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.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
caged bird blurs
i just don't give a shit. i'll just have to work backwards. the diary turns into a curse, the more that happens and the more clever things i think about to relate, the less time i have and the less motivated i feel to sit down and take hand to keyboard. i don't write songs anymore. i write diary entries. it's a start. i wrote the rough outline of a song in mexico and tried to flesh it out during my 2 hours off in boston. it centers around a moment a photograph is taken at disney world. three voices: minnie stuck in her oppressive fucking costume, the housewife, and minnie's boyfriend the junkie with a view in the projects three miles away that overlooks disney world. main theme (like i can't relate): WHY AM I DOING THIS?
backwards number one.
so tonight was out first show of the european tour. we landed in deutschland yesterday and hung out with a huge bunch of caged exotic birds (all colors of green and blue and in a box sort of shaped like mini-bird-kennel with a few square inches per exotic bird) at baggage claim D, while british airways figured out where on the planet our luggage had migrated. they were destined for a german zoo. we felt for them. brothers. we bussed to the hurricane festival and slept over in the bus (on the grounds) and woke up with just a few hours til soundcheck. europeans know how to take care of artists...everybody says it and they're right. we had a nice little cubicle in artists village and we were the first band of many on the main stage. the show was fine despite the fact that it was in the fifties, bright yet drizzling, windy as fuck, and we were jetlagged and unpracticed. being the first band of the bill had the huge advantage that we could wander and observe for the rest of the day. so we ate and watched boy sets fire (punk and effective). then we watched NIN (nin-like and great).
then we watched rammstein (german and hilarious. i decided that making fun of rammstein is as pointless as hating the circus. the people must have their fun). then we watched oasis from the side of the stage. i was pretty unfamiliar with their music though i have checked out a few CDs.
the point HERE is that emily, our tour manager, is an oasis FIEND and had been looking forward to this day the way a....i can't think of a good metaphor. the way a crazed teenage obsessor looks forward to meeting the band they obsess over. which isn't a metaphor.
but you understand. this was the girl who had three complete walls covered with oasis posters and magazine centerfolds and spent every allowance on the latest maxi-single. to pick up, we watched them form the side of the stage with NIN (all five in a line, which was poetic and lovely) and then i wandered backstage to where emily had secured a concrete spot hanging with oasis and was introduced to each member of the band, including liam, the singer who was the most opinionated fuck i've ever met (guess what - i sorta liked him), noel his brother, who was very nice, and zach starkey, ringo starr's son, who is drumming for oasis on this tour. truth be told, they'd had a pretty terrible set. it was freezing for them too (i empathized) and they faced massive feedback problems. so i asked liam, the singer,ß what the difference was, for him, between a good show for himself and a good show for the audience.
it's a mystery. sometimes you play like shit and the audience goes nuts and cries and sometimes you're completely on and the audience just isn't there with you.
according to liam, it only works if you play well. don't you feel the tide turn when you talk to people after the show and they shower you with love and you-changed-my-life-tonight?
i asked liam. no, he said, i fucking leave the venue immediately. well, liam. ah, whatever. they also clued me in on the motto that i would have believed if i had really truly wanted to: "drink and smoke whatever you want, you'll be fine tomorrow." fuck. really? two marlboro lights and one vodka orange juice and one heinekin later i lost my faith. what am i doing? you're going to lose your voice, you fucking idiot. quit thinking that being in the presence of rock stars is special dispensantion for vice.
you'll be just as hung over tomorrow, asshole.
backwards number two: the DVD shoot.
so while back in boston, for a grand total of four days between tours, we shot our first DVD and played an additional show at avalon for WFNX. it really honestly looked kind of like a fast-motion cartoon in my house as i dropped my suitcase on the floor and started talking to pope downstairs about the shoot. beautiful marie and emilie flew in from france to take part and so did casey from san franscisco, the gentelman beyond reason who has been organizing the brigade through the magic of the interweb. the house was packed from top to bottom with people buzzing 24/7 getting things ready for the shoot...film interns, art department, piano tuners...madness.
the shoot itself began the moment i woke up (good morning Camera In My Face, i know i invited you in but now i wonder if this is truly healthy) and the day was a fuzzy soup of mania that I can luckily go back and watch now that i've forgotten. the power went out shortly before soundcheck and about 300 people patiently waited on commonwealth ave for three hours while we waited for it to come back on and finish soundchecking and readying the club. despite this disaster, the show did get filmed and we will see what becomes of it. we were tired. i gave the show a B- overall. maybe the visual will make up for any terribleness. in a stroke of true randomness, we did get christopher lydon to play the MC. i am strongly considering releasing the DVD without the musical performance, i think it would make more sense.
the show at avalon was a typical radio-station-throws-20-hip-bands-together kind of awkwardfest. pointy boots and sunglasses everywhere. i got to see one of my rock-crushes (the singer of the kaiser chiefs) and i streaked across stage during their set to keep the night interesting.
backwards yet still more: ....and everything before that must have been on tour with nine inch nails in america. we did do that, didn't we? it all gloms together in a blur of bus, dressing room, show, gas station, people and sharpies (both black and silver). i do not love the blur, i do not hate it, and i certainly don't try to focus on it any more, it's like trying to make sense of a film playing on fast fast forward. just appreicate the images for now and we'll take a closer look later. not that i am not enjoying myself. i am, actaully.
i have more free time lately to do as i please. i'm in the tour bubble. as the NIN stage manager, bitter and hilarious name-a-tour-i've-been on-it british chap,would put it in answer to everyone else's crass "living the dream" mantra: i'm "circling the dream". you're only in the picture when you look back at the photos. as he also says, after he takes a moment to sigh, order another few people around, yell into his cell phone that any other color WILL NOT DO and puts his hands on his hips while looking around for a moment, fully convinced that the venue will not collapse within seconds: "Time for a fucking hot pocket." that too.
NIN needs it's own chapter. it is it's own world. later.
forwards.
right now it's three days later than i started this entry, we've played two more festivals and frozen our asses off, brian's faith in music has "been restored" now that he's seen motorhead, and i can't fall asleep and it's 4:30 am. we've been driving almost an entire two days. we re-unite with NIN tomorrow for vienna and it will be nice to see the whole crew again.
the only thing i can remember that, for some reason, i felt it was important to relate was the food on the way back from san diego when the NIN tour finished. we were flying some typically cheap ticket and the food was brought. i always get vegetarian (though i do eat fish) because it's almost always better than the standard fare but brian, who was sitting next to me, was brought some really unidentifiable meat. it was sort of saucer-shaped and had the consistency of meatloaf. in his defense, he did actually TRY a bite before turning it into entertainment. it came in a sad bed of peas and corn and so he took two of the peas and gave it eyes, gave it a leafy hat and split it lengthwise to create a frighteningly mean-looking mouth, and made it sing all sorts of beatles songs and impromptu operatic numbers about how it's life was a misery because it was neither beef nor foul, chicken nor pork, and it was going through the most wonderful musical existential crisis and
i was peeing my seat with laughter and we were of course irritating the fuck out of all the nice families around us. then he made things worse by exchanging one of the peas for a corn kernel, so the little mystery-meat-beast had two different colored eyes, and making it sing a medley of marilyn manson songs. here i fully lost it, and needed to either throw up or fling the thing so we gave it a burial at the empty tray table next to me under a blue cocktail napkin.
backwards number one.
so tonight was out first show of the european tour. we landed in deutschland yesterday and hung out with a huge bunch of caged exotic birds (all colors of green and blue and in a box sort of shaped like mini-bird-kennel with a few square inches per exotic bird) at baggage claim D, while british airways figured out where on the planet our luggage had migrated. they were destined for a german zoo. we felt for them. brothers. we bussed to the hurricane festival and slept over in the bus (on the grounds) and woke up with just a few hours til soundcheck. europeans know how to take care of artists...everybody says it and they're right. we had a nice little cubicle in artists village and we were the first band of many on the main stage. the show was fine despite the fact that it was in the fifties, bright yet drizzling, windy as fuck, and we were jetlagged and unpracticed. being the first band of the bill had the huge advantage that we could wander and observe for the rest of the day. so we ate and watched boy sets fire (punk and effective). then we watched NIN (nin-like and great).
then we watched rammstein (german and hilarious. i decided that making fun of rammstein is as pointless as hating the circus. the people must have their fun). then we watched oasis from the side of the stage. i was pretty unfamiliar with their music though i have checked out a few CDs.
the point HERE is that emily, our tour manager, is an oasis FIEND and had been looking forward to this day the way a....i can't think of a good metaphor. the way a crazed teenage obsessor looks forward to meeting the band they obsess over. which isn't a metaphor.
but you understand. this was the girl who had three complete walls covered with oasis posters and magazine centerfolds and spent every allowance on the latest maxi-single. to pick up, we watched them form the side of the stage with NIN (all five in a line, which was poetic and lovely) and then i wandered backstage to where emily had secured a concrete spot hanging with oasis and was introduced to each member of the band, including liam, the singer who was the most opinionated fuck i've ever met (guess what - i sorta liked him), noel his brother, who was very nice, and zach starkey, ringo starr's son, who is drumming for oasis on this tour. truth be told, they'd had a pretty terrible set. it was freezing for them too (i empathized) and they faced massive feedback problems. so i asked liam, the singer,ß what the difference was, for him, between a good show for himself and a good show for the audience.
it's a mystery. sometimes you play like shit and the audience goes nuts and cries and sometimes you're completely on and the audience just isn't there with you.
according to liam, it only works if you play well. don't you feel the tide turn when you talk to people after the show and they shower you with love and you-changed-my-life-tonight?
i asked liam. no, he said, i fucking leave the venue immediately. well, liam. ah, whatever. they also clued me in on the motto that i would have believed if i had really truly wanted to: "drink and smoke whatever you want, you'll be fine tomorrow." fuck. really? two marlboro lights and one vodka orange juice and one heinekin later i lost my faith. what am i doing? you're going to lose your voice, you fucking idiot. quit thinking that being in the presence of rock stars is special dispensantion for vice.
you'll be just as hung over tomorrow, asshole.
backwards number two: the DVD shoot.
so while back in boston, for a grand total of four days between tours, we shot our first DVD and played an additional show at avalon for WFNX. it really honestly looked kind of like a fast-motion cartoon in my house as i dropped my suitcase on the floor and started talking to pope downstairs about the shoot. beautiful marie and emilie flew in from france to take part and so did casey from san franscisco, the gentelman beyond reason who has been organizing the brigade through the magic of the interweb. the house was packed from top to bottom with people buzzing 24/7 getting things ready for the shoot...film interns, art department, piano tuners...madness.
the shoot itself began the moment i woke up (good morning Camera In My Face, i know i invited you in but now i wonder if this is truly healthy) and the day was a fuzzy soup of mania that I can luckily go back and watch now that i've forgotten. the power went out shortly before soundcheck and about 300 people patiently waited on commonwealth ave for three hours while we waited for it to come back on and finish soundchecking and readying the club. despite this disaster, the show did get filmed and we will see what becomes of it. we were tired. i gave the show a B- overall. maybe the visual will make up for any terribleness. in a stroke of true randomness, we did get christopher lydon to play the MC. i am strongly considering releasing the DVD without the musical performance, i think it would make more sense.
the show at avalon was a typical radio-station-throws-20-hip-bands-together kind of awkwardfest. pointy boots and sunglasses everywhere. i got to see one of my rock-crushes (the singer of the kaiser chiefs) and i streaked across stage during their set to keep the night interesting.
backwards yet still more: ....and everything before that must have been on tour with nine inch nails in america. we did do that, didn't we? it all gloms together in a blur of bus, dressing room, show, gas station, people and sharpies (both black and silver). i do not love the blur, i do not hate it, and i certainly don't try to focus on it any more, it's like trying to make sense of a film playing on fast fast forward. just appreicate the images for now and we'll take a closer look later. not that i am not enjoying myself. i am, actaully.
i have more free time lately to do as i please. i'm in the tour bubble. as the NIN stage manager, bitter and hilarious name-a-tour-i've-been on-it british chap,would put it in answer to everyone else's crass "living the dream" mantra: i'm "circling the dream". you're only in the picture when you look back at the photos. as he also says, after he takes a moment to sigh, order another few people around, yell into his cell phone that any other color WILL NOT DO and puts his hands on his hips while looking around for a moment, fully convinced that the venue will not collapse within seconds: "Time for a fucking hot pocket." that too.
NIN needs it's own chapter. it is it's own world. later.
forwards.
right now it's three days later than i started this entry, we've played two more festivals and frozen our asses off, brian's faith in music has "been restored" now that he's seen motorhead, and i can't fall asleep and it's 4:30 am. we've been driving almost an entire two days. we re-unite with NIN tomorrow for vienna and it will be nice to see the whole crew again.
the only thing i can remember that, for some reason, i felt it was important to relate was the food on the way back from san diego when the NIN tour finished. we were flying some typically cheap ticket and the food was brought. i always get vegetarian (though i do eat fish) because it's almost always better than the standard fare but brian, who was sitting next to me, was brought some really unidentifiable meat. it was sort of saucer-shaped and had the consistency of meatloaf. in his defense, he did actually TRY a bite before turning it into entertainment. it came in a sad bed of peas and corn and so he took two of the peas and gave it eyes, gave it a leafy hat and split it lengthwise to create a frighteningly mean-looking mouth, and made it sing all sorts of beatles songs and impromptu operatic numbers about how it's life was a misery because it was neither beef nor foul, chicken nor pork, and it was going through the most wonderful musical existential crisis and
i was peeing my seat with laughter and we were of course irritating the fuck out of all the nice families around us. then he made things worse by exchanging one of the peas for a corn kernel, so the little mystery-meat-beast had two different colored eyes, and making it sing a medley of marilyn manson songs. here i fully lost it, and needed to either throw up or fling the thing so we gave it a burial at the empty tray table next to me under a blue cocktail napkin.
Thursday, May 19, 2005
burns shaped like stoves
Sometimes I realize that touring life is real, but mostly it feels like an accident happening and I keep thinking real life will resume. And then there are the moments where I am able to stop and say “I am truly happy right now.” It's happening right now, sitting in the back of a stranger's car watching the sunlit pensylvania countryside rushing by, feeling my sore neck and my lost voice, listening to classic girl by jane's addiction on the speakers. It happened two nights ago, backstage at the hammerstein in NYC, sitting alone in the dressing room twenty minutes before our set, when my bloody valentine came over the house speakers and I could only half-hear it, but that was perfect. The music I love ties me to reality.
Things that should make me happy (from the outside) often don't. This or that thing related to the band, this or that achievment, how many records and tikkets sold...it all tends to blur together in one place in my brain. There's a lot of space left in there.
The diary checklist in my head of musical/rockstar accomplishments stays constant. I might has well just list them this time around, instead of trying to pepper them into the prose of the past two weeks, here goes
1. Met David Bowie backstage. He likes the band and complimented the record, which he said he got ages ago. Bowie is plugged in. Does it matter? Met David Bowie and feel complete/ok with dying.
2. Brian Bell, the guitarist from weezer, found us backstage. He likes the band too.
3. Jerome (the very wonderful drummer from NIN) suggested sitting in with us, so we've been playing “karma police” by radiohead in the set (I wanted to play an avril song, but jerome heavily vetoed)
4. Tom Hamilton, the bass player from Aerosmith, came and found us after the boston show. Boston Rock Powah. He likes the band too.
5. We've been invited to play the Royal Albert Hall in london as part of the patti smith-curated meltdown festival, we'll be playing songs by Brecht, as it is a Brecht tribute night, with the likes of Ms. smith, wonderful Antony (with or without the Johnsens I'm not sure), Sparks, Martha Wainwright and others.....
6. Margaret Cho gave us a shout-out at her show at the Orpheum in boston. I sort of want to run away to a desert island with her.
I'm not sure where this accomplishment goes in the box of life, but we made trent reznor a creative birthday surprise involving a living statue in a beautiful green dress, a dark and dank boiler room in therpheum basement, a fruit tart with candles and a neutral milk hotel cd (he'd never heard of it). He smiled.
Mid-tour malaise has set in and the throat-porcupines have returned to set up camp. This was not at all aided by the party we threw in boston, where I deemed it a reasonable idea to stay up til sunrise. I was actually saved by further debotchery that night by a freak accident at the party which found me and the NIN guitar tech driving the NIN PA tech to the emergency room in ye olde volvo. We had lit a fire in the old woodstove of the cloud club and the PA tech, a very sweet guy from france named Florent, stepped right through the floor plexiglass in front of it and fell through. Luckily he didn't fall into Lee's apartment, but he did break the fall by putting his forearm on the stove, which is from the 19th century, and so his burn is very beautiful and covered with tasteful lines and arabesque little curly-q's.
Things that should make me happy (from the outside) often don't. This or that thing related to the band, this or that achievment, how many records and tikkets sold...it all tends to blur together in one place in my brain. There's a lot of space left in there.
The diary checklist in my head of musical/rockstar accomplishments stays constant. I might has well just list them this time around, instead of trying to pepper them into the prose of the past two weeks, here goes
1. Met David Bowie backstage. He likes the band and complimented the record, which he said he got ages ago. Bowie is plugged in. Does it matter? Met David Bowie and feel complete/ok with dying.
2. Brian Bell, the guitarist from weezer, found us backstage. He likes the band too.
3. Jerome (the very wonderful drummer from NIN) suggested sitting in with us, so we've been playing “karma police” by radiohead in the set (I wanted to play an avril song, but jerome heavily vetoed)
4. Tom Hamilton, the bass player from Aerosmith, came and found us after the boston show. Boston Rock Powah. He likes the band too.
5. We've been invited to play the Royal Albert Hall in london as part of the patti smith-curated meltdown festival, we'll be playing songs by Brecht, as it is a Brecht tribute night, with the likes of Ms. smith, wonderful Antony (with or without the Johnsens I'm not sure), Sparks, Martha Wainwright and others.....
6. Margaret Cho gave us a shout-out at her show at the Orpheum in boston. I sort of want to run away to a desert island with her.
I'm not sure where this accomplishment goes in the box of life, but we made trent reznor a creative birthday surprise involving a living statue in a beautiful green dress, a dark and dank boiler room in therpheum basement, a fruit tart with candles and a neutral milk hotel cd (he'd never heard of it). He smiled.
Mid-tour malaise has set in and the throat-porcupines have returned to set up camp. This was not at all aided by the party we threw in boston, where I deemed it a reasonable idea to stay up til sunrise. I was actually saved by further debotchery that night by a freak accident at the party which found me and the NIN guitar tech driving the NIN PA tech to the emergency room in ye olde volvo. We had lit a fire in the old woodstove of the cloud club and the PA tech, a very sweet guy from france named Florent, stepped right through the floor plexiglass in front of it and fell through. Luckily he didn't fall into Lee's apartment, but he did break the fall by putting his forearm on the stove, which is from the 19th century, and so his burn is very beautiful and covered with tasteful lines and arabesque little curly-q's.
Saturday, May 07, 2005
first night in chicago with NIN
the set in st. loius was rough. i'm having a "aliens invading my brain" experience with the new in-ear moniters i'm using.
not only that, we hadn't played a dresden dolls-only (no NIN) show in a week, and i hadn't taken into account how rusty we would be without having practiced our other material. but the crowd seemed to love it. brian and i have been struggling with these mindfucks lately. what makes a good show? brian can play the shit out of those drums some nights and then go lock himslef in a closet after the gig, banging his head against a wall sobbing "i'm a bad drummer" (well, i exaggerate, but it can get dramatic.). sometimes i will feel like i played like total shit and, nonetheless, will get the most tear-jerked-you-changed-my-life-tonight comments from people after the set. one thing we've definitely determined (and this supports an overall theroy of mine) is that where brian has more musician in his blood, i have more performer. if i feel that the audience has gotten off, even if i've had a rough show for any number of reasons, i leave stage satisfied. if brian feels he didn't perform his absolute best, he feels he has let the audience down. Even if the audience is none the wiser and loves the show and his drumming, he leaves stage frustrated and unfulfilled. i only made this connection tonight as we were talking about this on the bus; it's like two schools of thought about acting. One school (the method acting camp) says that if you're "acting" and not directly experiencing the drama, tears and pain of your character, then it's fucking fake and you're phoning it in. The other school would say that only a true perfomer/actor/entertainer can fake it and convince you that the experience is real. I suppose, like gayness, everyone falls somewhere in the middle, but generally towards one side or the other.
the show tonight in Chicago (night 1 with NIN) was as dramatic as all get out. We had no soundcheck (not even a quick one), so we hit stage cold and the audience was THE most hardcore NIN-fanatic bunch we've seen yet. They warmed up, but they were a distant bunch. NIN hit the stage and two songs into their set, the house PA cut out and they halted the show for half and hour while the problem was figured out. The natives got restless. People started a sing-song-y "BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT" chant and Brian and I, who were eating our dinner on the floor right above the stage, said
"bad fans.
poor trent and nails, this isn't their fault.
thank fucking god this didn't happen during our set."
it was amazing to see the Evil Trent that came back out on stage. finally i got a taste (or so i was told by the tech guys) of what NIN tours used to be like every night. jeepers, that guy was pissed (or maybe he was just acting pissed very convincingly. see above). lights kicked in, mic stands hari-kari'd into submission, instruments flung, mr. reznor writhing on the floor. the audience that had been forced to wait a half an hour was rewarded well with the most balls-out show i've yet seen on the tour.
in news:
and if you haven't seen, we've just announced a contest to win tickets to any of our shows between May 18th and June 2nd (yes, including NIN shows). All you have to do is send us a picture of a living statue in front of your local Police Station.
details at: www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=2877
deadline is May 9.
not only that, we hadn't played a dresden dolls-only (no NIN) show in a week, and i hadn't taken into account how rusty we would be without having practiced our other material. but the crowd seemed to love it. brian and i have been struggling with these mindfucks lately. what makes a good show? brian can play the shit out of those drums some nights and then go lock himslef in a closet after the gig, banging his head against a wall sobbing "i'm a bad drummer" (well, i exaggerate, but it can get dramatic.). sometimes i will feel like i played like total shit and, nonetheless, will get the most tear-jerked-you-changed-my-life-tonight comments from people after the set. one thing we've definitely determined (and this supports an overall theroy of mine) is that where brian has more musician in his blood, i have more performer. if i feel that the audience has gotten off, even if i've had a rough show for any number of reasons, i leave stage satisfied. if brian feels he didn't perform his absolute best, he feels he has let the audience down. Even if the audience is none the wiser and loves the show and his drumming, he leaves stage frustrated and unfulfilled. i only made this connection tonight as we were talking about this on the bus; it's like two schools of thought about acting. One school (the method acting camp) says that if you're "acting" and not directly experiencing the drama, tears and pain of your character, then it's fucking fake and you're phoning it in. The other school would say that only a true perfomer/actor/entertainer can fake it and convince you that the experience is real. I suppose, like gayness, everyone falls somewhere in the middle, but generally towards one side or the other.
the show tonight in Chicago (night 1 with NIN) was as dramatic as all get out. We had no soundcheck (not even a quick one), so we hit stage cold and the audience was THE most hardcore NIN-fanatic bunch we've seen yet. They warmed up, but they were a distant bunch. NIN hit the stage and two songs into their set, the house PA cut out and they halted the show for half and hour while the problem was figured out. The natives got restless. People started a sing-song-y "BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT, BUUULLLLLL-SHIIIIIIIT" chant and Brian and I, who were eating our dinner on the floor right above the stage, said
"bad fans.
poor trent and nails, this isn't their fault.
thank fucking god this didn't happen during our set."
it was amazing to see the Evil Trent that came back out on stage. finally i got a taste (or so i was told by the tech guys) of what NIN tours used to be like every night. jeepers, that guy was pissed (or maybe he was just acting pissed very convincingly. see above). lights kicked in, mic stands hari-kari'd into submission, instruments flung, mr. reznor writhing on the floor. the audience that had been forced to wait a half an hour was rewarded well with the most balls-out show i've yet seen on the tour.
in news:
and if you haven't seen, we've just announced a contest to win tickets to any of our shows between May 18th and June 2nd (yes, including NIN shows). All you have to do is send us a picture of a living statue in front of your local Police Station.
details at: www.theshadowbox.net/ddbb/viewtopic.php?t=2877
deadline is May 9.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Christpher Lydon
Christopher Lydon just emailed me and told me that he owes me dinner.
I think I'm going to die.
I think I'm going to die.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Vegas is Deceitful Above All Things
I've been waking up earlier than everybody else. Sometimes the bus is still moving, sometimes we're parked in a club lot or a Generic American Truck-stop, but either way it's glorious privacy and I can almost pretend I'm at home. I shock and awe myself at the pleasure I derive from doing the dishes in the sink of the bus kitchen. It feels like being home. When I was at home over this last break, I did the dishes first thing every morning, practically before the crust was out of my eyes. I don't know why but there they were and I was always drawn to them. I think it was the beauty of the mindless task, those few moments of freedom before the thoughts set in, before I realize that there are defintely priorities above the dishes, that the dishes can wait, that there is email in the inbox, phone calls to be answered, clothes to be laundered and bills to be looked at....before that avalanche came down on my poor little head would just stand there and scrub, throw teabags into trash, and put away the dry ones from the morning before. Amanda, the enemy of routine, actually deeply enjoying this. Something is not right. But as I feel myself aging and the little wrinkle lines appearing, I find myself enjoying things I never have. These things creep into my life surreptitiously, some dish-doing here, some exercise there, some terrible pop music here, a lack of typical inhibition here. It's all fine with me. I'm just watching. I think I spent so many years convincing myself of what would anchor me firmly in a wonderfully cool neverland of admirable recklessness, sexy carelessless, and an artistic-devil-may-care lifestyle that it's taken years of resistance to old habits to actually become a free man.
So in the morning, I wake up early and do dishes and clean and pick up JT LeRoy where I left off. Bill H sent me a copy of "Sarah" before out last european tour and I devoured it (that book left me feeling more sad than any other in recent memory) and I've started this tour off with the book that came out after that, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things". Bill H sent it via secret messenger to the Paradise show. And as we bump along the Great American Highway I plummet myself into his world of ten-year-old prostitutes and anal rape and mothers who leave their children out to rot and other unspeakable horrors, and I make reality collide with Semi-Fiction as we stop to shower at a truck-stop and I eyeball the big burly men sitting there in the Driver's Lounge, eyes glued to the screen, wondering if they too fork over greasy twenties to little boys dressed as girls when the sun goes down over the cemetery of shining Peterbilts outside. I read long after everyone else seems to be asleep, like the good old days with the flashlight under the covers long after I'd been warned a second time. But I still wake up earlier than everybody else. Napping is key.
My birthday came and went under the tacky Vegas sun without much incident. I had been to Vegas twice before, once on a cross-country trip when I was five (my mother let us each gamble a dollar at Circus Circus)
and once in 1999, when I went to visit with Brett and his uncle and tried to make some money on the strip as the Eight Foot Bride, my living statue charater. I set up illegally in front of different casinos until they chased me away. Brett put on his tuxedo and we got married by a mime in the Venetian. Brian had never been, so I took him for a walk on the strip and we indulged in AquaMassages and ten minutes of Oxygen Inhaling at a kiosk next to an outdoor cover band playing Eagles covers. Vegas fascinates me. It is a place, and yet a non-place. A tourist attraction from the ground up, a disneyland for the depraved. But somwehere off the strip must be a real town, i wonder where....maybe The Killers could tell us. But they're mormons. Ah, who cares.
The show with Nine Inch Nails that night went well and the NIN folk sent an Amanda birthday cake over to the bus. All Black, one solitary candle. Very NIN. The band and crew have been wonderfully kind. The NIN keyboard techs went to town on my abused Kurzweil the other night and I watched like a nervous mother watching her child get a appendix out as they spent a solid half-hour trying to get it open to see if they could repair a broken key. You can tell when people are passionate about gear, they get this gleam in their eye that reminds me of little boys pulling the wings off of flies. Mr. Trent Renzor and some of the other guys in the band and crew came out to our non-NIN show in San Francisco and apparently loved it. Trent loved the Brigade and the performers....it was an A+ night in the world of the Brigade, Casey pulled out all the stops and there were painted crazed people everywhere, stilts, puppets, evil, costumes that had to be seen to be believed and the crown jewel of the Vau de Vire Society, a wonderful troupe of vaudelvillian pranksters who did a choreographed stage show to both Missed Me and Girl Anachronism. Little Sunday, one of our youngest fans (i think she's 4) wheeled her toy piano backstage in a red wagon and played me the opening chords of "Coin-Operated Boy" on it for my birthday.
The Coachella festival was a surreal experience and felt like a historic landmark for the band....the desert filled with music and illuminated palmtrees and sound sculptures, made me regret that my hallucinogenic days came to an untimely end long ago. All of the artists (there were at least 40 bands on our day including Bright Eyes, NIN, Gang of Four and New Order) were set up in this wonderful David Lynchian Trailer Park with Picket Fences, so that every band had a little home and a yard set up in a grid about the size of a city block. The Arcade Fire hung out in our yard because it was in the shade and I felt very honored. They were amazing, though we only got to catch about 6 minutes of their set as they went in right before us. I can't wait to see them again. Our set was in a large tent and it was packed to the brim with about 3000 people. We played one of the most intense 45-minute sets of our career and left stage delirious. More unreality set in as Peter Murphy grabbed me back stage and told me that he loved the set (important note: Amanda was a Bauhaus Fanatic for a while in High School). He came back to our
yard and we drank wine while I pinched my proverbial arm every fifteen minutes or so. I went and forraged for cigarettes for all of us.
Brian and I just bought airbrushed T-shirts at the Generic American Truck-stop in Arizona yesterday. His is reddish orange has a big Wolf and mine is blue and purple and has two Dolphins.
l
a
p.s. media lately:
Antony and the Johnson's new CD "I am a bird now" is fucking genius, a cd to cry and die to.
kathleen edwards' new cd - "back to me" is growing on me, still very standard alt-country but brilliant songwriting.
just finished "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" by Mark Haddon and highly recommend, it can be a long one-sitting read....
So in the morning, I wake up early and do dishes and clean and pick up JT LeRoy where I left off. Bill H sent me a copy of "Sarah" before out last european tour and I devoured it (that book left me feeling more sad than any other in recent memory) and I've started this tour off with the book that came out after that, "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things". Bill H sent it via secret messenger to the Paradise show. And as we bump along the Great American Highway I plummet myself into his world of ten-year-old prostitutes and anal rape and mothers who leave their children out to rot and other unspeakable horrors, and I make reality collide with Semi-Fiction as we stop to shower at a truck-stop and I eyeball the big burly men sitting there in the Driver's Lounge, eyes glued to the screen, wondering if they too fork over greasy twenties to little boys dressed as girls when the sun goes down over the cemetery of shining Peterbilts outside. I read long after everyone else seems to be asleep, like the good old days with the flashlight under the covers long after I'd been warned a second time. But I still wake up earlier than everybody else. Napping is key.
My birthday came and went under the tacky Vegas sun without much incident. I had been to Vegas twice before, once on a cross-country trip when I was five (my mother let us each gamble a dollar at Circus Circus)
and once in 1999, when I went to visit with Brett and his uncle and tried to make some money on the strip as the Eight Foot Bride, my living statue charater. I set up illegally in front of different casinos until they chased me away. Brett put on his tuxedo and we got married by a mime in the Venetian. Brian had never been, so I took him for a walk on the strip and we indulged in AquaMassages and ten minutes of Oxygen Inhaling at a kiosk next to an outdoor cover band playing Eagles covers. Vegas fascinates me. It is a place, and yet a non-place. A tourist attraction from the ground up, a disneyland for the depraved. But somwehere off the strip must be a real town, i wonder where....maybe The Killers could tell us. But they're mormons. Ah, who cares.
The show with Nine Inch Nails that night went well and the NIN folk sent an Amanda birthday cake over to the bus. All Black, one solitary candle. Very NIN. The band and crew have been wonderfully kind. The NIN keyboard techs went to town on my abused Kurzweil the other night and I watched like a nervous mother watching her child get a appendix out as they spent a solid half-hour trying to get it open to see if they could repair a broken key. You can tell when people are passionate about gear, they get this gleam in their eye that reminds me of little boys pulling the wings off of flies. Mr. Trent Renzor and some of the other guys in the band and crew came out to our non-NIN show in San Francisco and apparently loved it. Trent loved the Brigade and the performers....it was an A+ night in the world of the Brigade, Casey pulled out all the stops and there were painted crazed people everywhere, stilts, puppets, evil, costumes that had to be seen to be believed and the crown jewel of the Vau de Vire Society, a wonderful troupe of vaudelvillian pranksters who did a choreographed stage show to both Missed Me and Girl Anachronism. Little Sunday, one of our youngest fans (i think she's 4) wheeled her toy piano backstage in a red wagon and played me the opening chords of "Coin-Operated Boy" on it for my birthday.
The Coachella festival was a surreal experience and felt like a historic landmark for the band....the desert filled with music and illuminated palmtrees and sound sculptures, made me regret that my hallucinogenic days came to an untimely end long ago. All of the artists (there were at least 40 bands on our day including Bright Eyes, NIN, Gang of Four and New Order) were set up in this wonderful David Lynchian Trailer Park with Picket Fences, so that every band had a little home and a yard set up in a grid about the size of a city block. The Arcade Fire hung out in our yard because it was in the shade and I felt very honored. They were amazing, though we only got to catch about 6 minutes of their set as they went in right before us. I can't wait to see them again. Our set was in a large tent and it was packed to the brim with about 3000 people. We played one of the most intense 45-minute sets of our career and left stage delirious. More unreality set in as Peter Murphy grabbed me back stage and told me that he loved the set (important note: Amanda was a Bauhaus Fanatic for a while in High School). He came back to our
yard and we drank wine while I pinched my proverbial arm every fifteen minutes or so. I went and forraged for cigarettes for all of us.
Brian and I just bought airbrushed T-shirts at the Generic American Truck-stop in Arizona yesterday. His is reddish orange has a big Wolf and mine is blue and purple and has two Dolphins.
l
a
p.s. media lately:
Antony and the Johnson's new CD "I am a bird now" is fucking genius, a cd to cry and die to.
kathleen edwards' new cd - "back to me" is growing on me, still very standard alt-country but brilliant songwriting.
just finished "the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime" by Mark Haddon and highly recommend, it can be a long one-sitting read....
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Nine Inch Nails & Tori Amos
I do not want to live to archive my own life.
I see it everywhere around me, especially with the popularity of web diaries, forums, and cell phones that take pictures. I do not want to fall into the subtle trap of truly believing I Blog Therefore I Am.
I see this happening at our shows, as an alien army of fans in the front row hold their phones up to my face as if probing me for signs of life in some twisted Outer Limits martian ritual. But I understand this feeling all too well. The picture that you will take home, connect to the interweb, mail to your friends and offer proof positive that you had an experience is almost worth more than the experience itself. And as I realize that more and more people out there read this diary, it haunts me in my life. Each good deed, struggle, mishap and geuinely weird experience I have gets simultaneously logged into an unhealthy mental card catalog of Good for Web Diary.
My friend who knows me best has the perspective and advantage of being older than I am, he saw me grow through my teens. We used to talk about a moment that never happened, but was a perfect metaphor for my self-consious narcissism.
It is summer. People are outside. I am lounging alone under a shady tree, in a beautiful sundress, reading a book. As people pass, I am more aware of this picturesque vision of myself than I am of the book I am reading. I am sixteen, and I know I am the Poster Girl of Youth and Beauty and Freedom, and that the middle-aged men passing by me in their polyester jogging suits take a long hard look as I focus on the page, pretending to be unaware that they are staring at me, the icon of girl.
We could talk on and on about The Male Gaze, post-feminism, narcissistic personality disorders and so forth, but the truth remains simple. For some people, life is lived to be shown more than lived. I pray every day that I don't fall victim to this in perpetuity, it would completely suck. Fuck it.
The two dates in London with Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com) were a relief. We were bracing ourselves for an onslaught of hatred just in case, but the audience was incredibly receptive. Nothing was thrown at the stage.
The band and crew of NIN were all very friendly, though you could feel that tension at first, before they all saw us play. I had imagined the whole aggro black-clad NIN crew sitting on their bus over whisky drinks saying
"So what about this gay mime band?"
"Dunno, Trent picked 'em so they might be good."
"We'll wait and see if they suck."
"Yeah."
In reality they were these amazingly kind and funny people. At any rate, they seemed to approve and decided to like us.
The band and Mr. Reznor Himself were busy as hell and cordonned off in some secret dressing room the way Famous Bands are, but on the second day we were granted an audeince, and we thanked Mr. Reznor for bringing us out on the road. He told us that he had been sent the CD by a friend, loved it, and that was that. Here we were. I had never seen them play until these shows, and these people fucking throw down. He's one intense motherfucker. From what I read in a recent interview, he's straight and into taking care of himself and his body lately, so when I get up the courage I will invite him to do some power yoga with me. Namaste, Trent.
And now, I must now delve into the uncomfortable subject of Tori Amos.
She's been haunting me for years and it's time the story was told.
My earliest memories of Tori Amos were of not really liking her, in that teenage-fuck-everything way, before I'd really heard much of her music. A friend of my sister, Rich Collins, was way into her and gave me a copy of her "crucify" EP. I didn't really dig it, and I didn't bother to dig any deeper. As I grew older and starting getting the comparisons, I just shrugged my shoudlers and said, "Not really familiar with it, not really into it." When I was working at Toscanini's, I think I was around 20, Mike Penta insisted that I dig. "You'll love her. I'll make you a mix." And so he did, and I listened. And I still didn't like it. This time, I more than didn't like it, I REALLY didn't like it. There was something about the vocal that irked me. But some of her lyrics and melodies were brilliant. Some I couldn't stand. This was really bugging me. There was one song on the disc "Winter", that I absolutely loved, but I wanted to go into the song with my bare hands and strangle some of the precious-sounding lyrics. I realized back then that the reason this was such a frustrating expereince is that the similarites - between my songs and hers - were enough that the differences were painful. The way human beings are terrified of likenesses of human beings that are "slightly off". Hearing the piano was like listening to someone speak in my voice, it felt like a violation. I would hear this word choice, this chord choice, this line or phrase and my blodd would just boil....wrong! wrong! wrong! No mittens and snowflakes! Evil! No butterflies, no goddesses, this is wrong wrong wrong! But the songs that were good rooted and stuck. They were few, but I was fucked. I had to admit that I liked them. After that I sort of forgot about her.
Then, recently, I got to the point where I could really afford to get CDs that I might not like. So I bought a bunch of her stuff. I considered this part of my job, research. I would even defend myself at the local record store, embarassed as if I were a guy buying tampons. "Heh heh. These are for my Wife." "Heh heh. This is research for my band. Really." I knew she was coming to town, I got tickets. I decided to delve headfirst and figure this out, and put it to bed if possible. Brian and I had gotten a DVD of hers and watched it several months ago and shut it off halfway through, bored. I had heard that she was a real fireball of a performer, and I was really disappointed by the blandness of it. I also cound't tell if I wanted to like it or wanted to hate it. I couldn't tell if I was jealous or looking for a role model. Some strange combo of all of these things, I think.
We left for tour and I brought a few of her CDs, including her new one, "The Beekeeper", and her new book. It was my project. Brian laughed at my face while he watched me reading. I would grimace, breathe through my teeth and put the book down while making a deep agoinized sound.
"What?"
"AARARRRGGHGGHGg. She's talking about the goddesses and butterflies again and refferring to a song as 'she'. Am I evil for hating this so much?"
But I was fucked again. Buried in all of the Corn-Mother, Butterfly-worshipping New Age LaLa there was a woman living my lifestyle. Getting in a bus with a bunch of people, writing songs, performing them, learning to cope with the crap-ridden, backstabbing music industry. Learning to cope with assholes like me hating her butterfly-worshipping side. I couldn't put the book down. So much of she was writing about, between the lines, was directly applicable to my life. I loved it and I couldn't stand it, just like the music. I listened to her first two records and found songs that I thought were genuinely brilliant. Meanwhile, I listened to the new CD. And I kept wondering...do you want to hate this? Do you want to like it? The answer kept being both (but with the new CD I had no choice, I couldn't like it even if I'd wanted to. Couldn't stand it.)
So we went to see her here in Boston the night before last, my band and I, and there I sat. And as I watched her I thought: This performer does not need to care about whether I like her music or not. She has a huge following, people who love her music and stick with her, she's forty, a mother and she's touring. Terrible album or not, Amanda, you've got to repsect this woman. Coming home, I finished the last few pages of her book and thought about what had struck me, stuck with me. One thing that she expressly said a few times was how sad she thought it was that female musicians and singers felt the need to compete so fiercly with each other, as if there were only room for so many - and it was kill or be killed. I wonder if that's true among those women at the top. I've never felt it. But maybe I have, without realizing it. Maybe my younger distaste for the Toris and the Anis of the world was borne of jealousy more than taste. As I've gotten older, I find that it all doesn't matter so much. I can allow myself to love this or that song, this or that album, and leave it at that. Soemtimes it's easier to love Avril than Tori. Sometimes I wonder what Liz Phair was thinking. Then I think about Bjork and all conflict disappears and I think that the rest of us should just give up and flip burgers.
So as Oprah would say, You Go Tori. I will always continue to buy your records, hoping to find a song I love. And your book made me think, and learn, and consider, and for that, I thank you. There are few of us, and indeed, we best stick together.
I see it everywhere around me, especially with the popularity of web diaries, forums, and cell phones that take pictures. I do not want to fall into the subtle trap of truly believing I Blog Therefore I Am.
I see this happening at our shows, as an alien army of fans in the front row hold their phones up to my face as if probing me for signs of life in some twisted Outer Limits martian ritual. But I understand this feeling all too well. The picture that you will take home, connect to the interweb, mail to your friends and offer proof positive that you had an experience is almost worth more than the experience itself. And as I realize that more and more people out there read this diary, it haunts me in my life. Each good deed, struggle, mishap and geuinely weird experience I have gets simultaneously logged into an unhealthy mental card catalog of Good for Web Diary.
My friend who knows me best has the perspective and advantage of being older than I am, he saw me grow through my teens. We used to talk about a moment that never happened, but was a perfect metaphor for my self-consious narcissism.
It is summer. People are outside. I am lounging alone under a shady tree, in a beautiful sundress, reading a book. As people pass, I am more aware of this picturesque vision of myself than I am of the book I am reading. I am sixteen, and I know I am the Poster Girl of Youth and Beauty and Freedom, and that the middle-aged men passing by me in their polyester jogging suits take a long hard look as I focus on the page, pretending to be unaware that they are staring at me, the icon of girl.
We could talk on and on about The Male Gaze, post-feminism, narcissistic personality disorders and so forth, but the truth remains simple. For some people, life is lived to be shown more than lived. I pray every day that I don't fall victim to this in perpetuity, it would completely suck. Fuck it.
The two dates in London with Nine Inch Nails (www.nin.com) were a relief. We were bracing ourselves for an onslaught of hatred just in case, but the audience was incredibly receptive. Nothing was thrown at the stage.
The band and crew of NIN were all very friendly, though you could feel that tension at first, before they all saw us play. I had imagined the whole aggro black-clad NIN crew sitting on their bus over whisky drinks saying
"So what about this gay mime band?"
"Dunno, Trent picked 'em so they might be good."
"We'll wait and see if they suck."
"Yeah."
In reality they were these amazingly kind and funny people. At any rate, they seemed to approve and decided to like us.
The band and Mr. Reznor Himself were busy as hell and cordonned off in some secret dressing room the way Famous Bands are, but on the second day we were granted an audeince, and we thanked Mr. Reznor for bringing us out on the road. He told us that he had been sent the CD by a friend, loved it, and that was that. Here we were. I had never seen them play until these shows, and these people fucking throw down. He's one intense motherfucker. From what I read in a recent interview, he's straight and into taking care of himself and his body lately, so when I get up the courage I will invite him to do some power yoga with me. Namaste, Trent.
And now, I must now delve into the uncomfortable subject of Tori Amos.
She's been haunting me for years and it's time the story was told.
My earliest memories of Tori Amos were of not really liking her, in that teenage-fuck-everything way, before I'd really heard much of her music. A friend of my sister, Rich Collins, was way into her and gave me a copy of her "crucify" EP. I didn't really dig it, and I didn't bother to dig any deeper. As I grew older and starting getting the comparisons, I just shrugged my shoudlers and said, "Not really familiar with it, not really into it." When I was working at Toscanini's, I think I was around 20, Mike Penta insisted that I dig. "You'll love her. I'll make you a mix." And so he did, and I listened. And I still didn't like it. This time, I more than didn't like it, I REALLY didn't like it. There was something about the vocal that irked me. But some of her lyrics and melodies were brilliant. Some I couldn't stand. This was really bugging me. There was one song on the disc "Winter", that I absolutely loved, but I wanted to go into the song with my bare hands and strangle some of the precious-sounding lyrics. I realized back then that the reason this was such a frustrating expereince is that the similarites - between my songs and hers - were enough that the differences were painful. The way human beings are terrified of likenesses of human beings that are "slightly off". Hearing the piano was like listening to someone speak in my voice, it felt like a violation. I would hear this word choice, this chord choice, this line or phrase and my blodd would just boil....wrong! wrong! wrong! No mittens and snowflakes! Evil! No butterflies, no goddesses, this is wrong wrong wrong! But the songs that were good rooted and stuck. They were few, but I was fucked. I had to admit that I liked them. After that I sort of forgot about her.
Then, recently, I got to the point where I could really afford to get CDs that I might not like. So I bought a bunch of her stuff. I considered this part of my job, research. I would even defend myself at the local record store, embarassed as if I were a guy buying tampons. "Heh heh. These are for my Wife." "Heh heh. This is research for my band. Really." I knew she was coming to town, I got tickets. I decided to delve headfirst and figure this out, and put it to bed if possible. Brian and I had gotten a DVD of hers and watched it several months ago and shut it off halfway through, bored. I had heard that she was a real fireball of a performer, and I was really disappointed by the blandness of it. I also cound't tell if I wanted to like it or wanted to hate it. I couldn't tell if I was jealous or looking for a role model. Some strange combo of all of these things, I think.
We left for tour and I brought a few of her CDs, including her new one, "The Beekeeper", and her new book. It was my project. Brian laughed at my face while he watched me reading. I would grimace, breathe through my teeth and put the book down while making a deep agoinized sound.
"What?"
"AARARRRGGHGGHGg. She's talking about the goddesses and butterflies again and refferring to a song as 'she'. Am I evil for hating this so much?"
But I was fucked again. Buried in all of the Corn-Mother, Butterfly-worshipping New Age LaLa there was a woman living my lifestyle. Getting in a bus with a bunch of people, writing songs, performing them, learning to cope with the crap-ridden, backstabbing music industry. Learning to cope with assholes like me hating her butterfly-worshipping side. I couldn't put the book down. So much of she was writing about, between the lines, was directly applicable to my life. I loved it and I couldn't stand it, just like the music. I listened to her first two records and found songs that I thought were genuinely brilliant. Meanwhile, I listened to the new CD. And I kept wondering...do you want to hate this? Do you want to like it? The answer kept being both (but with the new CD I had no choice, I couldn't like it even if I'd wanted to. Couldn't stand it.)
So we went to see her here in Boston the night before last, my band and I, and there I sat. And as I watched her I thought: This performer does not need to care about whether I like her music or not. She has a huge following, people who love her music and stick with her, she's forty, a mother and she's touring. Terrible album or not, Amanda, you've got to repsect this woman. Coming home, I finished the last few pages of her book and thought about what had struck me, stuck with me. One thing that she expressly said a few times was how sad she thought it was that female musicians and singers felt the need to compete so fiercly with each other, as if there were only room for so many - and it was kill or be killed. I wonder if that's true among those women at the top. I've never felt it. But maybe I have, without realizing it. Maybe my younger distaste for the Toris and the Anis of the world was borne of jealousy more than taste. As I've gotten older, I find that it all doesn't matter so much. I can allow myself to love this or that song, this or that album, and leave it at that. Soemtimes it's easier to love Avril than Tori. Sometimes I wonder what Liz Phair was thinking. Then I think about Bjork and all conflict disappears and I think that the rest of us should just give up and flip burgers.
So as Oprah would say, You Go Tori. I will always continue to buy your records, hoping to find a song I love. And your book made me think, and learn, and consider, and for that, I thank you. There are few of us, and indeed, we best stick together.
Monday, March 14, 2005
3/14/05 - Why We Are Not Rock and Roll
March 14, 2005. Bordeaux, FR
It's been a blurry week, shows starting to merge, towns starting to merge, life starting to merge, starting to feel repetitive...is it us getting used to this or have things honestly just been that routine for the past week? Both, I know.
The remainder of the german tour was incredible. We got to munich to find our newfound friends from "...and you will know us by the trail of dead" waiting in our dressing room as a surprise. Many fun was had, there was more dancing....this time the dj at the club was playing gun club and gang of four and human league....ah. We also did something very rock and roll, which was to throw a pair of hardboiled eggs against the wall. Granted, I cleaned up the mess, because I can't stand vandalizing the clubs we work in, but still it felt kind of rock and roll. A little. This brings me to an important point. We are not Rock and Roll. We do not smoke (well, much), drink (well, much), we do not trash dressing rooms, we do not stay up late into the night snorting coke of off groupies tits, in fact we do not do drugs to any Rock and Roll extant at all (does ambien count? We've been eating those like candy to fight jetlag and bus snoring), we do not get into fistfights with other bands, I do have a pair of leather pants that I used to wear religiously in germany but now that I'm actually in a rock band I'm almost too embarrassed to touch them, so we don't wear leather pants, we don't have shaggy hair, we don't wear sunglasses indoors, we don't wear pointy shoes, we are not Rock and Roll. On the contrary. An average day in the land of the dresden dolls is like group therapy at a geriatric nudist commune in the bay area. We drink juice, we do yoga, we get sufficient sleep, we stretch and warm up our voices, we give each other backrubs, we sleep with stuffed animals, we read books, we eat chocolate when we want to feel dangerous....I mean, it's fucking embarrassing bringing people on the tour bus. Instead of “this is the room where we have orgies and this smashed hole in the wall is from when brian....” we say “and this is amanda's tea collection and here's where we keep all our multivitimins.....”
I must say, though, having now been moderately exposed to bands who stay up drinking endlessly and snorting coke before shows: I Don't Know How They Do It. I swear to god I don't. If I eat too much sugar and have one cup of coffee and a couple cigarettes, I practically fuck myself for the next show. How do these people do it? I basically, through trial and error, had to stop drinking on tour. I don't have more than one drink - and rarely that - before going onstage. The early experiments with this, at the lizard lounge in boston when we were in our residency there, resulted in braincramps of the first order. I have a hard enough time remembering the lyrics and chords to all these damn songs that the minute I've got a couple drinks in me they sort of drift away like a childs lost balloon....goodbye, goodbye, there's no way in hell I'm going to remember you. Funny enough, last night (in the throes of complete sobriety, I might add) I decided to play perfect fit for the first time this tour and completely blanked on how the last verse started. I knew it had something to do with cards. Brian was miming insanely over his drumkit....shuffling and dealing like there was no tomorrow but I just didn't get it. We played a nice little instrumental for a good minute until he finally yelled “shuffle cut and deal!!” over my way and the song resumed. You've got to love a drummer who knows the lyrics better than you do. There are certain songs that just don't ever stick, and that's one of them. If I've ever re-written the lyrics, even once ten years ago, the song doesn't stick. I wonder why. I'm sure oliver sacks could tell me.
But I digress, back to being Not Rock and Roll.
I now limit my alcohol intake to two drinks tops on show days and a little more on off days. No coffee on show days. No cigarettes on show days. One on off days. Maybe two if I'm feeling indulgent. Every week I try to do a one-or-two day fast with no alcohol or caffeine or sugar. This helps. There is chocolate everywhere. In vending machines in the subway. Everywhere.
I've also been exercising more on this tour than any other, because I know I'll shrivel and die if I don't. My mood is so seriously effected by the amount of exercise I get that I'm starting to wonder if all that high school depression came on only because I quit the lacrosse team and joined the drama club. I carve out a little land for myself in the backstage area, lay down my yoga mat, and drishdi my little heart out for an hour every few days. I always feel a weird combination of pride (fuck yes! I'm exercising! I'm actively taking care of myself! This Is Unheard Of!) and shame (this is so not Rock and Roll). Granted, it's 98% pride to 2% shame, but the shame is still there. the ame ratio is there every time I turn down a drink, every time I decline an invitation to go painting the town red after a show, every time I toast with mineral water. But I know my body would fucking mutiny if I didn't do this. And our shows would start to suck, and my voice would disappear. So in order to rock and roll, one must not be Rock and Roll. It is the Rock and Roll Paradox. I look at all these aging rockers like keith richards and metallica and iggy pop and aerosmith and on and on and they've all had to become straight, yoga-fixated, juice-obsessed dorks like me over the years to sustain the touring life. I feel like I've just skipped the step where I OD and end up in recovery for six months.
It's been a blurry week, shows starting to merge, towns starting to merge, life starting to merge, starting to feel repetitive...is it us getting used to this or have things honestly just been that routine for the past week? Both, I know.
The remainder of the german tour was incredible. We got to munich to find our newfound friends from "...and you will know us by the trail of dead" waiting in our dressing room as a surprise. Many fun was had, there was more dancing....this time the dj at the club was playing gun club and gang of four and human league....ah. We also did something very rock and roll, which was to throw a pair of hardboiled eggs against the wall. Granted, I cleaned up the mess, because I can't stand vandalizing the clubs we work in, but still it felt kind of rock and roll. A little. This brings me to an important point. We are not Rock and Roll. We do not smoke (well, much), drink (well, much), we do not trash dressing rooms, we do not stay up late into the night snorting coke of off groupies tits, in fact we do not do drugs to any Rock and Roll extant at all (does ambien count? We've been eating those like candy to fight jetlag and bus snoring), we do not get into fistfights with other bands, I do have a pair of leather pants that I used to wear religiously in germany but now that I'm actually in a rock band I'm almost too embarrassed to touch them, so we don't wear leather pants, we don't have shaggy hair, we don't wear sunglasses indoors, we don't wear pointy shoes, we are not Rock and Roll. On the contrary. An average day in the land of the dresden dolls is like group therapy at a geriatric nudist commune in the bay area. We drink juice, we do yoga, we get sufficient sleep, we stretch and warm up our voices, we give each other backrubs, we sleep with stuffed animals, we read books, we eat chocolate when we want to feel dangerous....I mean, it's fucking embarrassing bringing people on the tour bus. Instead of “this is the room where we have orgies and this smashed hole in the wall is from when brian....” we say “and this is amanda's tea collection and here's where we keep all our multivitimins.....”
I must say, though, having now been moderately exposed to bands who stay up drinking endlessly and snorting coke before shows: I Don't Know How They Do It. I swear to god I don't. If I eat too much sugar and have one cup of coffee and a couple cigarettes, I practically fuck myself for the next show. How do these people do it? I basically, through trial and error, had to stop drinking on tour. I don't have more than one drink - and rarely that - before going onstage. The early experiments with this, at the lizard lounge in boston when we were in our residency there, resulted in braincramps of the first order. I have a hard enough time remembering the lyrics and chords to all these damn songs that the minute I've got a couple drinks in me they sort of drift away like a childs lost balloon....goodbye, goodbye, there's no way in hell I'm going to remember you. Funny enough, last night (in the throes of complete sobriety, I might add) I decided to play perfect fit for the first time this tour and completely blanked on how the last verse started. I knew it had something to do with cards. Brian was miming insanely over his drumkit....shuffling and dealing like there was no tomorrow but I just didn't get it. We played a nice little instrumental for a good minute until he finally yelled “shuffle cut and deal!!” over my way and the song resumed. You've got to love a drummer who knows the lyrics better than you do. There are certain songs that just don't ever stick, and that's one of them. If I've ever re-written the lyrics, even once ten years ago, the song doesn't stick. I wonder why. I'm sure oliver sacks could tell me.
But I digress, back to being Not Rock and Roll.
I now limit my alcohol intake to two drinks tops on show days and a little more on off days. No coffee on show days. No cigarettes on show days. One on off days. Maybe two if I'm feeling indulgent. Every week I try to do a one-or-two day fast with no alcohol or caffeine or sugar. This helps. There is chocolate everywhere. In vending machines in the subway. Everywhere.
I've also been exercising more on this tour than any other, because I know I'll shrivel and die if I don't. My mood is so seriously effected by the amount of exercise I get that I'm starting to wonder if all that high school depression came on only because I quit the lacrosse team and joined the drama club. I carve out a little land for myself in the backstage area, lay down my yoga mat, and drishdi my little heart out for an hour every few days. I always feel a weird combination of pride (fuck yes! I'm exercising! I'm actively taking care of myself! This Is Unheard Of!) and shame (this is so not Rock and Roll). Granted, it's 98% pride to 2% shame, but the shame is still there. the ame ratio is there every time I turn down a drink, every time I decline an invitation to go painting the town red after a show, every time I toast with mineral water. But I know my body would fucking mutiny if I didn't do this. And our shows would start to suck, and my voice would disappear. So in order to rock and roll, one must not be Rock and Roll. It is the Rock and Roll Paradox. I look at all these aging rockers like keith richards and metallica and iggy pop and aerosmith and on and on and they've all had to become straight, yoga-fixated, juice-obsessed dorks like me over the years to sustain the touring life. I feel like I've just skipped the step where I OD and end up in recovery for six months.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
03/06/05 - the dresden dolls in dresden
Dresden was a wildcard...an off-the-usual-touring-route for most bands, deep in eastern germany where the orange and brown polyester furniture echoes the commie era and the vibe is still very different from west german cities. It's poorer, it's bleaker and it also happened to get, oh, flattened in the war. Headed into the old town (I'd been once, back in 96 when I was living in regensburg) and walked around in the blistering cold, marveling at the beauty and visiting the newly restored fraunkirche. This huge, gorgeous church was pummeled in the bombing and the ruins were left standing by the DDR as a reminder of western evil. When the wall came down, they worked on the restoration which was just completed for the 60th anniversary of the firebombing.
We had no idea if people would show up for the concert, but in the end about 600+ folks showed up and it was one of the best concerts of the tour so far. Whatever it was in the air that was caused by the band name was palpable and we felt more embraced than in any other city....highlights included a big black banner in the crowd that read “welcome home in dresden” and a few dresdeners after the show coming to us and saying how genuinely proud they felt that we had named the band after their town, that we honored them. Holy shit. Weeping-worthy stuff.
The show in Cologne last night took a turn south as Brian and I bickered about bullshit up til showtime and I found myself completely distracted by the petty arguments echoing in my head during the show (about the same old bullshit....control issues, who's in charge of what, who has rights to stay and leave and call the shots for whom and on and on and god it's tiresome) and not fully able to concentrate on what I was doing until halfway through the set, which is rare and having PMS made it even harder to let the shit drop and just focus. One of the worst, and rare, parts of our otherwise mostly wonderful bandship is that we fucking love to argue and we can never let an argument end. When we get into let's-address-the-issue mode, we're both “....and another thing!...” types and this causes endless late soundchecks and bus departures while we go on and on at each other. It's very spinal tap, it's very typical for people in bands in general, and it's always been like this, but granted: it's getting way better than it used to be and our love for each other and the band grows ever deeper. There seems to be a two-three week point on every tour where the happy bubble bursts and everyone starts getting whinier and pissier.
On a brighter note, I'm slowly and painfully sifting through the 1000+ photos I've taken on my new digital camera since september and working on a fully captioned (sights! sounds! smells!) tour diary of the past six months. I'm trying to figure out whether to start at the beginning or the end....
I have resolved to cut coffee, sugar, beer and cigarettes out of my diet for the next three days, til we hit france. What was once (two short weeks ago) a very mild and harmless chocolate habit has grown into an ugly, wild-eyed addiction and I've been drinking not tons, but enough to leave me feeling crusty in the morning. Basta. Having quit smoking about two years ago, I'm still one of those annoying people who will ask you for a drag of your cigarette and then hold it there, worshipping it's smoking papery holiness like it's a bar of gold (“handrolled by god and licked shut by the claudia schiffer's pussylips” in the words of our hero bill hicks) before inhaling and sorrowfully returning it. Nasty habit, that, got to stop.
Every few days Brian or I will look at each other and one of us will say “we're opening up for nine inch nails this spring”. Then we'll observe a moment of stunned silence, then we'll pretend-faint and then we'll hop up and down a little. It should be an excellent tour, we're waiting on the word from herr reznor to see whether living statues in the theater lobbies will jive with the NIN aesthetic.
We had no idea if people would show up for the concert, but in the end about 600+ folks showed up and it was one of the best concerts of the tour so far. Whatever it was in the air that was caused by the band name was palpable and we felt more embraced than in any other city....highlights included a big black banner in the crowd that read “welcome home in dresden” and a few dresdeners after the show coming to us and saying how genuinely proud they felt that we had named the band after their town, that we honored them. Holy shit. Weeping-worthy stuff.
The show in Cologne last night took a turn south as Brian and I bickered about bullshit up til showtime and I found myself completely distracted by the petty arguments echoing in my head during the show (about the same old bullshit....control issues, who's in charge of what, who has rights to stay and leave and call the shots for whom and on and on and god it's tiresome) and not fully able to concentrate on what I was doing until halfway through the set, which is rare and having PMS made it even harder to let the shit drop and just focus. One of the worst, and rare, parts of our otherwise mostly wonderful bandship is that we fucking love to argue and we can never let an argument end. When we get into let's-address-the-issue mode, we're both “....and another thing!...” types and this causes endless late soundchecks and bus departures while we go on and on at each other. It's very spinal tap, it's very typical for people in bands in general, and it's always been like this, but granted: it's getting way better than it used to be and our love for each other and the band grows ever deeper. There seems to be a two-three week point on every tour where the happy bubble bursts and everyone starts getting whinier and pissier.
On a brighter note, I'm slowly and painfully sifting through the 1000+ photos I've taken on my new digital camera since september and working on a fully captioned (sights! sounds! smells!) tour diary of the past six months. I'm trying to figure out whether to start at the beginning or the end....
I have resolved to cut coffee, sugar, beer and cigarettes out of my diet for the next three days, til we hit france. What was once (two short weeks ago) a very mild and harmless chocolate habit has grown into an ugly, wild-eyed addiction and I've been drinking not tons, but enough to leave me feeling crusty in the morning. Basta. Having quit smoking about two years ago, I'm still one of those annoying people who will ask you for a drag of your cigarette and then hold it there, worshipping it's smoking papery holiness like it's a bar of gold (“handrolled by god and licked shut by the claudia schiffer's pussylips” in the words of our hero bill hicks) before inhaling and sorrowfully returning it. Nasty habit, that, got to stop.
Every few days Brian or I will look at each other and one of us will say “we're opening up for nine inch nails this spring”. Then we'll observe a moment of stunned silence, then we'll pretend-faint and then we'll hop up and down a little. It should be an excellent tour, we're waiting on the word from herr reznor to see whether living statues in the theater lobbies will jive with the NIN aesthetic.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
02/24/05 - And you will know us by the trail of kiwiskins
On a plane from paris to milan, where the bus and crew will catch up tomorrow....we're flying in a day early alone to do press and I'm looking, this very moment, at the staggering alien landscape of the alps beneath us....standing in security a half hour ago I turned to brian and said “what are we doing here? HERE?” What the fuck happened in our lives that we'd be standing in charles de gaulle airport at 5:30 am catching a flight to italy to be at mtv by 9? Reality check not possible on under 3 hrs sleep, sorry.
I'm encountering a strange problem; the more things happen the less I am writing in this diary.
I feel like I should keep these entries short and pallatable. I feel like I should choose and stick to one topic. I cannot stick to one topic. Fuck it. I'm also facing the very postmodern-feeling phenomenon of sitting down to interviews with european journalists who have this entire diary printed out in a white paper stack and refer to it as we are talking.
“Yez, zo you were having said a few weeks ago in your webzite diary zat....” Eek. It's wonderful, it's bizarre, it's every narcissist's dream come true. Now for the news.
We've now played six shows of the european tour (edinburgh, liverpool, amsterdam, london, gent and paris) and it's been a slow start but last night in paris was finally on fire finally. The crowd was wild, brian broke a cymbal, the acoustic guitar died so we played “amsterdam” on electric, in french, which I managed not to mangle, and we did two encores. Even though half of the shows have been sold out, there's been something off....hard to tell if it was tiredness, quiet crowds, who knows, some combination, but for some reason things were slogging a bit. Brian gets more frustrated with this than I do, he's a performance perfectionist. We've been testing out new material here and there and it's been hard to break from what's comfortable but it's good for us and good for the material...I'm in love with the new song called “me and the minibar” and we're tacking it onto the end of the set some nights. It's a solo piano song so brian either sits at his kit and listens or watches from offstage and I feel that weird freedom and lonliness of playing by myself again. No drummer to keep time with, complete focus on the two feet around me, but also an acute sense of something missing. I always think of the beatles leaving stage while paul plays yesterday on guitar, alone.
The brigade at all the shows has been brilliant...new friends showing up every night to make the clubs beautiful with their bodies and flowers and bizarre ideas and I only wish we had actual time to spend with people instead of the usual rushed hellos and you-are-wonderfuls and goodbyes.
We have a new crew member this time round...miss brianna, who is with us instead of whitney or em to commandeer the land of merchandise, along with the usual suspects: joel, our trusty and wonderful sound engineer and robert, our austin-powers-meets-dudley-moore-romanian-born-jew-family-moved-to-isreal-then-spent-teenyears-in-germany-now-residing-in-london tour manager. The accent is a work of art. We give each other endless grief and usually spend the hours after the show on the bus talking about nonsense and music and everything under the sun. Bri just came back from egypt, where she got stuck in one of the pyramids trying to indiana jones herself down into a hall that was closed off to the public. The new bus looks exactly like the last one, Falco, but we've named it Bill. The drivers name is Dirk, he's german, and we chatter in deutsch and he calls everybody sweetheart.
I took pains to make myself feel more homey on the bus this time around. This undertaking included packing
-slippers
-my favorite mug and tea collection, including ball strainer
-icecube (the polar bear. Miss Regina Spektor named him. Brian has been sleeping with him the past few nights because he has “needed him more”.)
-posters for my bunk (which I've just been stealing from each venue along the way. I got a really nice arcade fire poster from the melkweg in amsterdam
and
-my mouthguard, to prevent teethgrinding (at the insistance of my dentist and to everyone's nightly amusement....honestly, you haven't seen sexy until you see me with no eyebrows on and the mouthguard in. I look like a deranged fieldhockey player)
Edinburgh was gorgeous and I felt my scottish roots piercing through my nads like shrieking bagpipes. A brash lass came up to brian after the show and belted, repeatedly (with full scottish vigor): “GOO FARRTH AND FOOGGING ROCK!!!!”. I nearly wet myself with happiness.
Liverpool had an equally rowdy bunch and we dj'd after the set, enjoying being masters of the universe while the resident dj watched on in horror as we clumsily span muse together with the dead kennedys, goldfrapp followed by the stranglers followed by NIN followed by trail of dead followed by the killers (and many of these played at the wrong record speed....um, on purpose....yes).
We were dragged to the major club street after the gig. robert insisted that it was a rare anthropological phenomenon and good god was he true to his word. The temperature was close to freezing and there was an endless parade of staggering, falling-down-plastered liverpudlian girls wearing close to nothing buzzing up and down the street, shivering to death. Nary a coat to be seen. One of the strangest things I've ever seen. Teeth chattering, they all assumed a kind of hands-crossed-over-the-chest-clutching-opposite-shoulders-pose to ward off the biting winds that made them look a little like high-heeled, teetering corpses on some sort of purgatorial disco death march.
After sleeping the majority of our day off in amsterdam I found out, to my great joy, that one of my favorite newly-discovered bands,
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead were playing at the Melkweg (where we were playing the next night). I jumped up and down with glee and headed over with the crew a few hours later. They were mindblowingly good...ah, finally to see some amazing live music, they swept the crowd into folds of majestic battledrums and washed our souls clean with guitars...I danced and headbanged like there was no tomorrow and I was only disappointed that they didn't play my favorite song from the new record (“worlds apart”...which I had coincidentally just played the day before on the BBC in london when they asked for a track, so good...). We met the band after the show and found out, with much rejoicing, that they were fans of the dolls and we toasted with pernod and decided that a night of dancing was in order. Somebody local knew a club down the street and we stayed up til four in the morning, health, lungs and voice be damned, laughing and screaming our storied and dancing our asses off to the cure and grauzone and joy division and madonna. This is what I fantasize about, and it so rarely happens. We vowed to play shows together and parted outside the trail of dead tourbus feeling like true comrades.
Speaking of comrades, who should hit belgium at the same time as us but mr. bush. In a truly inspirational act of god, we were greeted upon exiting the bus with a parade mob of protestors in Gent, voicing their hatred for Our Dear President. We dedicated a special version of “war pigs” to him that evening and hoped for the best. It's both embarrassing and inspirational to be an american abroad nowadays. Must remind all these europeans that millions of americans like ourselves don't support this man or his regime and we make no apologies....we just do what we can do, hope to steal back the cabaret and the country all in one fell swoop, why not. The whole planet. German neonazis marching in on the Dresden bombing anniversary, french neonazis torching memorial train cars that transported french jews to Auschwitz, more war and death imminent, people starving in darfur, british, french, belgians, italians,americans begging us for coins and cigarettes in the street, it's always been this way, there's nothing we can do, there's everything, there's nothing. The man next to me just asked if I would help him off with his suit coat, he can't reach. There's everything. Pick the herald tribune up again. There's nothing.
I'm encountering a strange problem; the more things happen the less I am writing in this diary.
I feel like I should keep these entries short and pallatable. I feel like I should choose and stick to one topic. I cannot stick to one topic. Fuck it. I'm also facing the very postmodern-feeling phenomenon of sitting down to interviews with european journalists who have this entire diary printed out in a white paper stack and refer to it as we are talking.
“Yez, zo you were having said a few weeks ago in your webzite diary zat....” Eek. It's wonderful, it's bizarre, it's every narcissist's dream come true. Now for the news.
We've now played six shows of the european tour (edinburgh, liverpool, amsterdam, london, gent and paris) and it's been a slow start but last night in paris was finally on fire finally. The crowd was wild, brian broke a cymbal, the acoustic guitar died so we played “amsterdam” on electric, in french, which I managed not to mangle, and we did two encores. Even though half of the shows have been sold out, there's been something off....hard to tell if it was tiredness, quiet crowds, who knows, some combination, but for some reason things were slogging a bit. Brian gets more frustrated with this than I do, he's a performance perfectionist. We've been testing out new material here and there and it's been hard to break from what's comfortable but it's good for us and good for the material...I'm in love with the new song called “me and the minibar” and we're tacking it onto the end of the set some nights. It's a solo piano song so brian either sits at his kit and listens or watches from offstage and I feel that weird freedom and lonliness of playing by myself again. No drummer to keep time with, complete focus on the two feet around me, but also an acute sense of something missing. I always think of the beatles leaving stage while paul plays yesterday on guitar, alone.
The brigade at all the shows has been brilliant...new friends showing up every night to make the clubs beautiful with their bodies and flowers and bizarre ideas and I only wish we had actual time to spend with people instead of the usual rushed hellos and you-are-wonderfuls and goodbyes.
We have a new crew member this time round...miss brianna, who is with us instead of whitney or em to commandeer the land of merchandise, along with the usual suspects: joel, our trusty and wonderful sound engineer and robert, our austin-powers-meets-dudley-moore-romanian-born-jew-family-moved-to-isreal-then-spent-teenyears-in-germany-now-residing-in-london tour manager. The accent is a work of art. We give each other endless grief and usually spend the hours after the show on the bus talking about nonsense and music and everything under the sun. Bri just came back from egypt, where she got stuck in one of the pyramids trying to indiana jones herself down into a hall that was closed off to the public. The new bus looks exactly like the last one, Falco, but we've named it Bill. The drivers name is Dirk, he's german, and we chatter in deutsch and he calls everybody sweetheart.
I took pains to make myself feel more homey on the bus this time around. This undertaking included packing
-slippers
-my favorite mug and tea collection, including ball strainer
-icecube (the polar bear. Miss Regina Spektor named him. Brian has been sleeping with him the past few nights because he has “needed him more”.)
-posters for my bunk (which I've just been stealing from each venue along the way. I got a really nice arcade fire poster from the melkweg in amsterdam
and
-my mouthguard, to prevent teethgrinding (at the insistance of my dentist and to everyone's nightly amusement....honestly, you haven't seen sexy until you see me with no eyebrows on and the mouthguard in. I look like a deranged fieldhockey player)
Edinburgh was gorgeous and I felt my scottish roots piercing through my nads like shrieking bagpipes. A brash lass came up to brian after the show and belted, repeatedly (with full scottish vigor): “GOO FARRTH AND FOOGGING ROCK!!!!”. I nearly wet myself with happiness.
Liverpool had an equally rowdy bunch and we dj'd after the set, enjoying being masters of the universe while the resident dj watched on in horror as we clumsily span muse together with the dead kennedys, goldfrapp followed by the stranglers followed by NIN followed by trail of dead followed by the killers (and many of these played at the wrong record speed....um, on purpose....yes).
We were dragged to the major club street after the gig. robert insisted that it was a rare anthropological phenomenon and good god was he true to his word. The temperature was close to freezing and there was an endless parade of staggering, falling-down-plastered liverpudlian girls wearing close to nothing buzzing up and down the street, shivering to death. Nary a coat to be seen. One of the strangest things I've ever seen. Teeth chattering, they all assumed a kind of hands-crossed-over-the-chest-clutching-opposite-shoulders-pose to ward off the biting winds that made them look a little like high-heeled, teetering corpses on some sort of purgatorial disco death march.
After sleeping the majority of our day off in amsterdam I found out, to my great joy, that one of my favorite newly-discovered bands,
...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead were playing at the Melkweg (where we were playing the next night). I jumped up and down with glee and headed over with the crew a few hours later. They were mindblowingly good...ah, finally to see some amazing live music, they swept the crowd into folds of majestic battledrums and washed our souls clean with guitars...I danced and headbanged like there was no tomorrow and I was only disappointed that they didn't play my favorite song from the new record (“worlds apart”...which I had coincidentally just played the day before on the BBC in london when they asked for a track, so good...). We met the band after the show and found out, with much rejoicing, that they were fans of the dolls and we toasted with pernod and decided that a night of dancing was in order. Somebody local knew a club down the street and we stayed up til four in the morning, health, lungs and voice be damned, laughing and screaming our storied and dancing our asses off to the cure and grauzone and joy division and madonna. This is what I fantasize about, and it so rarely happens. We vowed to play shows together and parted outside the trail of dead tourbus feeling like true comrades.
Speaking of comrades, who should hit belgium at the same time as us but mr. bush. In a truly inspirational act of god, we were greeted upon exiting the bus with a parade mob of protestors in Gent, voicing their hatred for Our Dear President. We dedicated a special version of “war pigs” to him that evening and hoped for the best. It's both embarrassing and inspirational to be an american abroad nowadays. Must remind all these europeans that millions of americans like ourselves don't support this man or his regime and we make no apologies....we just do what we can do, hope to steal back the cabaret and the country all in one fell swoop, why not. The whole planet. German neonazis marching in on the Dresden bombing anniversary, french neonazis torching memorial train cars that transported french jews to Auschwitz, more war and death imminent, people starving in darfur, british, french, belgians, italians,americans begging us for coins and cigarettes in the street, it's always been this way, there's nothing we can do, there's everything, there's nothing. The man next to me just asked if I would help him off with his suit coat, he can't reach. There's everything. Pick the herald tribune up again. There's nothing.
Monday, February 07, 2005
02/07/05 - goodnight clocks & goodnight socks
It was one fucking magical thing after another this weekend. We had four shows in a row: New Haven CT, Philly PA, Providence RI and Portland Maine. The shows got more and more intense each night as brian got over his coldflu and we got more and more warmed up. Regina Spektor is my new hero and I can't wait to tour with her some more. She is just as amazing in person as she seems on record and I was onyl pissed that I never actually got to watch an entire set she played; since she was on immediatley before us we had to be getting ready. But what a soundtrack to hear through the walls, the girl is just on FIRE. We share lots of stories and made fast friends and she and grace, her tour manager, stayed over at my house on saturday and sunday nights after the shows. Saturday was a massive convergence: David J (from Bauhaus) was stayong over Saturday night as well (he was actually camped out here at the cloud club (pope sacrificed his bed) for the entire length of our mini-tour but we only got to see him that one night as fate would have it...he was in town becasue he'd composed some music for some Beckett shorts that were going up in a theater right across the street from us).
Anyway.....saturday night, late...still buzzing from the show and looking into my bedroom and seeing regina playing chopin on my piano while david j stood there listening with his eyes closed...delirious talks and hilarious jokes even though we were all ready to collapse was just......fantasy. life as it should be. all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.
This morning regina woke us up and we showed her the top floor of the house (a must) and we blew bubbles with the blue robot-bubble man i got for christmas and we ate muffins and drank tea and I gave regina a bunch of music I thought she would like....Peter Jefferies and Legendary Pink Dots and Neutral Milk Hotel (all of which she's never heard of). We agreed that The Arcade Fire was deserving of the attention. Then we sorrowfully parted ways. Regina left roses on the piano and David J left a little doll.
Having a support act like regina that I could relate to was such a breath of fresh air...I must say it can get tiring to play with rock band after rock band and feel like I have nothing to say to the railthin shaggy-haired brit-poppish singer next to me, even though we're doing superficially similar things.
The brigade performers blew my mind.......it's so amazing watching everyone getting more and more creative and confident and preparing more and more for the shows. Highlights included the gorgeous almost-naked girls in providence and portland who offered their bodies up as a sacrifice to the general public as blank white canvases, the cast of wonderland in new haven, the candy girl in philly (and pacofish the stiltwalking flag-giver-outer outside, who gave me my very own avril flag), the insanely gorgeous living statues in portland and providence and the 10-second date. It's working. It's happening.
Speaking of Avril, we fianlly finished editing the first installment in a new art form I call "Karaoke Verite". Nobody knows quite what to make of it (always a good sign), and so I'll let you judge for yourself and say nothing: http://www.dresdendolls.com/video (it's the video above coin-operated boy).
love
a
recommended reading of the week: "branded: the buying and selling of teenage america" - by alissa quart.
frightening and edifying. makes me want to burn down malls and hug all children.
Anyway.....saturday night, late...still buzzing from the show and looking into my bedroom and seeing regina playing chopin on my piano while david j stood there listening with his eyes closed...delirious talks and hilarious jokes even though we were all ready to collapse was just......fantasy. life as it should be. all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.
This morning regina woke us up and we showed her the top floor of the house (a must) and we blew bubbles with the blue robot-bubble man i got for christmas and we ate muffins and drank tea and I gave regina a bunch of music I thought she would like....Peter Jefferies and Legendary Pink Dots and Neutral Milk Hotel (all of which she's never heard of). We agreed that The Arcade Fire was deserving of the attention. Then we sorrowfully parted ways. Regina left roses on the piano and David J left a little doll.
Having a support act like regina that I could relate to was such a breath of fresh air...I must say it can get tiring to play with rock band after rock band and feel like I have nothing to say to the railthin shaggy-haired brit-poppish singer next to me, even though we're doing superficially similar things.
The brigade performers blew my mind.......it's so amazing watching everyone getting more and more creative and confident and preparing more and more for the shows. Highlights included the gorgeous almost-naked girls in providence and portland who offered their bodies up as a sacrifice to the general public as blank white canvases, the cast of wonderland in new haven, the candy girl in philly (and pacofish the stiltwalking flag-giver-outer outside, who gave me my very own avril flag), the insanely gorgeous living statues in portland and providence and the 10-second date. It's working. It's happening.
Speaking of Avril, we fianlly finished editing the first installment in a new art form I call "Karaoke Verite". Nobody knows quite what to make of it (always a good sign), and so I'll let you judge for yourself and say nothing: http://www.dresdendolls.com/video (it's the video above coin-operated boy).
love
a
recommended reading of the week: "branded: the buying and selling of teenage america" - by alissa quart.
frightening and edifying. makes me want to burn down malls and hug all children.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
01/26/04 - Armageddon is Coming
We're on a seven hour (plus) drive from Phoenix, Arizona to Santa Barbara, California in a rented 15-passenger van. I've been catching up on email on my blackberry, Brian's mostly supine with a stiff neck from headbanging too hard last night during “war pigs”, Emily's been in the front seat with her hands glued to the laptop and her cellphone affixed to her ear, and Joel's been driving. It's a day. We just drove through a vast windfarm....miles long over hill and dale, creating such trippy visuals that I wanted to jump out and hear dark side of the moon at top volume. The hazy sunlight helped. Back home in Boston there's 30 inches of snow. I wonder if my volvo will survive the winter?
The Sundance Film Festival was incredible...the film industriy's equivalent to the music industry's South by Southwest. One long street in Park City, Utah (about an hour outside of Salt Lake) taken over for a week by the hip and the restless, genuine indie filmmakers swashbuckling aside A to D-list celebrities. We spent the majority of our three-show run there camped in the dressing room of the club. Some of the acts who played with us were fucking incredible. Saul Williams, who I had never heard of before, blew my mind. He was a fan of the dolls, which flattered me beyond belief. I got to see Ben Kweller live and tell him how much I loved the toothbrush record. The Kings of Leon hung out and looked very cool and skinny, and were very cordial. Most exciting was getting to see Nellie Mckay play...I was really intrigued by her debut recod (all piano-based songs slickly produced...called “doris day meets eminem” in her press release). We had been hoping to meet each other and finally got to grok on sunday night, which we all had off. She sparked a real chord in me, seeing her sitting at the piano, all alone. I couldn't stop thinking: “This is it. This is what I would be doing if I hadn't met Brian.” We were at a party altogether; us, Nellie and The Ditty Bops - who we hadn't seen since the last tour - and a photographer was trying to capture everyone together and seperately. And, as we realized by sharing later, both Brian and I watched Nellie, standing there getting her photo taken and both felt it...she just seemed so....alone. And we poured a little shot out of our proverbial forties onto the altar of rock love, once again expressing our deep gratitude...and disbelief...did we really even find each other? Are we that fucking lucky? We ask each other this question every other day or so and still are in awe of the answer.
I also found myself having a quiet moment of appreciation for my record label and the fact that they personally know me and Brian and are not so gargantuan and beurocratic that this happens: Nellie is a staunch animal-rights activist and PETA-supporter (it even states that on the back of her record) and her label, Sony, actually sent her a fur stole for Christmas. Unfuckingbelievable.
Last night we played to a packed house in Tempe, Arizona and had a blast. We played ping-pong and I came 20,000 points short of getting the high score on their Ms. Pac-Man (which, I'll have you know, is damn fine work) and walked up and down the quarter-mile alley behind the club a total of 9 times while warming up my voice, hearing the repetitive choir of dogs get all worked up from behind their respective fences, picking up oranges from the ground and trying to teach myself how to juggle and trying to figure out how anyone could possibly think that “Fuck” and “Bitch” scrawled in three-foot letters makes interesting graffitti.
Oh, and a billboard just reminded me. Armageddon is coming.
The Sundance Film Festival was incredible...the film industriy's equivalent to the music industry's South by Southwest. One long street in Park City, Utah (about an hour outside of Salt Lake) taken over for a week by the hip and the restless, genuine indie filmmakers swashbuckling aside A to D-list celebrities. We spent the majority of our three-show run there camped in the dressing room of the club. Some of the acts who played with us were fucking incredible. Saul Williams, who I had never heard of before, blew my mind. He was a fan of the dolls, which flattered me beyond belief. I got to see Ben Kweller live and tell him how much I loved the toothbrush record. The Kings of Leon hung out and looked very cool and skinny, and were very cordial. Most exciting was getting to see Nellie Mckay play...I was really intrigued by her debut recod (all piano-based songs slickly produced...called “doris day meets eminem” in her press release). We had been hoping to meet each other and finally got to grok on sunday night, which we all had off. She sparked a real chord in me, seeing her sitting at the piano, all alone. I couldn't stop thinking: “This is it. This is what I would be doing if I hadn't met Brian.” We were at a party altogether; us, Nellie and The Ditty Bops - who we hadn't seen since the last tour - and a photographer was trying to capture everyone together and seperately. And, as we realized by sharing later, both Brian and I watched Nellie, standing there getting her photo taken and both felt it...she just seemed so....alone. And we poured a little shot out of our proverbial forties onto the altar of rock love, once again expressing our deep gratitude...and disbelief...did we really even find each other? Are we that fucking lucky? We ask each other this question every other day or so and still are in awe of the answer.
I also found myself having a quiet moment of appreciation for my record label and the fact that they personally know me and Brian and are not so gargantuan and beurocratic that this happens: Nellie is a staunch animal-rights activist and PETA-supporter (it even states that on the back of her record) and her label, Sony, actually sent her a fur stole for Christmas. Unfuckingbelievable.
Last night we played to a packed house in Tempe, Arizona and had a blast. We played ping-pong and I came 20,000 points short of getting the high score on their Ms. Pac-Man (which, I'll have you know, is damn fine work) and walked up and down the quarter-mile alley behind the club a total of 9 times while warming up my voice, hearing the repetitive choir of dogs get all worked up from behind their respective fences, picking up oranges from the ground and trying to teach myself how to juggle and trying to figure out how anyone could possibly think that “Fuck” and “Bitch” scrawled in three-foot letters makes interesting graffitti.
Oh, and a billboard just reminded me. Armageddon is coming.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
01/18/04 - "FUCK THIS SHIT" RE-VISITED
So, after being home for an entire two weeks and having alphabetized my tea and having scraped the lint from my electrc fan with a paring knife and so forth, i haven't been able to actually write (i think i've just over-exercised the organizing side of my brain...which weakens the creative side....at least, that's my lame theory/excuse). so instead,
acting as the productive adult that i've become (real health insurance!!! old silver fillings redone with white stuff!!!
financial planning!!! matching mugs!!!!) i finally set myself to the task of sorting through hundreds and hundreds of lyric drafts and
trying to do something with them. Without actually DOING anything, you see...it's a "sorting" process. Oh, bloody hell, yes i'm wanking, but it's a start.
Anyway, I came across this hilarious and rather revealing song, which i never recorded (i don't think), and the music to which I can barely remember.
And I think it will breathe it's dying gasp here, since i'm never going to work on it. it's time came and went.
It was an upbeat little ditty, the words came out fast and furious (not unlike "girl a") and the end, the "fuck this shit" part had kind of a major-key, grand finale feel to it....very broadway and sing-along (think "let the sun shine in").
Enjoy.
"Fuck this Shit"
(written around Summer/Fall 2003)
--Intro--
I’m going to finally write a song;
just once and only play this song
in very small intimate settings
where I won’t end up regretting it.
ok. all right. I’m going to finally do it.
ok. here we go. please know this will be very
difficult for me.
--verse one--
today I faxed the publicist and called up different fedexes
to see which one was open and still close to my apartment.
today I spent at least an hour
putting stamps on presskit folders,
including letters that I wrote to interested record labels.
i’m hoping if I do this now I’ll never write another song
about the boring fucking shit I actually do all day long.
--verse two--
I drove to needham to pick up the execution contracts
(I love that they’re called that) and I got more
minutes tacked onto to our cell phone plan.
I cut some checks: one to the photographer, one for the insurance adjuster,
one for merch and one for my piano teacher.
I spent a couple hours sorting
email into folders and I copied brian
on what I thought was important
and two times just to treat myself I made some tea and surfed the web
for live reviews of dresden dolls shows.
managers won’t be our friends.
booking agents hate our band.
we’re not new york and not LA,
the boston rock scene thinks we’re gay,
and at the end of every day
(it seems like every day’s this way)
we barely even get to play
and this is all i have to say…..
--grand finale--
I quit.
fuck this shit.
won’t somebody save me please?
I am being eaten by the music industry.
everybody sing:
FUCK THIS SHIT!
(la la la la la la)
FUCK THIS SHIT!
(la la la la la la)
FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THIIIIIIIIIIIIS SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!!
acting as the productive adult that i've become (real health insurance!!! old silver fillings redone with white stuff!!!
financial planning!!! matching mugs!!!!) i finally set myself to the task of sorting through hundreds and hundreds of lyric drafts and
trying to do something with them. Without actually DOING anything, you see...it's a "sorting" process. Oh, bloody hell, yes i'm wanking, but it's a start.
Anyway, I came across this hilarious and rather revealing song, which i never recorded (i don't think), and the music to which I can barely remember.
And I think it will breathe it's dying gasp here, since i'm never going to work on it. it's time came and went.
It was an upbeat little ditty, the words came out fast and furious (not unlike "girl a") and the end, the "fuck this shit" part had kind of a major-key, grand finale feel to it....very broadway and sing-along (think "let the sun shine in").
Enjoy.
"Fuck this Shit"
(written around Summer/Fall 2003)
--Intro--
I’m going to finally write a song;
just once and only play this song
in very small intimate settings
where I won’t end up regretting it.
ok. all right. I’m going to finally do it.
ok. here we go. please know this will be very
difficult for me.
--verse one--
today I faxed the publicist and called up different fedexes
to see which one was open and still close to my apartment.
today I spent at least an hour
putting stamps on presskit folders,
including letters that I wrote to interested record labels.
i’m hoping if I do this now I’ll never write another song
about the boring fucking shit I actually do all day long.
--verse two--
I drove to needham to pick up the execution contracts
(I love that they’re called that) and I got more
minutes tacked onto to our cell phone plan.
I cut some checks: one to the photographer, one for the insurance adjuster,
one for merch and one for my piano teacher.
I spent a couple hours sorting
email into folders and I copied brian
on what I thought was important
and two times just to treat myself I made some tea and surfed the web
for live reviews of dresden dolls shows.
managers won’t be our friends.
booking agents hate our band.
we’re not new york and not LA,
the boston rock scene thinks we’re gay,
and at the end of every day
(it seems like every day’s this way)
we barely even get to play
and this is all i have to say…..
--grand finale--
I quit.
fuck this shit.
won’t somebody save me please?
I am being eaten by the music industry.
everybody sing:
FUCK THIS SHIT!
(la la la la la la)
FUCK THIS SHIT!
(la la la la la la)
FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK THIIIIIIIIIIIIS SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!!
Thursday, January 13, 2005
01/13/05 - Block
But I'm not.
But I think I am.
I don't know. Surprise.....
It's 3:30 in the morning.
What is it like? I wish I could explain. I'll try.
Ever since I was a teenager, I grappled with how and what and when and why to write music.
Songs would come, early on, and it was simple. There was no point. Just to write a song was a wonder in itself,
a reward in itself, to be played endlessly for an imaginary crowd who would sit, impressed and awed, all five thousand of them,
attentive on folding chairs in the living room between the painting of the revolutionary war and the fireplace.
And I would play for them.....so simple.
Then came the tapes. I can't remember exactly when it started....1990, I think. The industry had just started realizing that tapes themselves could be aesthetic little pieces of plastic and started marketing the clear plastic cassette tapes with neon squiggles and lines. Clear blue, clear pink....the one I started with was dark clear blue. I called it (later) "The Long Lost Blue Tape"...because I
gave it to someone to listen to, god knows why, and it didn't find it's way back to me till much later. But it was the first one: I wouldn't just play, just write, I would ARCHIVE. I would archive this thing happening. I would record every thought, every idea, every line for a song and the stream-of-consciousness-nonsense that spewed out with it, and then..somehow....later....maybe.....finish it? When? I never did. I never could. An idea was always an end in itself; a convenient little package and tangible evidence of What Could Have Been a Brilliant Song.
As the tapes filled up and the unfinished songs started numbering in the hundreds, I (reasonably, I think), began to feel slightly distressed. This system isn't working.
I went back to a journal of mine from 1998. I had finished college and was living in Harvard Square in a garret sublet for the summer.
The same catholic guilt, the same insane self-flagellation......"why aren't you doing? making? performing? recording? finishing anything? why are you drinking too much? smoking too much? fucking stupid people too much? wasting your time? not finishing ANYTHING?" This refrain was so typical by then that is was almost laughable. Yet here I am, 2005, sitting in my apartment, wondering many of the same things. And I've "accomplished" plenty. The feeling doesn't go away.
When I got to college things got remarkably worse. I stopped writing altogether. I don't know what happened. I was terrified. So disappointed that college wasn't the artists bohemian haven I has fantasized about, so disappointed that I had to start from scratch with a group of people I couldn't relate to, and I had no piano to go to without trekking across campus to a dank and sterile practice room open until 10 pm while genius #56 on one side pounded out Beethoven Sonatas and disciplined music student #85 flew through scale after endless scale on their flute/trombone/jaw harp on the other side. I had nothing in common with these people. I was so much better, I was so much worse. I didn't do anything right.
Not a moment of my life went by without the contemplation of the specter of the tapes that lay there, in a pile, intimidating, taunting, mocking me. So many of them. 20 maybe. Times ninety minutes. Each holding 20, 30, 40 ideas for songs I would never write or finish. I even tired to catalog, weed out the better ideas, listen and type comments into a document that I created in it's own special folder on my very modern Macintosh Classic computer. Nothing came of that. Now I have a modern Dell. It organizes and also tempts with an unending stream of communication that I could tend to constantly, sitting here as things unraveled and raveled, as crises appeared and ideas and people and fans and friends beckon with their loving and distracting correspondence. I have no self-discipline whatsoever. The idea of putting aside an allotted amount of time per day during which to check email or get online is unfathomable. It's all happening, right now. I want to watch. Now. NOW, godammit.
I can't imagine what life would be like if I owned a television, but I can empathize with the addiction.
So when I needed to create my course schedule for my sophomore year, I went to a music professor and a theatre professor and conned them both into giving me a full course credit for doing an independent "performance art" project. Of course, I did nothing. Three weeks before the end of the semester I got to work. I work well under pressure. I mixed the bets of the ideas together into a one-hour sound collage on my four track and superimposed and interview with myself on top. I interviewed my pundit from the dead, basically. "What about those old tapes?" "Well, she had an INCREDIBLE amount of potential as a songwriter, you see. She was wildly talented. But she never really got it together. Such a shame...." The soundtrack was played during the performance, which was attended by about 50 people (including the two professors, of course, who had to grade me). I strung a white sheet across the stage and stood behind it, with a slide projector projecting light against it so I was in silhouette. Then I took the 60 or 70 some-odd cassette tapes that I had found at various thrift shops and yard sales (mostly terrible things from the early eighties, and blank mix tapes of Unknown Origin) and began unraveling them, gradually hanging the yards of magnetic ribbon on a clothesline so the screen would be more more and more darkened and obscured. Then I lost my patience and hacked them apart, dramatically, with a hammer. Oh, I meant it. I wanted to crush those fuckers, Dead. The performance ended, accidentally early, when the sheet fell down and I stood there, naked, screaming that I never wanted this, that I didn't want to be talented, that I didn't want to be a songwriter with any fucking ideas, good or bad. I generally had a good old-fashioned healthy public temper tantrum freak out.
Both teachers gave me an A, but it didn't help. I was enraged. I had gotten away with murder, public wanking, and I was still stuck.
I could just let myself be, I suppose. I have been. Take a walk. Drink some coffee. Read a book. Answer the endless stream of email.
I did, I did all day. My calendar said "Day off. Write."
And there they sit, the new batch of brilliant ideas, crouching on the piano like little fucking demons, like unfinished book reports, like abandoned children who knew I was the mother. I can't sit down at the piano anymore, I'm just paralyzed with fear. Of what, I don't really know. I've never known. I used to think it was fear of success. God knows that's not true, nowadays. Bring it on.
Once an idea is finished, it's not an idea anymore. It's a song, good or bad. Possessing the secret weapon of a so-called brilliant idea feels much more exciting than following through, I suppose. Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm actually lazy.
Maybe I really need more time off to do nothing but take walks and drink coffee and read books and answer emails and whack off, basking in the glow of existence.
I spend so much time on the road thinking about this moment, this free time, this window in which to create, and here I am. Sitting behind my computer, hiding.
One of my best friends, Joshua, once wrote and mailed me a letter. I was 18, and he knew about the song demons.
All it said was
"It is saturday morning and I find myself thinking: are you writing a song or fixing yourself a bite to eat?"
Oh, Josh, I'd be so disappointing to you right now. But my kitchen is immaculate, and I've organized my tea alphabetically.
But I think I am.
I don't know. Surprise.....
It's 3:30 in the morning.
What is it like? I wish I could explain. I'll try.
Ever since I was a teenager, I grappled with how and what and when and why to write music.
Songs would come, early on, and it was simple. There was no point. Just to write a song was a wonder in itself,
a reward in itself, to be played endlessly for an imaginary crowd who would sit, impressed and awed, all five thousand of them,
attentive on folding chairs in the living room between the painting of the revolutionary war and the fireplace.
And I would play for them.....so simple.
Then came the tapes. I can't remember exactly when it started....1990, I think. The industry had just started realizing that tapes themselves could be aesthetic little pieces of plastic and started marketing the clear plastic cassette tapes with neon squiggles and lines. Clear blue, clear pink....the one I started with was dark clear blue. I called it (later) "The Long Lost Blue Tape"...because I
gave it to someone to listen to, god knows why, and it didn't find it's way back to me till much later. But it was the first one: I wouldn't just play, just write, I would ARCHIVE. I would archive this thing happening. I would record every thought, every idea, every line for a song and the stream-of-consciousness-nonsense that spewed out with it, and then..somehow....later....maybe.....finish it? When? I never did. I never could. An idea was always an end in itself; a convenient little package and tangible evidence of What Could Have Been a Brilliant Song.
As the tapes filled up and the unfinished songs started numbering in the hundreds, I (reasonably, I think), began to feel slightly distressed. This system isn't working.
I went back to a journal of mine from 1998. I had finished college and was living in Harvard Square in a garret sublet for the summer.
The same catholic guilt, the same insane self-flagellation......"why aren't you doing? making? performing? recording? finishing anything? why are you drinking too much? smoking too much? fucking stupid people too much? wasting your time? not finishing ANYTHING?" This refrain was so typical by then that is was almost laughable. Yet here I am, 2005, sitting in my apartment, wondering many of the same things. And I've "accomplished" plenty. The feeling doesn't go away.
When I got to college things got remarkably worse. I stopped writing altogether. I don't know what happened. I was terrified. So disappointed that college wasn't the artists bohemian haven I has fantasized about, so disappointed that I had to start from scratch with a group of people I couldn't relate to, and I had no piano to go to without trekking across campus to a dank and sterile practice room open until 10 pm while genius #56 on one side pounded out Beethoven Sonatas and disciplined music student #85 flew through scale after endless scale on their flute/trombone/jaw harp on the other side. I had nothing in common with these people. I was so much better, I was so much worse. I didn't do anything right.
Not a moment of my life went by without the contemplation of the specter of the tapes that lay there, in a pile, intimidating, taunting, mocking me. So many of them. 20 maybe. Times ninety minutes. Each holding 20, 30, 40 ideas for songs I would never write or finish. I even tired to catalog, weed out the better ideas, listen and type comments into a document that I created in it's own special folder on my very modern Macintosh Classic computer. Nothing came of that. Now I have a modern Dell. It organizes and also tempts with an unending stream of communication that I could tend to constantly, sitting here as things unraveled and raveled, as crises appeared and ideas and people and fans and friends beckon with their loving and distracting correspondence. I have no self-discipline whatsoever. The idea of putting aside an allotted amount of time per day during which to check email or get online is unfathomable. It's all happening, right now. I want to watch. Now. NOW, godammit.
I can't imagine what life would be like if I owned a television, but I can empathize with the addiction.
So when I needed to create my course schedule for my sophomore year, I went to a music professor and a theatre professor and conned them both into giving me a full course credit for doing an independent "performance art" project. Of course, I did nothing. Three weeks before the end of the semester I got to work. I work well under pressure. I mixed the bets of the ideas together into a one-hour sound collage on my four track and superimposed and interview with myself on top. I interviewed my pundit from the dead, basically. "What about those old tapes?" "Well, she had an INCREDIBLE amount of potential as a songwriter, you see. She was wildly talented. But she never really got it together. Such a shame...." The soundtrack was played during the performance, which was attended by about 50 people (including the two professors, of course, who had to grade me). I strung a white sheet across the stage and stood behind it, with a slide projector projecting light against it so I was in silhouette. Then I took the 60 or 70 some-odd cassette tapes that I had found at various thrift shops and yard sales (mostly terrible things from the early eighties, and blank mix tapes of Unknown Origin) and began unraveling them, gradually hanging the yards of magnetic ribbon on a clothesline so the screen would be more more and more darkened and obscured. Then I lost my patience and hacked them apart, dramatically, with a hammer. Oh, I meant it. I wanted to crush those fuckers, Dead. The performance ended, accidentally early, when the sheet fell down and I stood there, naked, screaming that I never wanted this, that I didn't want to be talented, that I didn't want to be a songwriter with any fucking ideas, good or bad. I generally had a good old-fashioned healthy public temper tantrum freak out.
Both teachers gave me an A, but it didn't help. I was enraged. I had gotten away with murder, public wanking, and I was still stuck.
I could just let myself be, I suppose. I have been. Take a walk. Drink some coffee. Read a book. Answer the endless stream of email.
I did, I did all day. My calendar said "Day off. Write."
And there they sit, the new batch of brilliant ideas, crouching on the piano like little fucking demons, like unfinished book reports, like abandoned children who knew I was the mother. I can't sit down at the piano anymore, I'm just paralyzed with fear. Of what, I don't really know. I've never known. I used to think it was fear of success. God knows that's not true, nowadays. Bring it on.
Once an idea is finished, it's not an idea anymore. It's a song, good or bad. Possessing the secret weapon of a so-called brilliant idea feels much more exciting than following through, I suppose. Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm actually lazy.
Maybe I really need more time off to do nothing but take walks and drink coffee and read books and answer emails and whack off, basking in the glow of existence.
I spend so much time on the road thinking about this moment, this free time, this window in which to create, and here I am. Sitting behind my computer, hiding.
One of my best friends, Joshua, once wrote and mailed me a letter. I was 18, and he knew about the song demons.
All it said was
"It is saturday morning and I find myself thinking: are you writing a song or fixing yourself a bite to eat?"
Oh, Josh, I'd be so disappointing to you right now. But my kitchen is immaculate, and I've organized my tea alphabetically.
Friday, January 07, 2005
01/07/05 - Winter in a Vacuum
It's been a rough week...on the way back from our new years' shows I started vomiting uncontrollably on the plane. Charming! Brian was the consummate band-mate, holdin the bag while the sympathetic flight attendants brought me tepid ginger ale. It made me remember being a wee lass, flying to our dad's every month adn often puking on the way. I used to be the type of kid who could practically vomit on command. On the way to the movies in the car, you name it.
Forget about boats. Luckily that passed with time. So, I thought it was turbulance, but no....I was sick the whole night with what turned out to be a nasty stomach flu. Brian contracted it 48 hours later and threw up all day at home while I scurried about trying to be florence nightingale, buying juices and soups and all-flora stomach enzyme supplements. He's on the mend, everything seems to be getting back to Dandy. I'm insanely happy to be home and able to hide in my cluttered apartment, brewing endless cups of green tea and listening to the humidifer.
The tour in Australia, which everybody keeps asking about, was unprecedented...... The band is, far and away, more successful in Australia than any other country and it showed... people were just incredubly enthusiastic and every show was sold out. My most memorable moments were a few public parks in New Zealand and Melbourne where I could walk, alone, and sit and think and stretch and lie in the grass, doing nothing and looking at trees that I wasn't used to. There wasn't time for much else, and when there was, I slept. The jetlag would just not go away...it hit both of us 2 or 3 days into the trip and by the last few shows we were practically falling asleep (in some cases, literally falling asleep) backstage. Coem to think of it, something ridiculous happened the last night of the tour, in Melbourne: we left soundcheck to go back to the hotel - which was a block away form the venue - to grab a nap. We arranged that Robert, our trusty tour manager, would phone us up a half-hour before stage time so we could get into costume and become functional humans before hitting stage. He called. We went back to sleep. The next thing we know, Robert's on the phone saying "Where are you? There's a crowd of angry Australians chanting 'Dresden Dolls! Dresden Dolls! Dresden Dolls!' Are you locked outside the club or what?" One of the most interesting feelings I've experienced. Sort of an actor's nightmare come true. Needless to say, it was one of the quickest changes in Dresden Dolls history and the first few songs must have sounded a little rough, as we had both been been fast asleep not 12 minutes before. That was also the night the keyboard decided to shut itself off during every other song. Shit keyboard. Made for interesting interludes.
The Brigade performers throughout the world have been astounding....highlights have included a bizarre performance art/mask piece to "Missed Me" in Strasbourg, France; The Girl Who Sews Her Lips Shut in San Diego; an action painter dressed as Jack in Brisbane and cigarette girls and a contortionist in Sydney. The forums have been seeing some action lately: there's one for prep and general networking (divided up by country) up at http://www.gothic.net/dresden_brigade/ and one for archiving photos and other stuff at http://ddbrigade.tribe.net/.
We're home for a spell and going into the studio tomorrow (with Sean Slade, at Camp Street) to record demos for the record. Seven songs in four days (Backstabber, Shores of California, wwwwwwiii, First Orgasm, Necessary Evil, Sex Changes and Delililah - and some of those are working titles) and I'm spending the majority of today changing lyrics like the little perfectionist freakazoid I am. One thing I am mystified by (and I'm sure there's a very rational psychological explanation for this) is the fact that it is invariably when I have a recording or a show coming up that the new music starts pouring out - demanding (and this is essential) that I ignore the actual work at hand and pay mind to the new ideas. It has to do with old habits of procrastination and focus, I think. Cleaning my bedroom was far preferable to doing my latin homework, which was far preferable to doing math homework, which was far preferable to actually going to school....so I would create odd systems for myself that involved skipping school so I could do my latin homework and would deliberately mess up my room so I could write songs. Does this make any sense to anyone else? The mind is a strange beast.
After the recording we're heading to Sundance ((www.ascap.com/eventsawards/events/sundance/2005/) for a few shows and then doing a short tour of California and surrounding environs, New England and then heading back to Europe til mid-march.
All things will be revealed at www.dresdendolls.com/calendar/index.htm.
love
a
recent great books: "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland and "Bad Seed" (a Nick Cave biography) by Ian Johnston
recent great music: kathleen edwards "failer" gripped me for a solid week. very straight ahed rock, but the lyrics...brilliant.
Forget about boats. Luckily that passed with time. So, I thought it was turbulance, but no....I was sick the whole night with what turned out to be a nasty stomach flu. Brian contracted it 48 hours later and threw up all day at home while I scurried about trying to be florence nightingale, buying juices and soups and all-flora stomach enzyme supplements. He's on the mend, everything seems to be getting back to Dandy. I'm insanely happy to be home and able to hide in my cluttered apartment, brewing endless cups of green tea and listening to the humidifer.
The tour in Australia, which everybody keeps asking about, was unprecedented...... The band is, far and away, more successful in Australia than any other country and it showed... people were just incredubly enthusiastic and every show was sold out. My most memorable moments were a few public parks in New Zealand and Melbourne where I could walk, alone, and sit and think and stretch and lie in the grass, doing nothing and looking at trees that I wasn't used to. There wasn't time for much else, and when there was, I slept. The jetlag would just not go away...it hit both of us 2 or 3 days into the trip and by the last few shows we were practically falling asleep (in some cases, literally falling asleep) backstage. Coem to think of it, something ridiculous happened the last night of the tour, in Melbourne: we left soundcheck to go back to the hotel - which was a block away form the venue - to grab a nap. We arranged that Robert, our trusty tour manager, would phone us up a half-hour before stage time so we could get into costume and become functional humans before hitting stage. He called. We went back to sleep. The next thing we know, Robert's on the phone saying "Where are you? There's a crowd of angry Australians chanting 'Dresden Dolls! Dresden Dolls! Dresden Dolls!' Are you locked outside the club or what?" One of the most interesting feelings I've experienced. Sort of an actor's nightmare come true. Needless to say, it was one of the quickest changes in Dresden Dolls history and the first few songs must have sounded a little rough, as we had both been been fast asleep not 12 minutes before. That was also the night the keyboard decided to shut itself off during every other song. Shit keyboard. Made for interesting interludes.
The Brigade performers throughout the world have been astounding....highlights have included a bizarre performance art/mask piece to "Missed Me" in Strasbourg, France; The Girl Who Sews Her Lips Shut in San Diego; an action painter dressed as Jack in Brisbane and cigarette girls and a contortionist in Sydney. The forums have been seeing some action lately: there's one for prep and general networking (divided up by country) up at http://www.gothic.net/dresden_brigade/ and one for archiving photos and other stuff at http://ddbrigade.tribe.net/.
We're home for a spell and going into the studio tomorrow (with Sean Slade, at Camp Street) to record demos for the record. Seven songs in four days (Backstabber, Shores of California, wwwwwwiii, First Orgasm, Necessary Evil, Sex Changes and Delililah - and some of those are working titles) and I'm spending the majority of today changing lyrics like the little perfectionist freakazoid I am. One thing I am mystified by (and I'm sure there's a very rational psychological explanation for this) is the fact that it is invariably when I have a recording or a show coming up that the new music starts pouring out - demanding (and this is essential) that I ignore the actual work at hand and pay mind to the new ideas. It has to do with old habits of procrastination and focus, I think. Cleaning my bedroom was far preferable to doing my latin homework, which was far preferable to doing math homework, which was far preferable to actually going to school....so I would create odd systems for myself that involved skipping school so I could do my latin homework and would deliberately mess up my room so I could write songs. Does this make any sense to anyone else? The mind is a strange beast.
After the recording we're heading to Sundance ((www.ascap.com/eventsawards/events/sundance/2005/) for a few shows and then doing a short tour of California and surrounding environs, New England and then heading back to Europe til mid-march.
All things will be revealed at www.dresdendolls.com/calendar/index.htm.
love
a
recent great books: "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland and "Bad Seed" (a Nick Cave biography) by Ian Johnston
recent great music: kathleen edwards "failer" gripped me for a solid week. very straight ahed rock, but the lyrics...brilliant.
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Sunday, December 12, 2004
12/12/04 - Air New Zealand
I am sitting on a plane, on the last leg of London to New Zealand. We've been flying for almost 24 hours straight.
My head is a right mess, and my body is exhausted. We've been touring almost non-stop since summer. I remember once reading studies about the effects of Rapid Eye Movement sleep interruption....when you deprive people of REM, they can't dream. When they can't dream, they can't subconsciously process their lives. Then they slowly go insane. I'm feeling something similar.
The endless travelling with no real time to stop and reflect (and more importantly, create) has stunted my mental state of being - which I only notice in flashes here or there, like an amnesiac confronted with a sentimental photo. I try not to be too hard on myself, but I get scared by the fact that I can barely concentrate on a mindless magazine lately. My brain is being reprogrammed to think in shallow, five-minute intervals.
Things have gotten even more complicated lately by the fact that Brian and I have such an intense relationship, and it's being put to the test on the road. We're often like an old married couple, bitching mercilessly one moment and then caringly wonderful the next, and the manic-depressive relationship cycle slowly but surely starts to wear me down to the point where I feel like shutting off completely just to avoid further conflict. We're possessive and jealous like lovers, without the obvious silver lining that carries most lovers through the night. This relationship is one for the fucking books, I tell you....it'll take them years to figure out what actually happened. We barely know ourselves.
We found out yesterday that “dimebag” daryl from pantera was shot, along with the others onstage in ohio, and we were just dumbstruck. Brian was hard hit, this was an old idol of his from high school. And we ask each other, as we always do: what the fuck? what is happening to people? But we know it's the same old question...it's been happening for years and we can only use it for what it's worth. We're here, this is it, and if we think we're heading to something bigger and better and brighter down the road, we're fools. Here we are, on stage, alive. End of story.
I hate plane food. I want vegetables.
We're barely able to believe what's going on in New Zealand and Australia....the album is blowing up and we're in heavy rotation on MTV and the national alternative radio station, triple j. Most of the shows are sold out. I'm not even sure what to expect. The last time I was in Austrlia it was 2000 and I was on my own, performing the Eight Foot Bride at the Adelaide fringe festival. I almost got arrested twice.
On a brighter note (I should tattoo “don't post under the influence of less than 5 hours sleep in a 48 hour period” to my left hand), I've developed a new art form that keeps me from feeling I am entirely creatively zombified on the road. Together with Manta, who came on the tour to do morning martial arts exercises (www.shintaido.org) in addition to being the offical tour videographer, we have been carving out the framwork of a revolution in bad taste and narcissistic media.
It is called Karaoke Verité.
It fuses the art of film with the kitsch of karoake and basically amounts to me making ridiculous lipsyched videos in my free time as a kind of emotional/physical travelogue. For the time being, I am using the music of other artists. You can take a stab. The first one will be posted by christmas, I hope. I hope she doesn't sue.
My head is a right mess, and my body is exhausted. We've been touring almost non-stop since summer. I remember once reading studies about the effects of Rapid Eye Movement sleep interruption....when you deprive people of REM, they can't dream. When they can't dream, they can't subconsciously process their lives. Then they slowly go insane. I'm feeling something similar.
The endless travelling with no real time to stop and reflect (and more importantly, create) has stunted my mental state of being - which I only notice in flashes here or there, like an amnesiac confronted with a sentimental photo. I try not to be too hard on myself, but I get scared by the fact that I can barely concentrate on a mindless magazine lately. My brain is being reprogrammed to think in shallow, five-minute intervals.
Things have gotten even more complicated lately by the fact that Brian and I have such an intense relationship, and it's being put to the test on the road. We're often like an old married couple, bitching mercilessly one moment and then caringly wonderful the next, and the manic-depressive relationship cycle slowly but surely starts to wear me down to the point where I feel like shutting off completely just to avoid further conflict. We're possessive and jealous like lovers, without the obvious silver lining that carries most lovers through the night. This relationship is one for the fucking books, I tell you....it'll take them years to figure out what actually happened. We barely know ourselves.
We found out yesterday that “dimebag” daryl from pantera was shot, along with the others onstage in ohio, and we were just dumbstruck. Brian was hard hit, this was an old idol of his from high school. And we ask each other, as we always do: what the fuck? what is happening to people? But we know it's the same old question...it's been happening for years and we can only use it for what it's worth. We're here, this is it, and if we think we're heading to something bigger and better and brighter down the road, we're fools. Here we are, on stage, alive. End of story.
I hate plane food. I want vegetables.
We're barely able to believe what's going on in New Zealand and Australia....the album is blowing up and we're in heavy rotation on MTV and the national alternative radio station, triple j. Most of the shows are sold out. I'm not even sure what to expect. The last time I was in Austrlia it was 2000 and I was on my own, performing the Eight Foot Bride at the Adelaide fringe festival. I almost got arrested twice.
On a brighter note (I should tattoo “don't post under the influence of less than 5 hours sleep in a 48 hour period” to my left hand), I've developed a new art form that keeps me from feeling I am entirely creatively zombified on the road. Together with Manta, who came on the tour to do morning martial arts exercises (www.shintaido.org) in addition to being the offical tour videographer, we have been carving out the framwork of a revolution in bad taste and narcissistic media.
It is called Karaoke Verité.
It fuses the art of film with the kitsch of karoake and basically amounts to me making ridiculous lipsyched videos in my free time as a kind of emotional/physical travelogue. For the time being, I am using the music of other artists. You can take a stab. The first one will be posted by christmas, I hope. I hope she doesn't sue.
Monday, November 29, 2004
11/29/04 - Berlin, GER
I went to my tenth high school reunion just before leaving for europe.
alcohol - 1
amanda - 0
Ah, not only did the good old days wash over me with an infinite sea of hi-I-hear-you're-doing-very-wells but I tasted the sweet taste of being hungover and ill in an airport. My late teens and early twenties all over again.
Thank fucking god they're gone.
I simply pray that I didn't do anything more embarrassing than my clouded memory can dredge up.
I did get to feel the re-creation of an ultimate High School Moment. I was in the ladies room of the trashy euro-bar
that housed the reunion, relating to some old friends the story of whacking off in physics(how, you ask? cleverly, and under multiple large, flowing, gothic skirts) while staring directly into the eyes of the ultimate heather-like volleyball girl who I considered my spiritual nemesis (thinking, as I achieved orgasm, something terribly arrogant along the lines of "you will never be free, you will never be free...."). As I finished relating the story in the reunion bathroom, a heather-like friend of the ultimate heather appeared out of a nearby stall and looked at me, flipping heather-yet-now-soccer-mom hair and said: "Yeah right", while rolling her eyes heavenward and storming out of the bathroom. Ah, right back at home. Of course, I took the opportunity to relate this story to anyone who was willing to listen for the rest of the night.
Several drinks later, I snogged the football-team-captain-freak-basher who used to make my life a living helln after a short discussion and mutual truce. A large crowd gathered around us in a circle and applauded. A very West Side Story Moment.
I've since emailed my friend M. to see if anything of a less tasteful nature occurred.
Writing it all here in my public confessional makes me feel better, but I'm actually pretty horrified with myself. There was my chance to put them all to shame with my newly-found adulthood and maturity and I probably came off like a loudmouthed and bloated fool. In my defense, the fog of insecurity in the room was so thick that barely anyone could see straight and the open bar didn't help. I'll make up for it in 2014.
Berlin is as I always experience it: large, empty, cold and hard to find.
I woke up at 5 am this morning and took a long walk listening to the Avril CD. I swear, it's like a disease. I've concluded that listening to this CD, the ultimate guilty pleasure, is about as punk-rock as it gets. The only true rebellion lies in doing the truly unacceptable. I also haven't been tempted to listen to ANYTHING on a walkman since I was around 18. I put my finger on this morning over breakfast: if I had bought this CD at 12, I'd be addicted, and wouldn't feel the shame of listening to such terrible, corporate, superficial over processed shite, because I hadn't quite turned into a music snob yet and was perfectly happy listening to pop that made me smile.
Nowadays, when I listen to the music I loved at 12, it brings me back to a very specific feeling. The feeling belongs very specifically to my twelve-year-old self, a direct nostalgic connection to a solid spot.
But by listening to Avril, I have actually harnessed the power of the twilight zone and am able to re-live being 12 from a fresh perspective. How common is that?
alcohol - 1
amanda - 0
Ah, not only did the good old days wash over me with an infinite sea of hi-I-hear-you're-doing-very-wells but I tasted the sweet taste of being hungover and ill in an airport. My late teens and early twenties all over again.
Thank fucking god they're gone.
I simply pray that I didn't do anything more embarrassing than my clouded memory can dredge up.
I did get to feel the re-creation of an ultimate High School Moment. I was in the ladies room of the trashy euro-bar
that housed the reunion, relating to some old friends the story of whacking off in physics(how, you ask? cleverly, and under multiple large, flowing, gothic skirts) while staring directly into the eyes of the ultimate heather-like volleyball girl who I considered my spiritual nemesis (thinking, as I achieved orgasm, something terribly arrogant along the lines of "you will never be free, you will never be free...."). As I finished relating the story in the reunion bathroom, a heather-like friend of the ultimate heather appeared out of a nearby stall and looked at me, flipping heather-yet-now-soccer-mom hair and said: "Yeah right", while rolling her eyes heavenward and storming out of the bathroom. Ah, right back at home. Of course, I took the opportunity to relate this story to anyone who was willing to listen for the rest of the night.
Several drinks later, I snogged the football-team-captain-freak-basher who used to make my life a living helln after a short discussion and mutual truce. A large crowd gathered around us in a circle and applauded. A very West Side Story Moment.
I've since emailed my friend M. to see if anything of a less tasteful nature occurred.
Writing it all here in my public confessional makes me feel better, but I'm actually pretty horrified with myself. There was my chance to put them all to shame with my newly-found adulthood and maturity and I probably came off like a loudmouthed and bloated fool. In my defense, the fog of insecurity in the room was so thick that barely anyone could see straight and the open bar didn't help. I'll make up for it in 2014.
Berlin is as I always experience it: large, empty, cold and hard to find.
I woke up at 5 am this morning and took a long walk listening to the Avril CD. I swear, it's like a disease. I've concluded that listening to this CD, the ultimate guilty pleasure, is about as punk-rock as it gets. The only true rebellion lies in doing the truly unacceptable. I also haven't been tempted to listen to ANYTHING on a walkman since I was around 18. I put my finger on this morning over breakfast: if I had bought this CD at 12, I'd be addicted, and wouldn't feel the shame of listening to such terrible, corporate, superficial over processed shite, because I hadn't quite turned into a music snob yet and was perfectly happy listening to pop that made me smile.
Nowadays, when I listen to the music I loved at 12, it brings me back to a very specific feeling. The feeling belongs very specifically to my twelve-year-old self, a direct nostalgic connection to a solid spot.
But by listening to Avril, I have actually harnessed the power of the twilight zone and am able to re-live being 12 from a fresh perspective. How common is that?
Thursday, November 25, 2004
11/25/04 - On Online Journaling
I can't help but find it just plain strange that writers of late have been asking: how does it feel to expose your inner life on your website?
What am i missing here? The way i see things I'm writing some pretty mundane observations about my everyday life in this band and
leaving the heavy shit for my own journals (to be published posthumously, of course, to save everyone a great deal of embarrassment) or
for ephemeral phone conversations and late-night conversations.
I've often wondered WHAT would happen I did indeed start chronicling my inner life for all to read. Would it make the music more
interesting? Less interesting? More or less revealing, or mysterious? When you give people pieces to the puzzle of your pysche, it can
often lead to more questions than answers.
Fuck this shit, I'm going to go to Avril's website and see how it's done.
(pause....)
Ok, so Avril's not really revealing very much. Perhaps Courtney Love's website will have some details more revealing than "We're on tour in Spain and it's awesome, the shopping here is kick-ass etc"
(must also confess I watched ALL the videos from the new record. Angry Avril!)
(pause....)
Courtney Love has no online diary on her website. Probably for the best. How about......Ashlee Simpson? Norah Jones? Fucking.....Diamanda Galas?
(pause. pause. pause.........)
This is a really deadend project, none of these women seem to be the online journal type.
Good god, is it just me and Avril?
(pause...........)
It would seem so. I checked the websites of Rufus Wainwright, Bjork, Liz Phair, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, David Bowie and Momus....
just the cross-section of folks that popped into my head. Momus has a great "daily picture diary". Bowie seems to post on
his message board with some regularity, mostly music recommendations. Not a lot of soul-baring going on. And why should they? They're
artists and they should be concerned with making art.
But isn't this the future?
This is art.
I really ought to go to bed. To make myself feel better about this whole process I will try to reveal some of myself. I've been listening
to Avril's new record all night. I can't tell you exactly why, but it sort of makes me feel like I am 15 all over again in a parallel universe. I'm so ashamed and
so proud of myself at the same time. I learned "Together" on the piano. We could never cover it. We can get away with covering Britney, but Avril would just
not be acceptable. It's like the difference between admitting you like porn (which is cool) and admitting you make child porn (which is not cool).
Cult of Personality/Reality Performance of Self Via Interweb as artform? I'm nostalgic enough about my own life and past to want to get away with this kind of crap.
I have kept every letter I've ever recieved. I need a bigger apartment to fit all the shit I can't throw away. I did screaming naked perfomance art in college.
I was THAT girl. Who has made their personality into an artform lately and done a decent job? RuPaul?
I'm not just saying this to be cool but the Avril record really disintegrates towards the end.
Amanda. go. to. bed.
What am i missing here? The way i see things I'm writing some pretty mundane observations about my everyday life in this band and
leaving the heavy shit for my own journals (to be published posthumously, of course, to save everyone a great deal of embarrassment) or
for ephemeral phone conversations and late-night conversations.
I've often wondered WHAT would happen I did indeed start chronicling my inner life for all to read. Would it make the music more
interesting? Less interesting? More or less revealing, or mysterious? When you give people pieces to the puzzle of your pysche, it can
often lead to more questions than answers.
Fuck this shit, I'm going to go to Avril's website and see how it's done.
(pause....)
Ok, so Avril's not really revealing very much. Perhaps Courtney Love's website will have some details more revealing than "We're on tour in Spain and it's awesome, the shopping here is kick-ass etc"
(must also confess I watched ALL the videos from the new record. Angry Avril!)
(pause....)
Courtney Love has no online diary on her website. Probably for the best. How about......Ashlee Simpson? Norah Jones? Fucking.....Diamanda Galas?
(pause. pause. pause.........)
This is a really deadend project, none of these women seem to be the online journal type.
Good god, is it just me and Avril?
(pause...........)
It would seem so. I checked the websites of Rufus Wainwright, Bjork, Liz Phair, Laurie Anderson, Nick Cave, David Bowie and Momus....
just the cross-section of folks that popped into my head. Momus has a great "daily picture diary". Bowie seems to post on
his message board with some regularity, mostly music recommendations. Not a lot of soul-baring going on. And why should they? They're
artists and they should be concerned with making art.
But isn't this the future?
This is art.
I really ought to go to bed. To make myself feel better about this whole process I will try to reveal some of myself. I've been listening
to Avril's new record all night. I can't tell you exactly why, but it sort of makes me feel like I am 15 all over again in a parallel universe. I'm so ashamed and
so proud of myself at the same time. I learned "Together" on the piano. We could never cover it. We can get away with covering Britney, but Avril would just
not be acceptable. It's like the difference between admitting you like porn (which is cool) and admitting you make child porn (which is not cool).
Cult of Personality/Reality Performance of Self Via Interweb as artform? I'm nostalgic enough about my own life and past to want to get away with this kind of crap.
I have kept every letter I've ever recieved. I need a bigger apartment to fit all the shit I can't throw away. I did screaming naked perfomance art in college.
I was THAT girl. Who has made their personality into an artform lately and done a decent job? RuPaul?
I'm not just saying this to be cool but the Avril record really disintegrates towards the end.
Amanda. go. to. bed.
Monday, November 15, 2004
11/15/04 - Portland, OR
We had a rainy day off and I spent a majority of it losing myself in the best bookstore I've ever seen (www.powells.com ). I picked up what I am pretty sure is my new favorite book - "Girl Culture" by Lauren Greenfield - an unvelievably beautiful and terrifying photo collection. Nothing like the real thing, but I found some online images from the book at www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0301/lg_index.html . Girls at weight-loss camp. Prom queens. Anorexics. Three-year olds in lipstick. Amanda Heaven. Look closely at the captions.
Then I joined forces with some of the folks from Fran Sanchez (the name we've finally settled on for the tour bus) and headed to Mary's Club, Portland's first topless bar, which is now a full-on nekkid strip joint. Not that I'm a massive connoisseur, but I've been to my fair share of tit bars and strip joints and this one was a classic. No cover, very cheap drinks, and decor that resmebled a cross between a 50's family Italian restaurant, a rec room and a FunWorld.
There were only three girls working there, rotating every three songs. There was no DJ, which was also a first for me...the girls just selected tunes from a jukebox that was nailed to the wall next to the stage. One girl was insanely thin, blond and boring. The second girl had complete control over the muscles in her tits (we spent all night trying to figure out whether they were faux or not) and did a wonderful trick of pretending to tug them into the air with invisible strings. But our favorite was girl number three, Carmen, who was tattooed from head to toe and looked like full-on suicide girl material, buddy holly glasses and all.
I've had two bizarre dreams lately.
In the first one, I was eight months pregnant. This was one of those intensely vivid dreams, in which I could feel every detail down to the scratchy pinch of my maternity-pants waistband being ever-so-slightly too tight. I refused to name a father. I'd say it was more of a nightmare, actually.
The next night made up for it. I dreamt that John Lennon wound up at my apartment and I tried to get him to cuddle. To my amazement, he was up for it. I was clumsily messing around with my cd player, putting on some mood music - specifically, I was checking to see which disc tray my Cathode "Sleeping and Breathing" cd was in, because I was sure he'd like it - but I wound up accidentally blasting the beginning of the White Album instead. John sort of tried to be nice about it, but his expression read: "Oh Please, Anything But This." After apologizing and trying to laugh about it, I switched discs again and what should come on but....the fucking White Album again. God, how embarrissing. I suppose this has some sort of traceable interpretation having to do with typical musician anxiety. When you're not the sort of girl who cares if the whole class sees a big bloody splotch on the back of your white skirt, you end up having fears like this instead.
I did wind up cuddling with John Lennon, and all was well.
Then I joined forces with some of the folks from Fran Sanchez (the name we've finally settled on for the tour bus) and headed to Mary's Club, Portland's first topless bar, which is now a full-on nekkid strip joint. Not that I'm a massive connoisseur, but I've been to my fair share of tit bars and strip joints and this one was a classic. No cover, very cheap drinks, and decor that resmebled a cross between a 50's family Italian restaurant, a rec room and a FunWorld.
There were only three girls working there, rotating every three songs. There was no DJ, which was also a first for me...the girls just selected tunes from a jukebox that was nailed to the wall next to the stage. One girl was insanely thin, blond and boring. The second girl had complete control over the muscles in her tits (we spent all night trying to figure out whether they were faux or not) and did a wonderful trick of pretending to tug them into the air with invisible strings. But our favorite was girl number three, Carmen, who was tattooed from head to toe and looked like full-on suicide girl material, buddy holly glasses and all.
I've had two bizarre dreams lately.
In the first one, I was eight months pregnant. This was one of those intensely vivid dreams, in which I could feel every detail down to the scratchy pinch of my maternity-pants waistband being ever-so-slightly too tight. I refused to name a father. I'd say it was more of a nightmare, actually.
The next night made up for it. I dreamt that John Lennon wound up at my apartment and I tried to get him to cuddle. To my amazement, he was up for it. I was clumsily messing around with my cd player, putting on some mood music - specifically, I was checking to see which disc tray my Cathode "Sleeping and Breathing" cd was in, because I was sure he'd like it - but I wound up accidentally blasting the beginning of the White Album instead. John sort of tried to be nice about it, but his expression read: "Oh Please, Anything But This." After apologizing and trying to laugh about it, I switched discs again and what should come on but....the fucking White Album again. God, how embarrissing. I suppose this has some sort of traceable interpretation having to do with typical musician anxiety. When you're not the sort of girl who cares if the whole class sees a big bloody splotch on the back of your white skirt, you end up having fears like this instead.
I did wind up cuddling with John Lennon, and all was well.
Thursday, November 04, 2004
11/04/04 - Back in the USA
We were in Montreal on election day. We played at the Cabaret Music Hall and then dashed back out to the bus to sit and wait and listen to a faint radio signal as state by state the results came in. We barely spoke. The mood was pretty somber. When the prospects started to get really dim, we seperated. There was nothing to talk about, really. Some went for walks, some stayed up and drank, toasting to the new dark ages.
I went to my bunk and thought about what it really meant that Bush was going to be the president. The damage to the environment, the lives that will be lost, the progress twisted. I cried for a little while.
I'll admit it outright. A part of me is looking forward to the challenge. Might as well embrace the new dark ages for what they'll provide us: fuel. This band, though not overtly political, did what it could in a very small way. We registered people to vote at shows. We voted ourselves. Could we have done more? Certainly. Is that our responsibility? Yes. And no.
We will do what we do best: express ourselves however we like, make art we love, be kind to each other and those around us, support creativity in all shapes and sizes....and try to infect others with the urge to do likewise. That, I believe, is the most powerful asset we, and all artists, have. More so than waving a flag for a candidate or a cause.
It's a time-tested fact. In dark and oppressive political times the artistic kilns of revolution and expression are set ablaze.
Let it begin here, my friends.
I went to my bunk and thought about what it really meant that Bush was going to be the president. The damage to the environment, the lives that will be lost, the progress twisted. I cried for a little while.
I'll admit it outright. A part of me is looking forward to the challenge. Might as well embrace the new dark ages for what they'll provide us: fuel. This band, though not overtly political, did what it could in a very small way. We registered people to vote at shows. We voted ourselves. Could we have done more? Certainly. Is that our responsibility? Yes. And no.
We will do what we do best: express ourselves however we like, make art we love, be kind to each other and those around us, support creativity in all shapes and sizes....and try to infect others with the urge to do likewise. That, I believe, is the most powerful asset we, and all artists, have. More so than waving a flag for a candidate or a cause.
It's a time-tested fact. In dark and oppressive political times the artistic kilns of revolution and expression are set ablaze.
Let it begin here, my friends.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
10/21/04
we're stuck in florida, and it's only about 12 days to the election. is it a sign? maybe we'll stay here and count ballots. anything to help the cause. "one for bush, one for kerry, one for bush....um, two for kerry, three for kerry....one for brian, one for amanda, one for noam chomsky...."
the tour has been wonderful and hard so far. touring in a bus for the first time has been a huge relief (no more schlepping our shit every which way every night and morning) but it leaves one with a feeling of complete impermenance. as if we're heading somewhere and never actually arrive. there's also very little space to spead out and make a mess, which i tend to need. at least every few days.
the local shows in the south have been pretty well attended and the people we've been meeting have been inspiring and beautiful. performers have just begun to emerge from the woodwork in different places and the brigade is gaining momentum. kansas city was a trip and a half...we flew in for one show to support pj harvey and sonic youth at a large theater. since we'd been getting radio play (a lot of it) we were astounded to actually play to a captive audience of about 2000 folks who were familiar with the album and completely into the show.....we'd expected to feel like an opener (with everybody sort of milling in and curiosly checking us out, at best). it felt incredible, quite a step up for our wee band. pj harvey cancelled (something having to do with a missed flight or a canadian border holdup). i was disappointed not to be able to meet her, but we did get to play a longer set. the folks from sonic youth were plenty friendly and had very kind things to say and share.
the baby porcupines that were vigorously mating in my throat region have called a truce and seem to be huddling together for warmth but threaten to get it on at little prompting (lack of sleep and lots of talking seems to get the little buggers going at it). i soothe them with herbal teas and try to keep my stress level at a minimum, which is difficult as that often requires ignoring everyone and everything around me to keep my head on straight. staying out of everybody's headtrips and problems while living in close quarters is not an easy task, and can feel downright insensitive at times, but it's pretty necessary to maintain your own sanity and protect yourself. my mom taught me that. hi mom! i love you!
i also was intrigued at somebody's post on the dolls' forum about the current meaning of cabaret, and thought i'd cross-post my musings here.
good morning, eveybody........
........................
i don't claim to be any sort of expert on cabaret or the weimar era. in fact, i probably hold my romantic views as fast as the average citizen...i associate the cabaret with a fantasy of an era that we can only be familiar with through books, films and other seond-hand impressions (and therefore, the romanticising of others) of a time that is now gone. however, the cabaret as an idea did not begin and end with weimar germany, even though that's the "classic" cabaret. christopher isherwood's novels and berlin stories, which were turned into a play, which were in turn turned into the musical "cabaret", which in turn was made into the joel gray/liza minelli film is a beautiful example of how post-modern this all gets....the story which feds the fantasy which feeds the story which feeds the artform which feeds the fantasy, etc etc ad infinitum. but there was also the cabaret of paris, the cabarets in new orleans, the vaudleville everywhere, the dadists, the beat culture of the fifties....the spirit of what cabaret means keeps getting captured again and again in different generations and places, it just gets tagged with a different label. for me, the concept of "cabaret" isn't the particular musical styling, it's the spirit in which it is created and brought into the world.
so when i answer these questions, i must be honest: i'm not trying to re-create the weimar berlin cabaret, i'm not trying to start a cult, i'm not trying to do anything excpet kick-start in other people the romantic fantasy which i've always had and i know many others share....to create a space, even just an hour or two, in which everybody and anybody can take part: a spot in a dull world which keeps getting more and more frightening where everybody bands together and makes alot of meaningful noise, where self-expression is demanded, where risk-taking is honored, where art is god and where the rules of everyday life and coduct are forgotten for a while.
some of us will read up on it, take all the christpoher isherwood books out of the libabry and study the dissonant chord changes of kurt weill, some of us will lock ourselves in out rooms and try to memorize the Dada Almanac, some of us will rent "blue angel" and watch it countless times" and write essays about dietrich's influence on the transgendered community, and others will simply come for the show. let posterity show that a very valiant attempt was made at some point in the early 2000's by a group of people, musicians, aritsts, performers and common folk to fight against the overwhelming ennui of the cultural climate. the folks a few decades down the road may find the same inspiration from our efforts.
the tour has been wonderful and hard so far. touring in a bus for the first time has been a huge relief (no more schlepping our shit every which way every night and morning) but it leaves one with a feeling of complete impermenance. as if we're heading somewhere and never actually arrive. there's also very little space to spead out and make a mess, which i tend to need. at least every few days.
the local shows in the south have been pretty well attended and the people we've been meeting have been inspiring and beautiful. performers have just begun to emerge from the woodwork in different places and the brigade is gaining momentum. kansas city was a trip and a half...we flew in for one show to support pj harvey and sonic youth at a large theater. since we'd been getting radio play (a lot of it) we were astounded to actually play to a captive audience of about 2000 folks who were familiar with the album and completely into the show.....we'd expected to feel like an opener (with everybody sort of milling in and curiosly checking us out, at best). it felt incredible, quite a step up for our wee band. pj harvey cancelled (something having to do with a missed flight or a canadian border holdup). i was disappointed not to be able to meet her, but we did get to play a longer set. the folks from sonic youth were plenty friendly and had very kind things to say and share.
the baby porcupines that were vigorously mating in my throat region have called a truce and seem to be huddling together for warmth but threaten to get it on at little prompting (lack of sleep and lots of talking seems to get the little buggers going at it). i soothe them with herbal teas and try to keep my stress level at a minimum, which is difficult as that often requires ignoring everyone and everything around me to keep my head on straight. staying out of everybody's headtrips and problems while living in close quarters is not an easy task, and can feel downright insensitive at times, but it's pretty necessary to maintain your own sanity and protect yourself. my mom taught me that. hi mom! i love you!
i also was intrigued at somebody's post on the dolls' forum about the current meaning of cabaret, and thought i'd cross-post my musings here.
good morning, eveybody........
........................
i don't claim to be any sort of expert on cabaret or the weimar era. in fact, i probably hold my romantic views as fast as the average citizen...i associate the cabaret with a fantasy of an era that we can only be familiar with through books, films and other seond-hand impressions (and therefore, the romanticising of others) of a time that is now gone. however, the cabaret as an idea did not begin and end with weimar germany, even though that's the "classic" cabaret. christopher isherwood's novels and berlin stories, which were turned into a play, which were in turn turned into the musical "cabaret", which in turn was made into the joel gray/liza minelli film is a beautiful example of how post-modern this all gets....the story which feds the fantasy which feeds the story which feeds the artform which feeds the fantasy, etc etc ad infinitum. but there was also the cabaret of paris, the cabarets in new orleans, the vaudleville everywhere, the dadists, the beat culture of the fifties....the spirit of what cabaret means keeps getting captured again and again in different generations and places, it just gets tagged with a different label. for me, the concept of "cabaret" isn't the particular musical styling, it's the spirit in which it is created and brought into the world.
so when i answer these questions, i must be honest: i'm not trying to re-create the weimar berlin cabaret, i'm not trying to start a cult, i'm not trying to do anything excpet kick-start in other people the romantic fantasy which i've always had and i know many others share....to create a space, even just an hour or two, in which everybody and anybody can take part: a spot in a dull world which keeps getting more and more frightening where everybody bands together and makes alot of meaningful noise, where self-expression is demanded, where risk-taking is honored, where art is god and where the rules of everyday life and coduct are forgotten for a while.
some of us will read up on it, take all the christpoher isherwood books out of the libabry and study the dissonant chord changes of kurt weill, some of us will lock ourselves in out rooms and try to memorize the Dada Almanac, some of us will rent "blue angel" and watch it countless times" and write essays about dietrich's influence on the transgendered community, and others will simply come for the show. let posterity show that a very valiant attempt was made at some point in the early 2000's by a group of people, musicians, aritsts, performers and common folk to fight against the overwhelming ennui of the cultural climate. the folks a few decades down the road may find the same inspiration from our efforts.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
10/05/04 - HAAAAAAAAAAAACK
things are wonderful despite the fact that i have a cough and throat infection and feel like two baby porcupines are making love behind my mouth each time i breathe.
the european tour was magnificent. i hope to learn how to post the digital pictures i took while we're on the US leg of tour. London, Berlin, Brussels and Paris were all sold out and the euorpean people seemed to take quite a shine to the dresden dolls. the NME is already gossiping about us (surely a sign of imminent downfall), we've gotten rave reviews in the german, dutch and UK press and i'm generally feeling wonderful(except for the fucking porcupines. right now they are dry-humping).
Brian sliced his neck open with a broken umbrella handle in Berlin during a TV-shoot for a cultural show called Polylux. He was dueling the cameraman. We have it all on film. Six stitches, and a very sexy looking scar.
We've had a matter of hours, it seems, to come home and regroup and get our shit washed and good to go for our US tour, which is kicking off in Austin, TX this friday (go, porcupines, go! fly far, far, away!).
The schedule is pretty grueling but we have a new convenience of modern rock touring: the TOUR BUS, in which The Dresden Dolls and Count Zero (and after the NYC show: The Ditty Bops) will all sleep in little pods like larvae and get on ech other's nerves with our personal grooming habits. It's like camp, except people are hungover.
the european tour was magnificent. i hope to learn how to post the digital pictures i took while we're on the US leg of tour. London, Berlin, Brussels and Paris were all sold out and the euorpean people seemed to take quite a shine to the dresden dolls. the NME is already gossiping about us (surely a sign of imminent downfall), we've gotten rave reviews in the german, dutch and UK press and i'm generally feeling wonderful(except for the fucking porcupines. right now they are dry-humping).
Brian sliced his neck open with a broken umbrella handle in Berlin during a TV-shoot for a cultural show called Polylux. He was dueling the cameraman. We have it all on film. Six stitches, and a very sexy looking scar.
We've had a matter of hours, it seems, to come home and regroup and get our shit washed and good to go for our US tour, which is kicking off in Austin, TX this friday (go, porcupines, go! fly far, far, away!).
The schedule is pretty grueling but we have a new convenience of modern rock touring: the TOUR BUS, in which The Dresden Dolls and Count Zero (and after the NYC show: The Ditty Bops) will all sleep in little pods like larvae and get on ech other's nerves with our personal grooming habits. It's like camp, except people are hungover.
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