jeordie White" to the tune of every possible NIN song, and soon we followed suit to see what good ones we could come up with. The classic and original was to "Terrible Lie" (it went: "Jeordie White"...."Jerodie White" to the tune of "Terrible Lie"). We came up with a good "With Teeth" ("Ah-Jerodie White-ah") and a good "Closer" version ("I wanna fuck you like a Jeordie White"). I also came up with an interesting song called "The Hands That Sneeze" that went along with a hand-dance and garnered some attention in our tour bus. Back to the personell, we get to The Man Himself, Mr. Trent. He kept himself at a considerable distance and almost never talked to his crew, that we saw. He was always very quiet, polite and almost never stuck around the minute the show was over. Jerome, Alessandro and Aaron were all likely to go to an afterparty, but Jerodie and Trent were like ghosts the minute they left stage. I think they left through the roof by helicopter, because we'd often see fans waiting outside the stage door for HOURS, asking "where's Trent? where's Trent?" and we had to admit that he was gone and must have used the Bat-exit. who knows. when we got to mexico the whole NIN-band donned fake moustaches, cheesy sunglasses and wrapped bandanas around their so that they could pose as "locals" and thus not get disturbed while sight-seeing. But albino mexicans, i hear, are very rare and their ruse didn't really work.

There was a NIN vocabulary that slowly formed over the course of the tour. The NIN were such advanced technological creatures (and as internet-centric as we were) that they brought their own wireless to every venue, so we were never offline. If the venue also had wireless, we referred to it as "wireless". if we had NIN-wireless, we referred to it as "Ninternet". The kids who would wait outside the venue starting at 6 in the morning, wrapped in sleeping bags and pierced 6 ways to sunday, to insure a front-row Trent-Reznor-sweat-soaked experience were referred to as "Nincompoops" or the more affectionate "Nincompoopers". Evening mealtime provided by the catering was "Ninner" and the overbearing nag champa that the NIN tour manager would burn in his office five sticks at a time was "Ninscense". The entire world of the club and it's grounds, rather, anything that did not include what we referred to as "The Outside World", was "NinLand". This was most often used when referring to the tour as a whole as in "We've been playing solo shows and have had a day off. I miss NinLand." Missing NinLand was usually due to the fact that returning to smaller clubs on our "offday shows" usually meant coming to terms again with horrible sound, no catering, no Jerome Dillons to flirt with and no nice keyboard techs to fix our shoes. Alas. But in closing, I must say that having a Trent Reznor Life seems like a hard life. He was said to be often dissatisfied with the state of the crew and the shows and this usually left everyone in NinLand feeling anxious. As one of his techs said to us: "You don't bring your B-game to Trent Reznor". anyway, a good object lesson for the dresden dolls. We watched the band play almost every night and i was constantly astounded at Trent Reznor's ability to scream so loud and play so hard night after night after night. We always got a great view of the side-stage antics, since we watched from the stage, and my favorite part was when Aaron would kick over Jerome's drums during a song. Then the drum techs would scurry around like roaches on speed to get them set back up. Then Aaron would kick them over again. Etc. It was like a game. I made sure that almost every time Trent played "Hurt", I could see from somewhere. Sometimes I went out into the audience and lose myself in the crowd. But I always caught that song. It's a brilliant song. I cried most times I heard it. Cormac and I (speaking of Cormac, he opened up for my solo show a few weeks ago and was met with much applause: go see www.sleepshell.com) just covered a version on "Right where it belongs" from the new NIN album, and it ranks up there with "Hurt". Lyrics not quite as good, but still gorgeous. (Sorry, Trent).

Long out of NinLand, i have become fully happy at home again and am sad to be leaving tomorrow for Japan. In my three weeks home I have been to the Cafe Pamplona three times (too many people complained and the spanish 88-year owner, Josephina, caved in and re-opened), read three excellent books, made a calendar of Where I Have Been For The Past Year Of My Life (because I couldn't remember anymore and was starting to get scared), spent lots of Quality Time with various cherished and long-lost friends, and vacuumed my apartment. I prepared for and played a solo show which was wonderful....dusted out a bunch of old tunes and breathed a little life into them. Brian sang a sing for the first time alone on stage and broke everybody's hearts (it was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotels' "Oh Comely"....the best and saddest song ever written). We threw a rollerskaing party in Dorchester (known in these parts as The Hood...there was a metal detector at the door due to some shootings there last year) and about 200 people came and rollerskated their asses off. And at the rollerskating party (at which we played DJ...fun fun), we instituted shaving door prizes and gave one mohawk, cut one girl's hair, and shaved one pair of man-legs and one set of pubic hair. We used new disposable razors on everybody and it was very good clean fun. Days on end have been spent watching footage for the DVD downstairs with Pope, Zea and Noah and making changes. I daresay it's coming out pretty well and it should be hitting shelves before Xmas. Just very recently I watched my clothes tumble in the washing machine for ten minutes. I went to the basement, to see if the load was done, and there were ten minutes left, so i watched through the front-loading glass door. i never have time to watch. I didn't really have time. I should have been packing. I should be packing right now. it was really beautiful, i had never noticed how artful the spin cycles are. When it got to the last few minutes it went into a fast spinning frenzy in one direction and then came to a dead stop. then a few moments - maybe 12 seconds - later, it gave the clothes a brief (maybe 3 second) toss to the right and then stopped again. then it gave them a brief toss to the left. then to the right again. this last set of little tosses seemed so loving. i am very emotional tonight. i am listening to the mother cat outside calling her kittens. she;s an alleycat but we've been feeding her out of a dish on the front stairs. she started with three kittens but a few days ago andrew found one of them dead in the garden. sad things happen all the time. i love my friend and drummer brian but he's been very sad lately, so i try to be a good friend to him and not be too irritating like i can be. he is a deep motherfucker and i don't envy the way he has been plumbing the existential depths lately. drives a person crazy.

our flight is in 8 hours. i know very little about japan, well, no more than the average american, so i expect my mind to be turned inside out and i will probably find some interesting things to relate. this is one particular trip that i assume will yield good photos. i currently have a backlog of about 1498 interesting digital photos waiting to be put into a tour journal on the net but i can never seem to find the time. i would rather read. but someday.



recommended reading:
"The Art of Travel" by Alain de Botton. One of the most hilarious and honest pop-philosopher-essayists of our time. he also wrote "how proust can change your life" which is also a great read.

"The Anarchist and the Devil Do Cabaret" by Norman Nowrocki. Not insanely well-written, but very passionate, accurate and funny account of a montreal political cabaret/crust-punk band touring europe in a band while the singer searches for his long-lost polish uncle.

"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse. On of my top 5 favorite books of all time, I am re-reading it for the third time right now. It was originally published in 1927 but makes more sense now than ever. For madmen only.

i just made an amazing discovery.
if you place your mac powerbook directly on top of your lower belly while watching a DVD in bed, the extreme heat soothes menstrual discomfort.

the fourth of july.

july 1st
Things have reached that point.
We've just finished our second-to-last festival gotten into a van for a ten hour drive to Roskilde (one of the biggest, 70,000 people in denmark) and Brian was already at the end of his rope five days ago. Emily just handed back a clipboard and paper so we could put our signatures down for something and brian (instead of simply signing the thing) spent a good ten minutes kind of twitching and giggling and drawing a creature that looked like edvard munch's “the scream” with giant vulture wings and feet like shrivelled elves'. We didn't even find it funny, just....brace for drive and shut up.
Things have reached that point.
-
july 3rd - 11:30 pm
well fucking brilliant. arriving back home at 11 pm, 5 am body-time and listening to the boston cab driver blaring bad synthesized R&B while the skyline
greets me covered in haze. it's enough to make me want to turn around and go back, as much as i was sick of being on tour. we fully hit the wall about a week before the end. now i am home, water boiling, and refusing to go to bed until i can make some sense of anything. i always have to do this, i don't know exactly why.

-
tea is done. cathode is injected into the stereo. i'm already feeling better.
i just feel a little lost. this is when i want my guidebook to this life, to tell me where to start, how to come to terms. my voice teacher told me a few months ago that some of the huger performers he's known will often take tour breaks in their hometowns without going home. they just check into a hotel and keep their rote touring schedule so that they don't have to deal with the mindfuck. i feel like i don't live here anymore. i walk into pope's apartment upon getting out of the cab a few hours ago and nobody blinked an eye. they're just as used to me being a ghost of a human being as i am. my heart is breaking a little bit. the more i tour, the less i feel like myself. the constant people, the constant working out of interpersonal drama and other people's issues is something i can actively escape when i'm at home. i just close the door. on tour, there are no doors. everybody's shit is in each other's shit constantly. my nerves weren't built for that. if i had a few magical hours a day in wehich i could beam myself back home, to my safe place, alone, where i process and write and get free from the ragged wreck of humanity, i'd be far more equipped to survive the schedule. but it's all or nothing. when you tour, you just go. and you're just there, which is always sort of somewhere but never really anywhere.

"i'm in italy."
"where?"
"some festival near....padova." i'm not sure which part of italy because i forgot to check the atlas.
"but WHERE?"
"outside...wandering around...trying to get to a place where i can be alone....in a weird concrete landing, behind the tour bus." this is where most of my conversations take place. sort of nowhere.
"i miss you."
"i miss me too."

"i'm in berlin."
"where?"
"just kind of walking down a street, somewhere near the venue." i don't know which part of berlin; i forgot to check my map. i don't care, really. we're not staying and if i knew where i was, it wouldn't help me.
"what's there?"
"nothing much....apartments....i just passed a pawn shop and bought a cigarette tin. it's one of those typical streets in berlin where you just feel like your'e lost in the middle of nowhere. no signs of life but yet there are people who apparently live here and call it home." the spectre of every building having been thrown up in 15 minutes in the 50's may be part of the problem.
"what's the plan today?"
"eh. i have about two hours til soundcheck, and we may not even get one. i'm going to wander up and down this street...warm up my voice, it's all fucked up, and then head back to the venue." where i will also feel like i'm nowhere.
"i feel like i'm nowhere."
"you've been on the road for a while, now. i miss you."
"i miss me too."
"i love you."
"i love you too. i think i'm going a little crazy."
"i'm not surprised."

"i'm in the bus."
"where?"
"somewhere between two cities. we've been driving for 14 hours. i knocked myself out last night."
"fucking."

"i'm in england again."
"where?"
"glastonbury."
"where's that?"
"in the south, somewhere...look at a map, fucking." why is it my job to fucking know these things?
"i trust you."
"don't trust me, i'm losing my mind." and i am. the sun is starting to shine. it's simultaneously t-shirt and heavy jacket weather.
"what's going on?"
"i'm in the parking area for the tour busses. just some strange big fenced in sandland. i'm truly alone for the first time in 72 hours. it rained like a motherfucker here and everyone is wearing industrial rainboots. it's crazy."
"when do you play?"
"tomorrow. i need to be careful tonight. no drinking. no smoking. the show tomorrow is important."
"i'll let you go and warm up."
no! never let me go, never stop talking and giving me this human vocal thread by which to connect myself to what i know my life was and is. i don't want to warm up, i don't want to go back to being nowhere in this parking lot with no stove and no bed and no door that closes and i don't want to take my luggage to the dressing room and make myself a cheese and bread sandwich and a weak cup of tea in a plastic cup which will melt.
"ok."

but then again, it can be wonderful. it's work. after watching such a collection of huge folks close-up and backstage over the past week, i feel like my rose-tinted music glasses have been finally fully crushed and replaced with a stark reality of routines, gigs being called in from distant planets, nodding teen heroes being propped up by crutches backstage because their heroin habit has reduced them to 89 pounds, the mechanical nature of it all, the cocaine, the hangers-on, the wandering hipsters, more pointy shoes and blazers than you can shake a dying tambourine at, the lack of love, the whole fucked-up-ness of the inevitable disaster when you take a trade and artform fundamentally rooted in the expression of pain, suffering and insecurity and organize the shit out of it. does anyobdy feel like they're really in the middle of the party? not from where i was sitting. it seemed like everybody was always hovering around the edges, looking into a collective void.

the deadliest part: i'm home, and it feels closer to nowhere than ever before. this is bad, very bad. the british, i found out recently, have a name for this. they call it The Fear. it's a general sweeping mental malady that sets in after living in the UK with it's suicide-inducing weahter after a while. I have contracted a strain of The Fear. maybe not quite so bad. The Ennui. The germans call it Weltschmerz. Do we have a good english term for this? we will know. I hereby dub it The End.

don't get me wrong, it wasn't like this every day and every where. i'm exhausted. i want more. i want my drummer back, i feel like i'm losing him to the dark side again.
i want to skip over the part where i climb into my empty bed and wait to see how long it will take me to fall asleep on this fucked up schedule and get to the part where i wake up to the beautiful day and i'm magically compelled to immediately practice and open 67 pieces of mail and fly into a general manic creative frenzy and clean my whole kitchen from top to bottom and forget that i just spent five weeks doing absolutely nothing but listlessly watching life wander by between rock shows. i want my life to come back to me, because i don't fucking know where to go to find it. it's terrifying.

i want the fourth of july to just go away. i want the sound of people practicing fireworks outside my window to vanish. it sounds like war to me.

emily and bri stayed in europe and went to the G8 summit to reckon with The Man. i will live vicariously through them and their emails about how the resistance is going. reading todays' paper about live 8 and the general response of the experts and then watching the BBC coverage of Iraq on the plane and then watching a film about the last few days of Hitler's life in the bunker couldn't be doing much to improve my mood, come to think about it. simultaneously getting my period upon boarding the plane and having no sponge and no underwear didn't fucking help matters either. it all sucks, man. everybody's dying and complaining and trying and it's always this way. there is absolutely nothing to be upset about.

it's the fourth of july.
it's the fourth of july.
this is hilarious and sad to me, for some reason.
if i wasn's so tired, i'd find a sarcastic reason why.

i must have also been going through a hormonally challenged day when i had that unforgettable fourth of july image burned into my brain, i think it was 1998 or 1999. i was seeing will, and he lived near the mass ave bridge, where thousands of people always gather to watch the fireworks over the river. we walked onto the bridge but somehow lost each other. i looked and looked and coulndn't find him. the relationship wasn't working out anyway at that point. i'd never seen the fireworks before, i watched from the bridge, alone, surrounded by families and lovers and drunk people and the whole typical assortment. then they were over. and thousands of people started walking off the bridge, but i just stood there, in the middle, facing them all coming at me and thinking about america and patriotism and loneliness and people's lives in general and jsut started bawling my brains out (i'm not a crying-in-public kind of person generally. to myself, quietly, over the paper when i'm PMSing, yes, but not like this. no way.) and the people passing me, who were all in a kind of a fairground headspace, just looked at me with that "damn, what the fuck is her problem?" kind of look and they kept streaming by, thousands of them, bearing lawnchairs and coolers and it got uglier and uglier and i got sadder and sadder until somehow the whole thing ended and i made my way back to will's house, where his father offered me a beer and a piece of watermelon and i felt better. i wonder the hell was wrong with me in those days.

On Glastonbury

A Chronicle In Three Parts.

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glastonbury! we've been here for about four hours. We play tomorrow and up until now every festival that we've played has been an excercise in patience but generally good. having to be a cog in a large machine and only getting 30 minutes to explain your band is a difficult fucking task. We've been driving from country to country on our tour bus, landing in the middle of nowhere and trying to orient. Every crowd has been crazy and great excpet for yesterday, in london at the wireless festival in hyde park, where we encountered our First Real Unresponsive Audience in the history of the band. British Corpses on a drizzling field. But watching the acts that followed was heartening; the psychedelic furs, moby, even new order (I gave a disc to the furs, who watched our set and were very kind, as was moby) also greeted a pretty much catatonic crowd. We got to glastonbury late (and missed our shot to streak during the Kaiser Chief's set) and here I am, sitting in the catering tentative outside the john peel stage, one bottled-water worth of wine inside me and working on a second, enjoying life and the rain.
Glastonbury is a british rite of passage, in a way. 140,000 people, hundreds of bands, torrential rain. Passing these thousands of brits wading through 2-foot deep mud proclaiming with their bloody existances “I love music and I suffer for it” and smelling the burn of sausages and wine in the air makes me feel like I'm at summer camp, or what I imagined summer camp mustve been like, because I never went. There is an ongoing catwalk of wellington rainboots, sneakers wrapped in plastic bags, scooby doo body costumes and all other vareities of freak.

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Next day
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I found where I belong at this festival: it's a land in the corner of the edge of nowhere called Lost Vagueness and that's where people are sporting full period ballroom dress and other fancy clothings (and wellington rainboots, which makes for a beautiful and poetic sight). I found a secret bar last night and there were laced and hatted people within, playing a skeleton of a piano and drinking fine whiskey. If I hadn't had to sing today I would have gotten all sorts of inebriated.

But there's tonight, and inebriated is a possibility. Our set is over, it went well...about four to five thousand people
came to our tent. I escaped afterwards to go see garbage (not bad, but didn't hold my attention), rufus wainwright (charming and half naked, yay!) and am waiting to see bright eyes in the john peel tent. Bright eyes has replaced avril in my cd player and I can honestly swear that it's (the fevers and mirrors record) the only thing I've listened to since coming on the european tour. I tried to listen to a garbage mix that becca gave me, but it skipped, so I took it out and that deosnt count. I can fully understand why people just can't stand it. overdramatic, pitiful, needy and all that. but I love it, I think people don't see the humor in it. The poor guy. The album has some of the most beautiful production I've ever heard and really, I feel sorry for the fact that the voice and the woe-is-me subject matter probably turns away so folks from this band. For me, it's a guilty pleasure and I can't only be grateful that someone is taking the self-depricating, self-aggrandizing, self-loathing tendencies I often want to put into music but censor for fear of turning everyone off. Add to list of projects: write a record for only conor oberst to listen to.

Anyway, he's on in an hour or so, and i can't wait to see. I think I have a bona fide crush.

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Next day
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My bona fide crush is officially over.

this story must begin with the fact that brian and I were fully prepared to streak during the kaiser chiefs' set (we even invested in matching garterless stockings while in camdentown in london) but we arrived at glastonbury literally an hour after their set, so I had a latent urge. “All sorts of inebriated” is certainly a decent description for where I found myself at nine last night, when bright eyes were supposed to hit the stage. The schedule was running over an hour late, so Brianna (who was also birthday girl, 21 at glasto!) and I sat backstage having fun and drinking and smoking like fishes and chimneys(the perils of four days off in a row - I'm like an idiot kid in a candy store when I get off my fascist touring regimen). Bright eyes took the stage, led by a be-hoodied and bitter-looking c-dog (em's affectionate nickname for mr oberst) and they immediately began to be plagued by the same monitor problems that we had. And then it started happening. My crush started deflating. I mean, the sound on stage was horrible, and perhaps the mud had gotten to him, but poor c-dog was out of control. Between every song (and it got progressively worse as the set wore on) he berated the crowd, berated the festival, and basically dripped a kind of acidic sacrasm all over the stage. Standout quotes: “put your credit cards together! Come on! Visa in one hand and mastercard in the other! Put your credit cards together!” and in reference to the fact that glastonbury was supporting Make Povery History “great. yay. we're all here and poverty's going to go away. awesome” and things to that effect. He even rolled his eyes at John Peel and referred to him as a cokehead (on the john peel stage! this is wrong, conor! he just died! have some respect!), but after people started yelling “you're a cunt!” from the audience he apologized for that one. he truly sounded like an asshole, a twelve-year old with a bad attitude.

Emily came and found me and brianna by the side of the stage and we watched this all going down and then I decided it would be a good idea to streak and when em brought me another whiskey and the band struck up “lover I don't have to love” I decided that god wanted me to do it. what perfect way to puncuate a song about casual sex, loneliness and a lack of caring about the universe than random nakedness? emily, being the mom-like tour manager that she is, reacted first with doubt but then after thinking it through and looking at the way the show and crowd were progressing decided that "this needs to happen for so many reasons". the voices in my own head were somewhat of a blur, but it was a familiar "something interesting has to take place now" kind of amanda head-refrain. so I waited til the song ended, got undressed, walked to the middle of the stage, and made out with conor oberst for ten seconds. he quite seemed to enjoy it, and he was an amzing kisser even if he's a brat. I was pried away by a burly security guy who didn't seem to think it was at all funny and told to get the fuck out of the tent so we went back to the bar and I freestyle-rapped a song about how emily is the best tour manager in the world. I did talk to c-dog before his entourage left but I think “all sorts of inebriated” wouldn't suffice to explain his state. gone, just gone......gone.

mom, please don't send an email. i'm already been wracked with guilt now that i realize that i took part in what was probably the most shameful sets at glastonbury. oh well. fuck guilt! rock and roll and onward and upwards and there will be plenty of rock shows to wear clothes at for the rest of my life. and No More Streaking for me lest i get a bad reputation. promise. at least not until next summer. i remember feeling this same sort of guilt after making out with evil-jock carl easton at my high school reunion and now i look back at it with a kind of a fondness.

and for the record, though conor oberst has proved himself whiny to the max on one night, he's still incredibly cute, a good kisser and put out a really well-produced record with great songwriting that I will probably have to wait a few years to listen to again. i even, upon going into my amazon checkout cart today, cancelled the bright eyes albums i had on order. too painful. i have hope. i want to think, in my hope for all humanity, that conor had a terrible night and will wake up to a brand new day and realize that things aren't all that bad, that while we can't end poverty by putting on rock shows it's better than doing absolutley nothing, and that insulting the dead in their namesake tent at a festival is a bad career move. and becasue i still think his music is brilliant, i will try to go see him play again to make up for the bad dream.

emily said that the singer from primal scream was so drugged out that he refused to leave stage at the end of their set and had to be dragged off. hard drugs = bad. alcohol has it's moments but it's pretty dangerous as well. back to juice for amanda. i think my bigggest guilty feeling is that instead of drinking and hanging out at the john peel tent watching conor oberst berate the audience and pulling a weird naked stunt i would have been much better off back over at Lost Vagueness, where i could have found jason webley and my other spiritual brothers and sisters and had an authentically good naked time with the real freaks. i want the sixties in my head back.


Anyway, I need to find a new rock crush. top candidate: andre 3000.