.........................
rolls head around high-school library poll:
....i wish i was on a plane.....to france....
- claire ("it's a fat girl's name"), the breakfast club, 1984
so
on a plane....to france.....not for tour with the band or for promo or work this time but for Actual Fucking Vacation....like, do nothing shit.
feel so guilty even saying it, i know i've earned it, must be those puritanical new england roots of mine
i've gotten on lots of planes in the past few months to do yoga retreating, recording, video-ing, family-and-friend-visting, but this is different, this has no structure. not quite sure what's going to happen and thats the way i like it.
the woman beside me is reading a cheesy-ass airport romance novel
but i like her
i have not, in the last 7 years, purchased a plane ticket to JUST GO SOMEWHERE. so i did. when i was in bordeaux about two years ago with the dresden dolls i decided i was going to come back, someday, for a vacation. i don't know how i decided. i just did. it was the perfect south-ish of france day, the perfect weather, and as i walked through the streets of the town, something just struck me: this is the perfect place to come and be by myself. endless small winding streets, a labyrinth of squeezed-together blackened buildings all low to the ground, lots of mellow south-of-france people, old everything, croissants, coffee. wine.
how much of it was informed by my love of the breakfast club, i will never know. we tend to have poisoned and collective fantasies.
warning: i think this blog is going to be really fucking long. sorry. this flight is 6 hours and 50 minutes and i haven't taken an ambien yet.
i thought i was going to get to go on this fantasy bordeaux vacation last year but the usual crunch set in and it was lost.
i'd actually forgotten about that. until a few days ago. then life played a cruel joke as i was searching my sent items on my mac using the keyword "bordeaux". the first thing that popped up was an email that i had sent to ben a few months before he died. the email was a picture (a drawing, really) of an old old bordeaux that i found on a google image search and the text i wrote to him: THIS IS WHERE I AM GOING. i had been sharing with him my nascent bordeaux fantasy. i've been thinking about ben more than usual lately. maybe it's the time of year, i dont know. maybe it's because i lost the headphones that i bought because he had the same ones. they got shuffled away in the video shoot. the first thing i did when i came back to boston was went to the same store to see if i could buy the same pair. had to special-order them. special-ordered them. some things like that are important. for a few months ben kept popping up in the address field every time i would email ben folds. i had been emailing ben chapell so much, i suppose, that the mac just said: "this IS the ben you want to email, right?" i removed him from my adress book but i hadn't forseen the possibility that he'd come back from the dead while searching for flight information. i miss him. i miss him.
it's been a crazy fucking few weeks: truly, the happiest of my life so far. yes. i can honestly say that. there's been so many incredible moments that i wish i could bottle it all, save it, stretch it out, wish i could toss a few of the spectacular moments that maybe i didn't need in case i find myself hungry for good days when i'm old and doddering.
random thoughts from comments:
1.
i appreciated somebodys comment about the spin class equivalent of noga: nin. think of all the other possibilities for active non-exercise. such as norobics and nogging. nin as a form of exercise had a very nice ring to it as it conjured images of somebody focusing very hard on weightlifting an imaginary trent reznor. since it is an imaginary trent reznor, it could be the fishnet-clad 1989 version of trent reznor who is much skinnier than the present day buffed-out version of trent reznor and therefore much easier to lift were he not to be a theoretical trent reznor but i suppose if you're practicing nin and that means that by virtue of it being a non-exercise and therefore a non-existant trent reznor it really wouldn't matter either way.
2.
thank you for the link, but you will be proud to know that i DO already own a zen alarm clock. it is one of my most prized possessions and i think i have also given about 5 of them as gifts over the years. i first saw the zen alarm clock (which wakes you up by ringing an actual soft chime with a hammer in increasing increments of time, it's delicious, look for one on ebay, they run about $50-$100) at my friend sasha's house in brooklyn back in the day. she was playing bass and violin for king missile and invited me to crash there or visit one day and when i saw the alarm and said WHATS THAT she said: that is the zen alarm clock, it will change your life. and she was right. waking up to the fucking radio or a buzzing piece of shit alarm clock or a ringing hotel phone is one of my least favorite ways to start a day and i didn't even realise how much it was affecting me til i changed it. now, if they would make a TRAVEL zen alarm clock so i could take that shit on the road, given i am only at home with my zen alarm clock about 15% of the time, i'd be set. will somebody please invent it and drop me a line.
3.
somebody asked me my thoughts on the following artists:
Joanna Newsom - i like her, even though she looks and smells like a gelfling. the voice on the first record really turned me off but she seems to have toned it down for ys. i find it hard to relate to the lyrics, even though the can be captivating, they seem Away, a bit too literary for my taste. i have to admit ive barely listened to either record, but that's my impression. i am mostly impressed by her ability to be seemingly totally original, herself, what-she-is, no bullshit and draw people in. that's very special and i appreciate whoever does it whoever they do it, whether they are joanna newsom or devendra or fucking eminem.
Sigur Ros - i think they're amazing, bought my first album about 4 or 5 years ago in germany, and and and i want to see them live. i've heard they slay
Regina Spektor - its funny you should mention that now, because i've been thinking a lot about regina, how could i not. if you've known me for a while you'd know that i am a huge fan, bordering on the obsessive from back in the day. i was turned onto her music by a friend (im pretty sure it was anna vogelzang, a great piano-singer in her own right) a while ago, maybe in 2002, long before she blew up. somebody mentioned her, i went out and found soviet kitsch (actually, i think i pulled that "hey i'm in the dresden dolls can you send me a CD?" card and she mailed it to me) and spent the next 4 or 5 days in a love haze. it was the first time in years i re-discovered listening to music for pleasure instead of business (i would repeat this experience about a yar later with a bright eyes record) and actually Took My Walkman To Bed because i was so excited about hearing the sounds that this woman made with her piano and voice. we invited her to open up for us on a tour of new england, maybe 4 shows, and that was how we started getting to know each other. more shows and sleep-overs ensued (regina once stayed over at the same time david j was in town, a true convergence) and we would talk on the phone every few months to catch up about our respective lives in the weird Major Label Machine. she was working on the beginnings of "begin to hope" back then, and she was oh oh excited about how good it sounded. i remember talking to her once when she was walking from the studio back to her apartment and she just sounded fucking High on the process, so happy with what was coming out...
i saw her last show at avalon in boston, with full band, and was just blown away by how far and how fast it can happen for some people. i used to say to people: "looking at what is happening with regina every month is like watching an alternate/quantum version of my own life"....because she was doing the solo piano thing, which is what may well have happened if i hadn't met the drummer brian viglione and started the dresden dolls. i would sometimes feel jealous of her solo-ness ("damn. she gets to be alone on stage, tour alone, and do whatever the fuck she wants"), sometimes badly for her solo-ness ("damn. she's all alone up there. no drummer to make bang bang loud loud") and certainly, when she blew up big time, envious of the mega-attention the label had given her ("damn. what if OUR record had had a budget & TV placement like that...?") but mostly i am just in awe of her abilty to move me, every single fucking time i see her play (and often just via headphones). she is a song-writing genius, in my opinion, done, if anyone ISN'T already familiar with her music: i recommend starting with "soviet kitsch" and then moving to "songs" and "begin to hope". "11:11" isnt really worth it, nowhere near her best. regina plug over
4.
re: the new avril video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ25-glGRzI
well, we were waiting to see which direction she would go for record #3 and the votes are in: CHEESE FEST.
where'd brooding, angry avril go? this fucking video makes ME brooding and angry. it's the most hate-ridden, ignorant, mean-bitch-promotin' video EVAR & makes me wanna hurl. omg SO over it. that said, "under my skin" will never leave my top ten.
back to life
the birthday show in nashville i find it hard to describe. it's been so long since ive toured or played live shows that i was really bowled over and touched by how loving and generous everyone was. we put this show together in literally four days and then...hundreds of people show up. there is all this energy, all these gifts, all this attention. i feel like i have a magic faucet plug into the universe. how did i get so fucking lucky?
i wanted to rock out so i put a band together with bass-playing jared (from ben fold;s band, he knew some of the songs anyway from the recordings) and drum-slaying doni (from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead and nowadays more in the band Forget Cassettes) and we had one only-slightly-beer-sodden rehearsal the day before the gig. they were both pro and intuitive, incredible musicians and i felt that holy-shit-MUSIC! feeling as we plugged in and played those first few songs. i had jotted out a brand new song, rare for me to work that quickly, the night before they came and so i went for broke and arranged it with them. we also broke out a cover of "sister christian" by night ranger and by that point in the set my life was complete. i think 5 separate people brought cakes, i was given at least 12 ponies (i re-gifted a few of them to the 6-year old in attendance), and a pair of girls brought a pinata which i slayed out on the smoking porch. they didnt tell me it was filled with glitter and so my head was covered with glitter for a few days, which was nice, it was like luminescent dandruff
(the woman beside me just made a funny comment when the french steward brought me my wine. i have noticed lately how everybody on planes are always on their number one best behavior. from apes in the jungle to being stuffed in a box like this, hundreds of us, for seven hours!!!! evolution and socialization: fucking impressive
oh you'll sleep well, she said
you bet your ass i will, wait til i pop the ambien, bizzatch)
at the show i played some the new songs that ben and i have been working on and Holy Shit do they sound good live....any doubts that i was hanging onto festering have fully melted and i felt like a fucking powerhouse, ripping through one song after the next, sopping up the audience that i'd felt so missing in the weeks of recording, as i sang into a response-less microphone and empty room. now the music was real. people could hear it, i cold hear them hearing it, i could feel them feeling it & this is what i like about being a musician.
after the show i went on a til-dawn bar-tour and playground-tour of nashville and got to sleep after the sun came up.
the LA shoot for "shores" was.......breathtaking? awesome? i'm running out of adjectives. it's irritating that all this good shit is happening at once, it makes it all seem a little less incredible. fuck. i seem to use "incredible" and "awesome" a lot. whatevs. plainly priceless, as you can plainly see from the pictures posted up on the myspace (more coming...). there were about 50-100 people hanging (so patiently, especially as the cold rolled in) on venice beach and i kept doing this "fucking pinch me" thing to whoever would listen because i was so happy. all the friends there, all the love, all the work, it was just (fuck adjectives) FUCKING INCREDIBLY AWESOME. i saw the rough cut for it yesterday and i think we came close to capturing the magic, we'll see. editing videos is weird, it's so hit and miss. the director, andrew, and the producer, frank, were great gentlemen (and broke my not-working-with-michael-pope cherry gently....pope is, by the by, doing great and currently living in brooklyn and working on a new feature film, which will most certainly be amazing and feature some kind of amanda cameo, even if i have to be naked and blowing somebody....and i would not put his past michael pope...i would count on it....long parenthesis over). frank gets special love for taking me on an epic motorcycle ride to the best sushi view in hollywood.
(oh the sky is orange right now outside the plane the plane)
in LA i stayed the whole time at katie kay's magic house near los feliz. staying in a house or apartment of a friend (especially the house or apartment of an amazing friend such as katie kay) tends to change everything. hotels are not Home. when not feel home, do not act Home. when you are Home you are happier. i would rather stay at Home and deal with very small inconveniences like Sleeping On The Couch and Waiting For The Boyfriend To Get Out of the Bathroom than stay in a fucking soulless hotel room. granted, hotel rooms are great when you need Very Alone and what not but good friends are usually very chill in the Alone dept. and in this case, i actually wondered if i was encroaching on katie's Alone because she had so much Shit To Do for the video. she killed it, all the costumes, NAILED, the woman is a shining light of brilliance and inspiration....we spent long good talks eating and juicing and driving around LA. emily came to town to join the fest, erin maxick dropped in and took us to yoga. the night before we shot the video (all of our alarms were set for 5:15 am) i was listening to the track over and over and decided around midnight to go out to the street for a good ol dance-and-lip-synch fest for practice, inspied by watchi david lee roth 16 times in a row and being stunned by his earnestness. emily asked if she could video-tape and i said yes and i have yet to see the footage of me bopping around hollywood at midnight in my sweater, lipsycnhing music that only i could hear, but my guess is it's hilarious.
the morning of the shoot i woke up at 4 am with a very christmas feeling in my stomach and knew that going back to sleep would be impossible. so i decided to be a good yogi, went to katie kay's dark kitchen, brewed this great white/green te mixture she has stocked, and took my mug of tea and a blanket out to her front lawn to meditate across from the little buddha statue sitting under the tree. i sat for about half an hour, got up around 5 am all proud of myself for being all centered and enlightened and promptly tripped across katie kay's front steps, smashing her mug into several dozen pieces on the cement and very possibly waking up several neighbors. i laughed very hard at this.
when we showed up at the beach the whole crew was already in full swing and the rest of the day was a blur of sand and whacked out clothes and faces and color and love. the characters on venice beach blended nicely with ourown collection of freaks....costume changes at the cadillac hotel every twenty minutes....david j from bauhaus showing up in his dapper white suit....margaret cho showing up in FULL belly-dancing regalia....kelly from "kelly likes shoes" showing up in full dress and making out with me in the sand...jason webley showing up and teaching the entire cast of school girls the "elephant elephant" song (another gem from the record we're producing by the amazing siamese twins, evelyn & eveyln, more details on that later i assure you)....the bodybuilder who just happened by and decided to oil himself up for the shoot...the roller derby girls who came all decked out...the stilt-walker troupe...everybody freezing their asses off....my A&R guy david bason and my art director jeff from roadrunner getting in the video with their bare legs clad in high heels....i could go on: my only regret is that the video won't feature HALF of what was happening on venice beach that day. there's only 3 minutes for the whole video FUCK!!!!!!!
there is a STAGGERINGLY gorgeous and huge photo-set of all this madness up at :
www.pixievisionproductions.com/gallery/dresden_dolls050307
pixie is the BEST.
& video should be done by june.....
the shoot wrapped at around sunset and i felt a level of tiredness in my body that i used to only feel after a double shift of stature work on top of a three hour drive. a heaviness in my limbs that was so infused with satisfaction that i could ever decide from moment to moment what to focus on. superkate, my kick-ass assitant for the day, drove us back to katie kay's and i sat there like a zombie in the front seat, unable to process everything that had just happened. it was as if the best moments of my life had just been compacted into 9 hours and i was trying to digest it all. i almost fell asleep. i SHOULD have gone to sleep. but instead i went to a club dow the street where jason webley was playing. i was delirious. i became more delirious. every time i see jason play i am inspired, the guy is just so fucking GOOD at entertaining a room of people, i've never seen him not play from the darkest depths of his fucking heart.
we stayed up late into the night and the next day was a complete recovery, we all went to madame matisse and ordered huge omelettes, jason drove off to his next tour date, and i collapsed back into bed until the next day. had two meetings, more film and tv agent meetings and huge sushi galore with em.
then i flew home and slept for like two days, for reals.
once i woke up i had to deal with the onslaught of mail and email and Basic Shite That Is Always There, but i took it in stride. i saw a lot of music. i soaked up the scent of my apartment and the incoming springtime, the flowers bursting like mad in my neighborhood. i Let Shit Go. i am getting better at this. one night patrick wolf and amy winehouse were playing at avalon and me and becca jumped in a cab to check it out. patrick was adorable as shit and inspired me to order, at no great expense, a baritone ukulele from eBay. he was pure energy on the stage. all my old family/crew was converged there, wonderful wonderful. i went over to central sq to see cuddle magic with andrew (a-fucking-mazing: www.myspace.com/cuddlemagic) then we went back for the amy winehouse afterparty. patrick danced with the drag queens (YES, THE VERY SAME ONES WHO PLAYED SOCCER WITH THE KAISER CHIEFS....how lucky are THEY in the rock dept. this month??)
a few nights later i went to see the arcade fire.
i must pause here for a moment of fucking silence for the Arcade Fire. oh oh oh oh oh oh oh............
this band....o...this band is doing it for real, my brothers and sisters. the only time i'd seen them was when i met them and saw them for all of two minutes at coachella a few years ago.
they BROUGHT IT, they PLAYED. the production itself was brilliant: video-feeds screaming big brother surveillance, neon lights that bent ironically towards heaven....they were so not afraid to be performers. they have the tunes; they have the talent. we said hi to will and win the singer (who is way taller than i remember, but just as gracious) and as soon as we exited to the street i heard "HEY AMANDA" and i turned and there were two guys, fans of the arcade fire and the dresden dolls. all High from the show. we chatted up i noticed that oneof the guys had a cast on his arm. it went all the way to his fingers; his hand was cocooned. his friend was wearing an arcade fire shirt that he had made out of bleach. i complimented him on his handiwork. then anthony, or me, i don't remember, asked
"what happened to your arm?"
yeah, it sucked. lost all my fingers, except the pinky.
how? we asked
at work, factory accident. sucks doesn't it.
then quiet
but he was wearing the biggest grin on his face.
the arcade fire show was still pumping through him, making all limbs and lack thereof irrelevant, maybe
we made the usual...at least youre here, at least you're not dead........
out hearts were swollen like killer tomatoes when we got into the cab home
home.
Home.
oh well, can;t really tell the difference anymore ?
i watch my packing habits. packing for tour, packing for shoots, packing for whatever. i;m always doing it.
i watched myslef packing this morning and got really hilarious with it. sometimes i'll REALLY let myslef go and talk to myself, out loud, in a completely un-checked stream-of-consciousness.
for example
"now go to the bathroom. toothbrush wait take the charger for the toothbrush now put it in the backpack pocket ok yay you did that now oh shit you need your passport let's go get it ok ok it's in the filing cabinet yay we're going to the filing cabinet ok passport yay it's actually in here ok now we're going to put it in backpack what else is in there oh gross now list list list let's see the list list time to pack books but dishes maybe dishes ok so the place isn't rank when we come home ok dishes time dishes dishes maybe just water all over them but dont actually clean ok ok put on an elliot smith cd good dish music yay really listening to music"
mind you, these are not THOUGHTS i am quoting, i am TALKING here, out load: to myself and the fleas.
sometimes i stop and notice it and fucking crack up laughing. then i shut up out of weird leftover self-consciousness.
i was planning on taking one small suitcase and igically ended up with two large ones.
how did i morph from minimal "i will take one blank book and maybe two pens" ? into a library of books and an amelda marcos collection of shoes for one photoshoot in france?
i put it this way to my housemate troy:
"oh my god i will have free time maybe i can learn to knit maybe i can learn to play autoharp maybe i can learn to read MUSIC!!!!!! maybe i can read EVERY FUCKING BOOK IVE ORDERED FROM AMAZON!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IN TEN DAYS I CAN EDUCATE MYSELF SO FAR INTO THE CONFLICT WITH IRAN THAT I WILL NEVER FEEL IGNORANT AGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!"
add one photo shoot on top of that and you've got two suitcases stuffed with possibilty
(the thin texan behind me just asked, REALLY condescendingly, im ASSUMING you dont want these? re: the three empty plane-wine bottles cluttering his foot space)
and
today before i boarded the plane
oh oh oh oh oh
today was really beautiful
this was the best.
i was invited to accept an award today at youth pride, which is basically the high school version of regular gay pride day, and i was supposed to be out of town. but then ben's show at the symphony came up ( i had to go, but i missed the infamous brawl) and i stayed a few extra days in town so i went, not knowing what to expect at all. about 2,000 high school kids were gathered at boston common to be out and out and i, rarely vocal bisexual that i am, accepted an award from my old high school's gay-straight alliance. i stood there thinking quick about what to say....i wanted to say a lot but i had nothing planned. i was just blown over by the sheer beauty of all these freaky high-school kids, all dancing and loud and proud and easy, the way i'd always fantasized about in high school...everyone decked out and united in happy celebration of being queer. me and three of my friends (claire, mehran and fred, aka kasha) in high chool founded the first incarnation of this gay-straight alliance group that presented my with my styly award. we caled ourselves Bi-GLASS (bisexual gay lesbian and straight society) and we mostly existed to throw parties and draw pictures of our group's logo, which cosisted of the "B" of Bi-GLASS taking the shape of a man's buttocks while the dot of the "i" transmorphed into a cock penetrating said ass. my god, we had fun back then. we were sick and having a great fucking time, i must say. we didn't accomplish anything, i think we went to one rally. probably tripping. but watching it having morphed into an actual organization at my old high school was pretty heart-warming.
i think things have changed, if only slightly. in 1993, when i was in the middle of high school, it was JUST BARELY cool, even if you were a freak, to admit you were bi or gay. now, from a distance at least, it seems like an acceptable badge of alternative honor. maybe im just jealous again. but the kids that i met at this rally were like a best-of: all caught up thinking, social, mad, lost, happy, delirious in the blitzing moment of their own creation right there on the big grassy historic-common thats seen revolution, civil rights marches, you name it, weep it...
in a fabulous twist of fate, the drag queen who MC'd right pride was from the Kaiser Chiefs/Amy Winehouse debacle-rama. i love life
i had thought that i would take off right after the awards to dash home and pack for the bordeaux fantasy but the kids kept asking if i was going to be a part of the parade and i knew i technically had time. so i stayed
(i just took the ambien - not much longer for this world)
i got into a world-war II-era combo land-water duck boat with the organizer (btw YOU GO KELLY, you may have ditched high school but look at what you've fucking organized, you fucking bitch!!l) and some of the other kids and we did a circle of the completely desolate financial district. this was saturday, i got the feeling that it was the cops idea of a cruel joke to be like "sure, you can have a parade, we'll take you through the financial district on saturday where NOBODY WIL BE and we will revel in the uncomlicated trafficlessness of it all"....and so it was a parade, but with no street-side spectators, which was kind of awesome because you mostly felt the inner resonance of this group of 2,000 people all cheering themselves on, all taking care of each other. then shit gets fucking weird: all cinematic, the parade passes by marcus stern, the director of the onion cellar. he and i had some heavy struggles with each other but we caught each others eyes and smiled all-gone all-good at each other, pressed fists over hearts, let the past go. we held each other's gazes for a while. could this parade get more surreal? yes:
the truly bizarre moment kicked in when the driver of the duck boat announced that he hadnt brought any music, did anyone have a CD? i struggled for a second, because i did. i had a "yes, virginia" stuffed in my purse in case i needed one for a gift (and indeed, i ended up signing it and giving it to kelly), so kelly grabbed it and shoved it in the CD player and for a totally surreal 35 minutes i watched a group of high-school kids in a duck boat singing my songs at the top of their lungs to a mostly empty sidewalk. it was weird enough, but it got weirder when i noticed that it didn't seem to make these kids feel weird to realize that the person who had RECORDED this shit, Stood In a Fucking Studio And Vocalized This Fucking Music was there with them. no, actually///// it didn;t seem to to faze them. my presence was an afterthought at best. it was the music, the music, the music. not me. not ME.
we got to the corner of tremont and boylston just as the last chorus of "sing" was playing. whatever was happening outside the boat, at that point, was irrelevant. crowds of saturday shoppers were standing in the street confused by this boat of traffic-disrupting teenagers who had an army of dead-pan flat-ass boston policemen on motorcycles keeping the road parade-ready in front of them...
and they belted out
"LIFE IS NO CABARET"
while i stood there sort of dumbstruck
"WE'RE INVITING YOU ANYWAY"
and they sang those word to the outside world like an anthem that they weren't even thinking about anymore, because the words were so familiar, like a given
and its not the wine at high altitude, oh maybe it is - they say in vino veritas, though i know i usually cry at any airplane movie, including harry potter, once i'm airborne
but i'm letting myself cry anyway no matter what the woman beside me thinks
because
i finally feel like i'm real
............
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Saturday, April 28, 2007
The Art of Noga
.
i don't know how much poetry to make out of the fact that I literally wake up in the dark every day.
it's not completely dark, i mean, i leave some lights on, but there's no windows anywhere.
i have been sleeping in the studio since it's cheaper and easier than staying in a hotel while I'm here recording.
Ben Foldses studio is like a huge church, and Im sleeping in the choir loft/where the pipe organ might be, up on a big wooden balcony. we moved a bed and a boxspring and a light up there and voila Instant Home.
there's also a little adjoining kitchen and bathroom area and this is where i make my morning tea and sit. i shower at the yoga studio. i don't make it to yoga every day. but every day is a valiant effort.
joe, the mixing engineer, shows up every morning to let the piano tuner and it's always this embarrassing joke. he and i are always the last ones in the studio at night and as he's packing up to leave and as we're talking about the next day's schedule i always proclaim i'm going to make it to 9:30 yoga in the morning. then i inevitable stay up til the wee hours doing some random thing. then he shows up again in the morning to let the piano tuner in and he sees me blearily staggering down the stairs and trying to croak hello and be social to him and the tuner. he assesses the situation, nods his head and cries out with his arm up, like a sports announcer declaring a touchdown: "NOGAAA!!!" these are what we call "Noga" days. the yoga intention was there, yes, and it was very strong. but o well fuck it. last night i stayed up til 4 finishing a brand new song. i am writing again, a lot. it's all coming back. im so fucking happy about that.
waking up to the sound of the piano tuner in the dark has become something i've actually really started to enjoy. the piano is directly beneath my loft and head so the tuner can't see me, but it's loud as hell. it's better than an alarm clock for sure. BONG BONNNNNNG. BONG BONNNNNNG. i love the sound of a piano being tuned the way i love the sound of an orchestra warming up. it's very comforting. and it's a wonderous piano, a fucking beauty. ben just got it, his new baby, its a full steinway grand from the early 1900s and it sounds like MAgic.
late nights, i sit alone in the huge studio and listen to the tracks we're working on. i youtube. i just play. just playing, i had forgotten about this. sometimes ben and i just play. last night we had a jam session in which we played Guitar Hero in the style of a cruise ship lounge band, then we had a three-way with me on tack piano, ben on the steinway, and joe on the minimoogthen ben made fun of "coin-operated boy". then i made fun of "brick". joe and i listened to the entire preview of "arena rock classics" over the playback speakers one night. i decided that every song i've written int eh past 4 months is directly derivative of "cold as ice" by foreigner. that's not such a bad sign considering foreigner did pretty well. we have been having a damn good time. i put a little youtube clip up of ben and i figuring out "runs in the family":
those papers falling off the piano were not staged! it was the Force of Rock!!!! the work is hard. being back in the studio for the first time since making the last dresden dolls record is in turns exciting and terrifying. there's much less of a clear plan, since i am putting this record out myself, with my own money and on my own schedule. ain't nobody up top telling me what to do, just the way i like it. but it also means that this thing
(ah the cafe is playing girlfriend in a coma, i love nashville)
could take 3 years if i wanted it to. this is good and bad. zoe keating, the wonderful cellist who i know through her days in rasputina and through her sister laura (our merch girl extraordinaire and now full-time management assistant)
came to lay down some tracks and we worked aroudn the clock to squeeze as much in as possible. we didn't have the arrangements prepared so we put them together on the spot and there was a lot of amanda-running-from-the-studio-room ben-running-from-the-control-room ahhhhhhh TRY THIS!!! no no no no wait, aaaaaahhhhhhGGGH try this! that's amzing! FUCK THAT! this is good ahhhhhhhhh for about 36 hours straight. we started at 9 in the morning both days, an unthinkable hour. needless to say those were Noga days.
(zoe amanda and ben, photo by joe)
today was a Noga day. i got all my shit together and walked over to the yoga studio and forgot it was fucking saturday and there was no class at noon. so i went for a jog instead. i've been learning how to jog ever since getting my ass kicked by my hawaiian roommate, suz. she would jog every morning before the 12 hour yogathon and i started going with her. suz has been featured on ESPN in those fucking insane week-long extreme sports megathons that involved teams of four competing against each other in a week-long marathon that included a total of 18 hours sleep, 788 miles of running, 435 miles of rock climbing and 4895 miles of whitewater rafting. her body was of steel. her stories about that were fucking unbelievable, like the one about her teammates draggin her behind them on a leash because her feet were so oozing with sand-blisters that she couldnt feel them and she couldn't run. anyway, jogging starting to seem like Not So Bad. and i've been loving it. i put my ipod on at full blast and run up and down Music Row in nashville lip syncing aberdeen city at the top of my lungs. the cars driving by must think im either Important or Fucking Nuts. i'm both, mothafuckers.
in the "since you asked" dept:
yes i drive stickshift.
avrils new record: i am very disappointed, avril. it's no "under my skin".
the day i flew to nashville, I spent all day in a weird airtport/transit twilight zone. my flight had been cancelled the night before, so i stayed home and they booked me on a two-leg flight the next morning.
it was a sureeal Snow Day, I'd already said goodbye to Max, Becca, Lee & my whole household.
i woke up insanely early, andrew (the same one who cahsed a lot of you out the lilypad that day with the loud japanese grindcore, or whatever it was..im sure he's sorry, he had to turn over the house) made us breakfast and took me to the airport. but we got fucking lost since neither of us are intimate with the 1,901 detours of the Big Dig (it doesnt matter HOW many years you live in boston, you'll never be able to negotiate the Big Dig detours). once I finally got to the gate, I was kicked off my flight, since they'd overbooked it. mother of fuck. then they told me they could fly me direct. this was Great.
i waited for that flight. we boarded late and then sat on the tarmac for 2 hours. then we had to get off and were told to Kind Of Wait.
wind, storm, all that. i wandered around, lost and looking for information.
I finally posed as a member of the Admirals Club and was told the flight had been canceled. i hunted for my luggage, found it, and called my sister for a ride home.
i went home for two hours. i got to scare the shit out of Becca, who was in my apartment playing piano (i snuck in and went YAAAAAAAGGGGGG! and made her jump).
i ended up deciding to stay in nashville for my birthday next week instead of going early to the video shoot in LA, mostly because i've started to feel at home here. i have a little family here. ben and joe and i eat together every day, usually twice, and it seems like the recording is something we do in-between meals, not the other way around. and this is the way i like it. jared stops by. joe's wife sandra is a riot and i love her. joe, besides being one of the best engineers i know, also knows every restaurant hostess in town. we eat often and well. we've been working long hard hours but they go quickly. last night ben got fixated and wouldnt Get Satisfied with the introduction to ampersand so i played it a few dozen times and then changed it and played it a few more dozen times and after about an hour of this we said Fuck It Let's Eat. then we came back and kept going and finally we were all happy. hours and hours for that one 13 seconds.
here's ben playing it:
i like recording this way. some days are vocal days and my voice is in perfect shape and things go fast. some days i sound like shit. some days i sound like shit and that sounds strangely good. we take youtube breaks frequently. we can't work for more than a few hours without taking a youtube break. we get fixated on one video and will watch it repeatedly throughout the day. two days ago we were so hilariously fixated that we ended up sampling the youtube audio from the flash animation that we were obsessing over and put it into the track we were working on. things are getting weird.
ben has spent more time being a touring musician than a producer, but he's had a heavy hand in all of own records and he knows what he's doing. he's actually gotten more nitty into my takes than other producers might. we started with a list of about 30 songs and gradually whittled. well, honestly, it wasn't that gradual. one thing that i love about ben is that we can be totally honest with each other. so "that song sort of blows" and "this song is awesome but that song is way too gay" are legitimate criticisms. often, i will make the criticisms before he needs to and we'll simply agree. we have so much respect for one another that when we disagree, which is rare, it's a non-issue. one of us lets go and we move on. we;ve been adding instruments, laying in textures, trying to be spare but creative. we have almost 6 songs almost done.
mornings i spend lots of time at cafe coco, sitting and writing in my journal, making sense of the past few months. i was in a
(wow, they must have it on shuffle, because they just started playing girlfriend in a coma again)
bad state in the past while and i feel like i'm finally rising form the ashes. the lupus episode was rough enough, but it left the finger issue unsolved. it's still diagnosed as a cross between arthritis and tendonitis due to overuse but i've been giving it lots of care and feeding and rubbing and love and yes lots of fish oil and glucosamine and it's been staying relatively unswollen. ive been taking impeccable care of myself, hardly any smoking at all, drinking only to lubricate an already moderate sense of well-being, which is, i think, the only way to drink. last night, actually, i drank while i was writing. i was exteremly proud of myself, i had the discipline to almost completely finish a song i'd started in the afternoon and had had spinning in my head all day. we had been talking about childbirth and labor (my friend claire had a TWO-DAY marathon labor with no sleep that made suz's week in utah seem like a stroll to the bodega to buy cigarette papers) that day at lunch. everybody
(now they're playing grace by jeff buckley)
always compares songwriting to childbirth and it's true that the parallels are endless and uncanny. if we follow this metaphor, then my use of drinking lager while writing is sort of like using your breath to get through the contractions. but careful. too much beer and you lose the inspired writing zone; too much heavy breathing and you might hyperventilate and pass out on the floor and hit your head and die! then mother and baby and song all dead = bad.
today is our last day of a little tracking and comping (where we listen mercilessly to takes and decide what to use from which takes). we've made headway on about 6 songs and that's more than i thought we would have done a week ago. so i am happy. tomorrow is off and doni is taking me to the woods and we're going to practice for the show on monday: quite looking forward to this nashvegas style birthday party show and recruited all my nashville homies to play with me in a pick-up band, doni from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead on drums and jared from ben's band on bass. maybe i'll even think of a name for us. theres always noah's old favorite ' victorian fourway'. my pther favorite is 'the candy coated shits'. nobody beats ad frank for best fictional band name ever (in fact, i think he was on the brink of using before he decided on Ad frank and The Fast Easy Women....this was a four-piece band of men, mind you): Ad Frank and the Gay Gayons From Planet Gay. maybe we'll be called something terribly nashville like "Amanda Palmer and The Killer Kegs". jared (the bass player) would especially like that one, since he likes beer. anyway
after the show i fly straight to LA for the "shores of california girls" video shoot, which is promising to be a ready-made surreal experience. it's a one-day, wicked-low-budget, all-volunteer cast, beach, GO! i am going to spend two full days in preparation to channel the spirit of david lee roth. i am using THIS (youtube.com/watch?v=BKTc9VaNIiI) for inspiration. my god. what an amazing man. almost as good as THIS (youtube.com/watch?v=kX9qcggRo18&mode=related&search=) but not quite.
while i'm at it, i might as well share the rest of our favorite youtube & audio clips from the past two weeks of studio madness:
1. BITTY (about 2 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8orUaCJ0GY. i spent all day that day saying "BITTY" into the mic inbetween take. i love little britain.
2. the troggs tapes (about 10 minutes) - http://website.lineone.net/~thetroggs/ this was especially relevant as i was having a kook attack about What Record Production Means. lore has it that this is the recording that INSPIRED spinal tap. it's fucking amazing, a candid studio recording of the troggs (who recorded "wild thing") arguing like only a band in the studio can. it's CLASSIC. the drummer is especially heartbreaking.
3. WARRIORS OF GENGHIS KHAN. ok, only one more i promise. speaking of spinal tap, this pre-dated it as well and is QUITE excellent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB7DGe3paEM
and now that that's out of the way....
i got off track somewhere there but i was talking about coming back around after a rough few months. it's true. i have noticed that's an excellent space in which to write songs. when you're struggling and confused or depressed, it can be hard to focus enough to record the emotions. but once you get through to the other side there's a grace period where the reverb of those emotions can feed you while your creative energy Does the UnStuck. i'm almost 31 years old, definitely starting to seem old to teenagers. i sort of totally love it. i feel so comfortable with myself, it's hard to explain, but i really just don't worry about things the way i did when i was younger. a lot of people have said this happens to them when they hit their thirties. you just start wearing a huge, shit-eating grin because you have become Fully Yourself and have stopped trying to be anything else. but it's also about teh ingredients. you start seeing this long picture of your life Up Until Now and see patterns in the ingredients that you've put into it and what you've gotten back in return. things make sense becasue of day-to-day experience, not in theory. you're not just shooting in the dark anymore. this can also be terrifying, because the assumptions you've wanted to hold onto desperately n the same refuse to be stay acceptable (I Can Eat/Smoke/Drug However I Want And Nothing Bad Will Ever Really Happen! Every Relationship Is Fixable! Water And Sleep Are Optional! ... and other popular delusions). there's just too there's just too much proof to the contrary, yer fucked, baby.
on that sobering note, i've also become less uptight about the moderation. i've seen too many cycles. seen too many promises of total abstinence broken. i know that moderate moderation actually works better than anything. i've gotten enough speeding tickets to drive relatively sanely. i've gotten excited and dissapointed about projects to put too much stake in any one thing. i've seen too many people around me have freak-attacks and death-threat temper-tantrums to be too bothered by it (or take it too personally) anymore. it always comes out in the wash. i've seen too many gloves and sunglasses get lost. i dont miss them as much when they go. i still try to hang onto them, and i'm getting better with that. but when that realization sets in ("oh well i think they're gone for good") i don't feel too sad.
or maybe it's not the age; i know a lot of uptight fucking 60-year olds.
maybe it's all the meditation and the Noga.
namaste motherfuckers
& goodnight
& may you all have a Noga day tomorrow
love
amanda
.
i don't know how much poetry to make out of the fact that I literally wake up in the dark every day.
it's not completely dark, i mean, i leave some lights on, but there's no windows anywhere.
i have been sleeping in the studio since it's cheaper and easier than staying in a hotel while I'm here recording.
Ben Foldses studio is like a huge church, and Im sleeping in the choir loft/where the pipe organ might be, up on a big wooden balcony. we moved a bed and a boxspring and a light up there and voila Instant Home.
there's also a little adjoining kitchen and bathroom area and this is where i make my morning tea and sit. i shower at the yoga studio. i don't make it to yoga every day. but every day is a valiant effort.
joe, the mixing engineer, shows up every morning to let the piano tuner and it's always this embarrassing joke. he and i are always the last ones in the studio at night and as he's packing up to leave and as we're talking about the next day's schedule i always proclaim i'm going to make it to 9:30 yoga in the morning. then i inevitable stay up til the wee hours doing some random thing. then he shows up again in the morning to let the piano tuner in and he sees me blearily staggering down the stairs and trying to croak hello and be social to him and the tuner. he assesses the situation, nods his head and cries out with his arm up, like a sports announcer declaring a touchdown: "NOGAAA!!!" these are what we call "Noga" days. the yoga intention was there, yes, and it was very strong. but o well fuck it. last night i stayed up til 4 finishing a brand new song. i am writing again, a lot. it's all coming back. im so fucking happy about that.
waking up to the sound of the piano tuner in the dark has become something i've actually really started to enjoy. the piano is directly beneath my loft and head so the tuner can't see me, but it's loud as hell. it's better than an alarm clock for sure. BONG BONNNNNNG. BONG BONNNNNNG. i love the sound of a piano being tuned the way i love the sound of an orchestra warming up. it's very comforting. and it's a wonderous piano, a fucking beauty. ben just got it, his new baby, its a full steinway grand from the early 1900s and it sounds like MAgic.
late nights, i sit alone in the huge studio and listen to the tracks we're working on. i youtube. i just play. just playing, i had forgotten about this. sometimes ben and i just play. last night we had a jam session in which we played Guitar Hero in the style of a cruise ship lounge band, then we had a three-way with me on tack piano, ben on the steinway, and joe on the minimoogthen ben made fun of "coin-operated boy". then i made fun of "brick". joe and i listened to the entire preview of "arena rock classics" over the playback speakers one night. i decided that every song i've written int eh past 4 months is directly derivative of "cold as ice" by foreigner. that's not such a bad sign considering foreigner did pretty well. we have been having a damn good time. i put a little youtube clip up of ben and i figuring out "runs in the family":
those papers falling off the piano were not staged! it was the Force of Rock!!!! the work is hard. being back in the studio for the first time since making the last dresden dolls record is in turns exciting and terrifying. there's much less of a clear plan, since i am putting this record out myself, with my own money and on my own schedule. ain't nobody up top telling me what to do, just the way i like it. but it also means that this thing
(ah the cafe is playing girlfriend in a coma, i love nashville)
could take 3 years if i wanted it to. this is good and bad. zoe keating, the wonderful cellist who i know through her days in rasputina and through her sister laura (our merch girl extraordinaire and now full-time management assistant)
came to lay down some tracks and we worked aroudn the clock to squeeze as much in as possible. we didn't have the arrangements prepared so we put them together on the spot and there was a lot of amanda-running-from-the-studio-room ben-running-from-the-control-room ahhhhhhh TRY THIS!!! no no no no wait, aaaaaahhhhhhGGGH try this! that's amzing! FUCK THAT! this is good ahhhhhhhhh for about 36 hours straight. we started at 9 in the morning both days, an unthinkable hour. needless to say those were Noga days.
(zoe amanda and ben, photo by joe)
today was a Noga day. i got all my shit together and walked over to the yoga studio and forgot it was fucking saturday and there was no class at noon. so i went for a jog instead. i've been learning how to jog ever since getting my ass kicked by my hawaiian roommate, suz. she would jog every morning before the 12 hour yogathon and i started going with her. suz has been featured on ESPN in those fucking insane week-long extreme sports megathons that involved teams of four competing against each other in a week-long marathon that included a total of 18 hours sleep, 788 miles of running, 435 miles of rock climbing and 4895 miles of whitewater rafting. her body was of steel. her stories about that were fucking unbelievable, like the one about her teammates draggin her behind them on a leash because her feet were so oozing with sand-blisters that she couldnt feel them and she couldn't run. anyway, jogging starting to seem like Not So Bad. and i've been loving it. i put my ipod on at full blast and run up and down Music Row in nashville lip syncing aberdeen city at the top of my lungs. the cars driving by must think im either Important or Fucking Nuts. i'm both, mothafuckers.
in the "since you asked" dept:
yes i drive stickshift.
avrils new record: i am very disappointed, avril. it's no "under my skin".
the day i flew to nashville, I spent all day in a weird airtport/transit twilight zone. my flight had been cancelled the night before, so i stayed home and they booked me on a two-leg flight the next morning.
it was a sureeal Snow Day, I'd already said goodbye to Max, Becca, Lee & my whole household.
i woke up insanely early, andrew (the same one who cahsed a lot of you out the lilypad that day with the loud japanese grindcore, or whatever it was..im sure he's sorry, he had to turn over the house) made us breakfast and took me to the airport. but we got fucking lost since neither of us are intimate with the 1,901 detours of the Big Dig (it doesnt matter HOW many years you live in boston, you'll never be able to negotiate the Big Dig detours). once I finally got to the gate, I was kicked off my flight, since they'd overbooked it. mother of fuck. then they told me they could fly me direct. this was Great.
i waited for that flight. we boarded late and then sat on the tarmac for 2 hours. then we had to get off and were told to Kind Of Wait.
wind, storm, all that. i wandered around, lost and looking for information.
I finally posed as a member of the Admirals Club and was told the flight had been canceled. i hunted for my luggage, found it, and called my sister for a ride home.
i went home for two hours. i got to scare the shit out of Becca, who was in my apartment playing piano (i snuck in and went YAAAAAAAGGGGGG! and made her jump).
i ended up deciding to stay in nashville for my birthday next week instead of going early to the video shoot in LA, mostly because i've started to feel at home here. i have a little family here. ben and joe and i eat together every day, usually twice, and it seems like the recording is something we do in-between meals, not the other way around. and this is the way i like it. jared stops by. joe's wife sandra is a riot and i love her. joe, besides being one of the best engineers i know, also knows every restaurant hostess in town. we eat often and well. we've been working long hard hours but they go quickly. last night ben got fixated and wouldnt Get Satisfied with the introduction to ampersand so i played it a few dozen times and then changed it and played it a few more dozen times and after about an hour of this we said Fuck It Let's Eat. then we came back and kept going and finally we were all happy. hours and hours for that one 13 seconds.
here's ben playing it:
i like recording this way. some days are vocal days and my voice is in perfect shape and things go fast. some days i sound like shit. some days i sound like shit and that sounds strangely good. we take youtube breaks frequently. we can't work for more than a few hours without taking a youtube break. we get fixated on one video and will watch it repeatedly throughout the day. two days ago we were so hilariously fixated that we ended up sampling the youtube audio from the flash animation that we were obsessing over and put it into the track we were working on. things are getting weird.
ben has spent more time being a touring musician than a producer, but he's had a heavy hand in all of own records and he knows what he's doing. he's actually gotten more nitty into my takes than other producers might. we started with a list of about 30 songs and gradually whittled. well, honestly, it wasn't that gradual. one thing that i love about ben is that we can be totally honest with each other. so "that song sort of blows" and "this song is awesome but that song is way too gay" are legitimate criticisms. often, i will make the criticisms before he needs to and we'll simply agree. we have so much respect for one another that when we disagree, which is rare, it's a non-issue. one of us lets go and we move on. we;ve been adding instruments, laying in textures, trying to be spare but creative. we have almost 6 songs almost done.
mornings i spend lots of time at cafe coco, sitting and writing in my journal, making sense of the past few months. i was in a
(wow, they must have it on shuffle, because they just started playing girlfriend in a coma again)
bad state in the past while and i feel like i'm finally rising form the ashes. the lupus episode was rough enough, but it left the finger issue unsolved. it's still diagnosed as a cross between arthritis and tendonitis due to overuse but i've been giving it lots of care and feeding and rubbing and love and yes lots of fish oil and glucosamine and it's been staying relatively unswollen. ive been taking impeccable care of myself, hardly any smoking at all, drinking only to lubricate an already moderate sense of well-being, which is, i think, the only way to drink. last night, actually, i drank while i was writing. i was exteremly proud of myself, i had the discipline to almost completely finish a song i'd started in the afternoon and had had spinning in my head all day. we had been talking about childbirth and labor (my friend claire had a TWO-DAY marathon labor with no sleep that made suz's week in utah seem like a stroll to the bodega to buy cigarette papers) that day at lunch. everybody
(now they're playing grace by jeff buckley)
always compares songwriting to childbirth and it's true that the parallels are endless and uncanny. if we follow this metaphor, then my use of drinking lager while writing is sort of like using your breath to get through the contractions. but careful. too much beer and you lose the inspired writing zone; too much heavy breathing and you might hyperventilate and pass out on the floor and hit your head and die! then mother and baby and song all dead = bad.
today is our last day of a little tracking and comping (where we listen mercilessly to takes and decide what to use from which takes). we've made headway on about 6 songs and that's more than i thought we would have done a week ago. so i am happy. tomorrow is off and doni is taking me to the woods and we're going to practice for the show on monday: quite looking forward to this nashvegas style birthday party show and recruited all my nashville homies to play with me in a pick-up band, doni from ...and you will know us by the trail of dead on drums and jared from ben's band on bass. maybe i'll even think of a name for us. theres always noah's old favorite ' victorian fourway'. my pther favorite is 'the candy coated shits'. nobody beats ad frank for best fictional band name ever (in fact, i think he was on the brink of using before he decided on Ad frank and The Fast Easy Women....this was a four-piece band of men, mind you): Ad Frank and the Gay Gayons From Planet Gay. maybe we'll be called something terribly nashville like "Amanda Palmer and The Killer Kegs". jared (the bass player) would especially like that one, since he likes beer. anyway
after the show i fly straight to LA for the "shores of california girls" video shoot, which is promising to be a ready-made surreal experience. it's a one-day, wicked-low-budget, all-volunteer cast, beach, GO! i am going to spend two full days in preparation to channel the spirit of david lee roth. i am using THIS (youtube.com/watch?v=BKTc9VaNIiI) for inspiration. my god. what an amazing man. almost as good as THIS (youtube.com/watch?v=kX9qcggRo18&mode=related&search=) but not quite.
while i'm at it, i might as well share the rest of our favorite youtube & audio clips from the past two weeks of studio madness:
1. BITTY (about 2 minutes): www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8orUaCJ0GY. i spent all day that day saying "BITTY" into the mic inbetween take. i love little britain.
2. the troggs tapes (about 10 minutes) - http://website.lineone.net/~thetroggs/ this was especially relevant as i was having a kook attack about What Record Production Means. lore has it that this is the recording that INSPIRED spinal tap. it's fucking amazing, a candid studio recording of the troggs (who recorded "wild thing") arguing like only a band in the studio can. it's CLASSIC. the drummer is especially heartbreaking.
3. WARRIORS OF GENGHIS KHAN. ok, only one more i promise. speaking of spinal tap, this pre-dated it as well and is QUITE excellent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB7DGe3paEM
and now that that's out of the way....
i got off track somewhere there but i was talking about coming back around after a rough few months. it's true. i have noticed that's an excellent space in which to write songs. when you're struggling and confused or depressed, it can be hard to focus enough to record the emotions. but once you get through to the other side there's a grace period where the reverb of those emotions can feed you while your creative energy Does the UnStuck. i'm almost 31 years old, definitely starting to seem old to teenagers. i sort of totally love it. i feel so comfortable with myself, it's hard to explain, but i really just don't worry about things the way i did when i was younger. a lot of people have said this happens to them when they hit their thirties. you just start wearing a huge, shit-eating grin because you have become Fully Yourself and have stopped trying to be anything else. but it's also about teh ingredients. you start seeing this long picture of your life Up Until Now and see patterns in the ingredients that you've put into it and what you've gotten back in return. things make sense becasue of day-to-day experience, not in theory. you're not just shooting in the dark anymore. this can also be terrifying, because the assumptions you've wanted to hold onto desperately n the same refuse to be stay acceptable (I Can Eat/Smoke/Drug However I Want And Nothing Bad Will Ever Really Happen! Every Relationship Is Fixable! Water And Sleep Are Optional! ... and other popular delusions). there's just too there's just too much proof to the contrary, yer fucked, baby.
on that sobering note, i've also become less uptight about the moderation. i've seen too many cycles. seen too many promises of total abstinence broken. i know that moderate moderation actually works better than anything. i've gotten enough speeding tickets to drive relatively sanely. i've gotten excited and dissapointed about projects to put too much stake in any one thing. i've seen too many people around me have freak-attacks and death-threat temper-tantrums to be too bothered by it (or take it too personally) anymore. it always comes out in the wash. i've seen too many gloves and sunglasses get lost. i dont miss them as much when they go. i still try to hang onto them, and i'm getting better with that. but when that realization sets in ("oh well i think they're gone for good") i don't feel too sad.
or maybe it's not the age; i know a lot of uptight fucking 60-year olds.
maybe it's all the meditation and the Noga.
namaste motherfuckers
& goodnight
& may you all have a Noga day tomorrow
love
amanda
.
Friday, April 13, 2007
bloodwork, elephants, motörhead & me
........................
why am i dressed this way?
9:34 am, i am on the train from boston to nyc
i will spend 3.5 hours in the train, 5.25 hours in the city, then 3.5 hours on the train again.
in those 5.25 hours in new york, i will have four meetings:
manager, film agent, potential new business partner, new publishing administrator.
i decided
it would be wise to dress like a grown-up today.
i Love doing this.
Dress-Stockings-Heels-Gloves-Scarf-Hat shit. in the train station I noticed how NICE everybody was to me.
everybody held the door, everybody smiled.
because I look like a Pretty Lady.
suckers.
while on the train i will write this blog, read over my contracts, talk on the phone and eat a muffin.
i am moving fast again. but it feels fine, mostly fine.
i feel infused with life, yesterday we spent all day working on new songs, eating thai food, looking for elephants and sharing life.
when i got my adult ensemble completed this morning i checked for unnoticed stained, turned to evelyn and asked: "would you take me seriously?"
he looked up from his laptop, pondered and decided yes. we drank our tea, then he dropped me at the train station.
things have been feeling borderline domestic. but the soundtrack to this bliss is a twisted child-porn-circus-soundtrack, so it all seems justifiable.
we have a unfiltered harmony, two minds that run on relatively parallel tracks with interesting enough veers that shit don't get boring. we both need to laugh.
.
and now the weather.
the first breaking news is this:
i'm recording the most beautiful record in the world with ben folds.
we've done very little so far, just broken ground and consumed endless pumpkin loafs and coffees in nashville, but i can finally hear my godamn heart sing. its been stuck, stuck, stuck for a while.
ive been writing new music and it's the best i've ever written, and exhuming the best of the old stuff for posterity.
it's a new experience for me to be in the studio with no pressure and no drama. just make music and make it good. ben plays with me, i listen, he listens, we free-associate in the same sorts of directions.
we've been whittling down a list of over thirty songs & there will be lots of pianos, lots of sounds. ben playing drums and synths and organs. and handclaps. he's good at handclaps. he's a great producer. he loves music. he is a fantastic fucking human being and i feel like the luckiest girl in the world that he found me and wanted to work with me. what the fuck? just take it, amanda.
but i'll back up and tell you the journey of the last six weeks or so.
i feel more alive and vital than i have in years, like i'm breaking out of a hard shell.
working constantly on the music business for the last six years has really sucked my soul out. i'm only seeing it in retrospect. i knew it was happening when it was happening, but i still pressed forward. i sort of had to. and i assumed i would arrive here. and now im here. and i'm sort of stunned.
like: oh. it worked. holy shit.
but
my little swollen finger, my aching joint. a few weeks before leaving on my long journey i finally went to my Real Doctor in desperation and asked what i should do.
none of the acupuncture, massage therapy and eye-of-newt treatments had been working. she examined. arthritis, probably, she said.
she took some standard blood tests.
i went to visit lisa, my step-sister, and the wee bairn growing in her tummy. i went with her to the sonogram and we found out it was a boy.
lisa and todd live in the way out there on a ranch near santa fe. we talked about all sorts of Boy Names. she has five horses. we went riding through the deserty terrain and i fell off.
i loved riding. loved falling off. pony heaven.
i had a dream last night that i was 5 months pregnant and the vividness with which i could feel the baby in my stomach was staggering.
i kept feeling the head right through my skin, a big solid lump.
i decided on an abortion because i had no idea who the father was and that really bothered me.
zach condon, the mastermind of the wonderful band Beirut (www.myspace.com/beruit, yes the mis-spelling is intentional) and his charming girlfriend hosted me for mardi gras in albuquerque.
we listened to his new song, talked about the pitfalls of touring life and then went to play pool with a bunch of his band and friends.
zach and i made a formidable team and kicked some ass. my mother always said that she would teach her two daughters how to do four things: Cook, Sew, Play Pool and Drive Stickshift.
i flew from santa fe to dallas fort worth to wait for my plane to honolulu. this is where i would be shutting my brain down, shutting my phone and computer off and learning how to teach yoga.
i was sitting at the gate, waiting for the plane to board, looking at my phone and wondering if i should symbolically shut it off as i boarded the plane, as i sat in my seat...or wait until the plane was lifting off the ground.
they all had a nice sense of closure. i had made all of my arrangements, set my email to autoreply (talk to you in a month, namaste motherfuckers) and felt fully ready to let go and take care of myself.
then the phone rang.
it was the Real Doctor calling from boston.
something came back wrong from my bloody blood tests.
what does that mean?
you have a high ANA count, sky high.
what does THAT mean?
well, i can email you some information about it, but it doesn't mean anything specifically. it means that you very well may have some kind of auto-immune disorder.
that could mean HIV, but given your condition and the chronic complaints about your joints, it's possibly rheumatoid arthritis, and with these numbers, possibly lupus.
oh goody. tell me more.
we won't know anything until we run a shitload more tests (please note, i;m paraphrasing all of this. the Real Doctor did not say shitload).
should i come home? should i cancel my yoga retreat and fly straight back to boston, get it over with, just insert myself headfirst into the iron lung?
no. just enjoy your vacation and we'll run the tests the minute you get back.
can you tell me anything else? i'm scared and alone.
i'm sorry, amanda.
then i hung up and the flight started boarding.
i shut my phone off.
i found my seat.
i had pictured this moment in advance, lifting off into the happy abyss, leaving my cares behind for a while while i went to commune with nature, my yoga mat and my like-minded hippie freak friends.
there was no irony or bad luck. the fact that i got this phone call five minutes before taking off was perfect. i burst into tears as the plane took off, looking at dallas getting little underneath me, thinking about what my life would be like if i had lupus or terrible arthritis and wondering if i was going to be plagued by this wondering for the next month. i sat and watched my thoughts and thought about all the people i knew who had battled cancer, falls from high-wires and dozens of broken bones, crippling afflictions and comas...by the time we landed in honolulu, i was feeling ready for death and weirdly content.
i kept remembering this story one of my teachers had told in class some time before, and i clung to it:
Although Henri Matisse was nearly 28 years younger than Auguste Renoir, the two artists were dear friends and frequent companions. When Renoir was confined to his home during the last decade of his life, Matisse visited him daily. Renoir, almost paralyzed by arthritis, continued to paint in spite of his infirmities. One day as Matisse watched the elder painter working in his studio, fighting torturous pain with each brush stroke, he blurted out: "Auguste, why do you continue to paint when you are in such agony?"
Renoir answered simply:
"The beauty remains; the pain passes."
And so, almost to his dying day, Renoir put paint to canvas. One of his most famous paintings, The Bathers, was completed just two years before his passing, 14 years after he was stricken by this disabling disease.
i thought a lot about this.
i was astounded. for the next month the wondering didn't plague me as much as i assumed it would. i knew i had no control, no impact on the outcome. well...thats not quite right. i assumed that if i let it go and did my best not to worry that this was my best and only defense against the worst possible news.
some guy i used to be good friends with cut off contact with no explanation a few weeks before i left for the trip and that, strangely, plagued me more than the blood test. i wasn't sure what it all meant, i just held it as a fact of life the way i held this shaky information about my health. in both cases, it was just there. nothing i could do about it except sit, watch, breathe. no asking questions (there would be no response anyway, in either case) no how-can-i-fix-this, which is my usual impulse. no what-the-fuck-did-i-do-to-deserve-this, no WHY-WHY-WHY?WHHHHHHHYYYY?!?!!!??
just: oh well. shit happens. blood tests come back bad. people disappear from your life without telling you why. what can you do about it? nada. health is random; people are unkind. c'est la vie. move on.
at kalani, which was the retreat center on the Big Island that hosted my yoga posse, i found real peace. i got there a few days early and made friends with the staff. i stayed in a wooden dorm-room with a bunch of other folks; i ate beautiful but simple foods, floated around in the water, read books, walked around, drank tea, tried to calm my jumpy mind and fell for a brit from outside cambridge whose favorite band is motörhead.
a few days later, the bootcamp started; barely a free moment in the day. wake up, silent walk, morning meditation, morning yoga, lunch, afternoon teacher training and evaluation, light dinner, evening practice and then night-time grok sessions: basicially led experiments in becoming as honest as possible with yourself and those around you. one night we all stood face-to-face for long stretches of time, not smiling, not talking, just being. one night we paired off and sat down with someone we didn't know well, hit the lights and poured out (in total confidence) our deepest fears, insecurities and regrets. think what you will; it worked. by the end of the week we were a family.
we learned from each other, we were totally honest with each other, we dug deep and respected one another. there were a few moments that grated on my nerves and struck me as crossing the cheese line, but mostly i was in my element. i was so impressed with all of us. though people poured their souls out, their stories and sicknesses and fears and deaths and general human dramas, the whole process was armored against the self-indulgent and self-pitying and geared towards the fuck-it-be-here-now. my body fell into itself, my hips stopped cracking, my left little toe finally detached from it's co-dependent neighbor. all sorts of shit started going down. i became a better yoga teacher.
i kept my bloody test at bay. i tried not to think about lupus too much.
i cant describe the beauty of kalani, or of hawaii, it's just impossible. there was an easiness about every act that dug into me like a stinging reminder of how hard i've made everything. the air was good, the people were good, the food was good, the place just held you...i felt my bad skin dropping off.
i felt like i was leading a double life, communing with my huge yoga family and then stealing moments with my motörhead crush and his friends on the kalani staff. it felt perfectly balanced to do yoga for 4 hours and then sit in a ganja-filled haze of a cabin and listen to everyone rapping local gossip and planning beer runs. my neck was stiff; i was recommended to a chiropractor down the street. i gave him a call on the staff phone. he picked me up the next day after breakfast, in his jaguar, a half-burned marlboro lite hanging out of his mouth.
you amanda?
fuck yeah.
lets go.
he cracked me 13 times and blasted Foreigner from his boom-box.
i became an addict. the next day he picked me up on his suzuki motorcycle. we hit 85 on the one-mile stretch to his house.
i stayed a few extra days in hawaii after the bootcamp ended. some friends and i went for a guided hike across the lava fields that la at the bottom of the active volcano. it rained and rained and we hiked like madpeople over miles of black glassy rock along the ocean. it was primordial. we finally reached a spot where a piece of the ground had collapsed into the flow and we stood around the edge of the hole into the earth. the magma was flowing right beneath us and you couldn't look too long or too hard; if you did your face would burn off. everybody threw something into the magma, which looked like white-golden crackly liquid and obliterated anything it touched on contact. then we hiked back and art-ed out on the way, taking naked photos lying in the lava fields. we came home frozen and soaked to the bone. richard, the wonderful man who started and runs kalani, let me wander into his cabin whenever i wanted to play his electric keyboard. he would arrive at breakfast every morning with flowers for whoever he ran into first. mahalo, richard. you made heaven.
on sunday mornings the enitre community from that corner of the big island, called puna, gathers for Church at kalani.
Church there means everyone gathers in a covered tent for three hours of strict no-talking: just ecsatically dancing and gyrating to a trance/80s/techno DJ with some wack-ass folk music thrown in for good measure.
hundreds of people wigging out in broad smiling daylight....little kids, dogs, old folks, clothing optional, dancing optional. some people just sat around and watched and smiled. freak-on freak-out time. my god.
then david and i went to the black sand beach, where the party continued into the afternoon, then rented a mustard mustang convertible and drove to kona on the other side of the island with the top down.
we stole a mix CD from the kalani kitchen and had no idea what was on it. i heard a song called "i will follow you into the dark" and wondered who it was by. i played it over and over again. we alternated between that and the chemical brothers. no motörhead. i mean, nothing against motörhead. we climbed the car over the volcano on the way back the next day and the temperature dropped forty degrees. we ate lots of fruit. we danced in the car david drove me the the spot of jungle where he lived for a while with a group of renegade anarcho-hippies called Someland (everybody wants Some Land) and the annex they built a few years later in the space adjacent to Someland (Space City). people live off the land here, in shelters they build themselves, generators, scratch. we got the mustang up to 110 on the way back to kalani.
i flew back from hawaii sunburned and completed. cooked to perfection.
and then....things weren't so good.
for starters, i noticed, for the first time in my life, that i was not even looking forward to coming home. my haven.
i went into the rheumotologist and got the tests run. i had to wait two weeks for the results.
i tried to let things go, hour by hour, minute by minute.
i kept my yoga practice solid and got second, third, then fourth opinions about my hand.
i was told i might have to have hand surgery. that bummed me out.
i started having to wonder what i would do about the june tour if i couldn't play.
other things started to ache on me more and more by the day, especially since i was back in the world of mutual acquaintances and all the gossip flying around exhausted me. i found myself so uninterested in it and so sucked in at the same time, the way you feel compelled yet disgusted picking up a Star Magazine at the dentist's office. i went to the dentist's office. i got my teeth cleaned. you've been grinding, they said.
does it hurt?
i laughed.
things started to really come into focus, in a more profound way than usual. between ben and hawaii, i had been spent such good, quality around people who were open and honest in hawaii that i stayed on a roll. my deep friendships got a little deeper. especially in the face of my weird vulnerability about the tests and my swollen hand, the relationships in my life that were real, honest, caring, good all floated to the surface and the bad and uncaring ones seemed to be sinking away. i took better and harder looks at my good friends and our lives together and was touched at how hard we've tried to care for each other over the years. it's kept me, and them, afloat.
i thought about the friend i missed, when i was gone. it's odd but when i count my deep friends and relationships on my fingers....one, two..........three.......there's a new, odd sort of spot for this community of people who read and respond to my blog. its become a different kind of Friend, its hard to define. it's not a person, it's not even a defined group of people. but i know what it feels like and i feel like it knows me.
its like time magazine said, fucking, it's You.
i love You. i love This.
i love cafe coco in nashville.
i took all the advice that was given to me. i got bodywork twice a week. i bought a parrafin wax bath for The Finger. i started eating lots of fish oil. i bought a gyroscopic tendon-exerciser.
i added bromalain, alpha lypoic acid and tumeric to my already long list of supplements.
a few days went by that were very sad, then a few days went by that were very good. it was like that for a while.
i sat in the Doctors waiting room, hanging up the phone in shock and not crying until i called up a friend to relate.
funny that thing where it doesn't hit you until you say it out loud to someone else.
looking blearily at yet more piles of Star magazine. still waiting.
i wasn't used to this. such low down YO' MAMA kinda stuff.
of course it hurts.
of course it fucking hurts.
things are changing in your life, i thought, looking out the window and waiting to get the test results. just wait. just breathe. just wait. just breathe. don't let them get you down.
i read a lot of paul auster books. i'm on my 5th. somebody here recommended "eat pray love" and i'm about a third of way through that. it's fucking awesome. thank you.
why did it hurt, actually, when somebody yelled YO' MAMA at you? i remember these moments vividly, darren foswell in the hall after reccess shouting YO' MAMA at me, at my classmates, at mr. heneghan our 4th grade teacher, at whoever passing by might have a mama worth insulting.
this yo' mama-ing was so indiscriminate that it really shouldnt have hurt if it happened to get flung in your direction. but it still always did. this rational "but darren foswell doesn't KNOW my mama..." really didn't help. insult hits you, heart gets hurt. period. what matters is not yo' mama, but the fact that somebody wants to insult yo' mama without even knowing her. or knowing you, for that matter.
mr. heneghan always had a clever retort when darren would pull out the YO' MAMA shit during class. he would stare douglas (who was a general discipline problem to begin with) straight in the eye and say:
"No. Not my mama. Yo' mama. My mama's dead."
anyway.
becca and i went to the kaiser chiefs show at avalon and played soccer with them and the drag queens who were sharing the dressing room for their show at axis.
if indoor soccer with drag queens and the kaiser chiefs can't cheer you up, i don't know WHAT the fuck can.
days go by. i clean my entire apartment and throw out everything. this helps a little.
i throw out pots and pans that have mouse shit in them from 2003. i never cook anyway.
i started considering all the balances in my life. what's worth the suffering, what's not. i wondered if i'd ever play madison square garden. i wondered if my soul would have to die before i get there in some inevitable faustian rock-star ritual. i wondered if tolerating bad relationships, bad air, bad food and bad sleep is worth it, to me or to anyone.
while i was in nashville, i hung out every day at the cafe near the studio and did a morning yoga class. i had two blisters on the tops of my feet. i wasn't quite sure how they got there, maybe from flip-flops, but unless my imagination was playing tricks on my, they were growing.
that's it,
i finally said in defeat one day.
i'm dying.
i took a quick trip to new york and back to commune with the city and to see reggie. robyn hitchcock was playing one night (with the venus 3, ie R.E.M. without micahel stope, and they were AMAZING: www.myspace.com/robynhitchcock) and we went over, brought the fabulous ms. emilyn brodsky. she insisted that we go see the elephants being paraded down 34th street at midnight. apparently this is a NYC tradition, they do this every year when ringling brothers comes to madison square garden. so we booked it from robyn's show. the cab got us as close as we could get to 34th, since the streets were shut down, and emilyn texted furiously with a friend who was sending us updates more or less reading "THEY JUST CROSSED MADISON HURRY THE FUCK UP YOU GONNA MISS IT". we ran, literally at top speed with our bags slamming on our backs, gasping for air....down 34th, three blocks behind the elephants, trying to catch up. reggie gave up the chase and said he'd meet up later. we got the madison square garden thirty seconds after they'd led the elephants inside. i ran smack into a protester holding up a sign that read:
"MOMENTS OF ENTERTAINMENT
A LIFETIME OF MISERY"
got my answer.
and i'm glad i missed the elephants.
Doctor called me in, finally.
she asked me do you mind if the resident interns watch?
i'm thinking why does she have to have two resident interns watching?
this is it, it's over.
she's got them here so they can learn first-hand how to be an empathetic doctor while you break the news to a professional pianist that she has a disfiguring joint disease with no cure.
its ok by me i said.
you're clear, she said, the tests were wrong.
you're fine, she said. you're fine.
i did a little dance for the resident interns.
..................
why am i dressed this way?
9:34 am, i am on the train from boston to nyc
i will spend 3.5 hours in the train, 5.25 hours in the city, then 3.5 hours on the train again.
in those 5.25 hours in new york, i will have four meetings:
manager, film agent, potential new business partner, new publishing administrator.
i decided
it would be wise to dress like a grown-up today.
i Love doing this.
Dress-Stockings-Heels-Gloves-Scarf-Hat shit. in the train station I noticed how NICE everybody was to me.
everybody held the door, everybody smiled.
because I look like a Pretty Lady.
suckers.
while on the train i will write this blog, read over my contracts, talk on the phone and eat a muffin.
i am moving fast again. but it feels fine, mostly fine.
i feel infused with life, yesterday we spent all day working on new songs, eating thai food, looking for elephants and sharing life.
when i got my adult ensemble completed this morning i checked for unnoticed stained, turned to evelyn and asked: "would you take me seriously?"
he looked up from his laptop, pondered and decided yes. we drank our tea, then he dropped me at the train station.
things have been feeling borderline domestic. but the soundtrack to this bliss is a twisted child-porn-circus-soundtrack, so it all seems justifiable.
we have a unfiltered harmony, two minds that run on relatively parallel tracks with interesting enough veers that shit don't get boring. we both need to laugh.
.
and now the weather.
the first breaking news is this:
i'm recording the most beautiful record in the world with ben folds.
we've done very little so far, just broken ground and consumed endless pumpkin loafs and coffees in nashville, but i can finally hear my godamn heart sing. its been stuck, stuck, stuck for a while.
ive been writing new music and it's the best i've ever written, and exhuming the best of the old stuff for posterity.
it's a new experience for me to be in the studio with no pressure and no drama. just make music and make it good. ben plays with me, i listen, he listens, we free-associate in the same sorts of directions.
we've been whittling down a list of over thirty songs & there will be lots of pianos, lots of sounds. ben playing drums and synths and organs. and handclaps. he's good at handclaps. he's a great producer. he loves music. he is a fantastic fucking human being and i feel like the luckiest girl in the world that he found me and wanted to work with me. what the fuck? just take it, amanda.
but i'll back up and tell you the journey of the last six weeks or so.
i feel more alive and vital than i have in years, like i'm breaking out of a hard shell.
working constantly on the music business for the last six years has really sucked my soul out. i'm only seeing it in retrospect. i knew it was happening when it was happening, but i still pressed forward. i sort of had to. and i assumed i would arrive here. and now im here. and i'm sort of stunned.
like: oh. it worked. holy shit.
but
my little swollen finger, my aching joint. a few weeks before leaving on my long journey i finally went to my Real Doctor in desperation and asked what i should do.
none of the acupuncture, massage therapy and eye-of-newt treatments had been working. she examined. arthritis, probably, she said.
she took some standard blood tests.
i went to visit lisa, my step-sister, and the wee bairn growing in her tummy. i went with her to the sonogram and we found out it was a boy.
lisa and todd live in the way out there on a ranch near santa fe. we talked about all sorts of Boy Names. she has five horses. we went riding through the deserty terrain and i fell off.
i loved riding. loved falling off. pony heaven.
i had a dream last night that i was 5 months pregnant and the vividness with which i could feel the baby in my stomach was staggering.
i kept feeling the head right through my skin, a big solid lump.
i decided on an abortion because i had no idea who the father was and that really bothered me.
zach condon, the mastermind of the wonderful band Beirut (www.myspace.com/beruit, yes the mis-spelling is intentional) and his charming girlfriend hosted me for mardi gras in albuquerque.
we listened to his new song, talked about the pitfalls of touring life and then went to play pool with a bunch of his band and friends.
zach and i made a formidable team and kicked some ass. my mother always said that she would teach her two daughters how to do four things: Cook, Sew, Play Pool and Drive Stickshift.
i flew from santa fe to dallas fort worth to wait for my plane to honolulu. this is where i would be shutting my brain down, shutting my phone and computer off and learning how to teach yoga.
i was sitting at the gate, waiting for the plane to board, looking at my phone and wondering if i should symbolically shut it off as i boarded the plane, as i sat in my seat...or wait until the plane was lifting off the ground.
they all had a nice sense of closure. i had made all of my arrangements, set my email to autoreply (talk to you in a month, namaste motherfuckers) and felt fully ready to let go and take care of myself.
then the phone rang.
it was the Real Doctor calling from boston.
something came back wrong from my bloody blood tests.
what does that mean?
you have a high ANA count, sky high.
what does THAT mean?
well, i can email you some information about it, but it doesn't mean anything specifically. it means that you very well may have some kind of auto-immune disorder.
that could mean HIV, but given your condition and the chronic complaints about your joints, it's possibly rheumatoid arthritis, and with these numbers, possibly lupus.
oh goody. tell me more.
we won't know anything until we run a shitload more tests (please note, i;m paraphrasing all of this. the Real Doctor did not say shitload).
should i come home? should i cancel my yoga retreat and fly straight back to boston, get it over with, just insert myself headfirst into the iron lung?
no. just enjoy your vacation and we'll run the tests the minute you get back.
can you tell me anything else? i'm scared and alone.
i'm sorry, amanda.
then i hung up and the flight started boarding.
i shut my phone off.
i found my seat.
i had pictured this moment in advance, lifting off into the happy abyss, leaving my cares behind for a while while i went to commune with nature, my yoga mat and my like-minded hippie freak friends.
there was no irony or bad luck. the fact that i got this phone call five minutes before taking off was perfect. i burst into tears as the plane took off, looking at dallas getting little underneath me, thinking about what my life would be like if i had lupus or terrible arthritis and wondering if i was going to be plagued by this wondering for the next month. i sat and watched my thoughts and thought about all the people i knew who had battled cancer, falls from high-wires and dozens of broken bones, crippling afflictions and comas...by the time we landed in honolulu, i was feeling ready for death and weirdly content.
i kept remembering this story one of my teachers had told in class some time before, and i clung to it:
Although Henri Matisse was nearly 28 years younger than Auguste Renoir, the two artists were dear friends and frequent companions. When Renoir was confined to his home during the last decade of his life, Matisse visited him daily. Renoir, almost paralyzed by arthritis, continued to paint in spite of his infirmities. One day as Matisse watched the elder painter working in his studio, fighting torturous pain with each brush stroke, he blurted out: "Auguste, why do you continue to paint when you are in such agony?"
Renoir answered simply:
"The beauty remains; the pain passes."
And so, almost to his dying day, Renoir put paint to canvas. One of his most famous paintings, The Bathers, was completed just two years before his passing, 14 years after he was stricken by this disabling disease.
i thought a lot about this.
i was astounded. for the next month the wondering didn't plague me as much as i assumed it would. i knew i had no control, no impact on the outcome. well...thats not quite right. i assumed that if i let it go and did my best not to worry that this was my best and only defense against the worst possible news.
some guy i used to be good friends with cut off contact with no explanation a few weeks before i left for the trip and that, strangely, plagued me more than the blood test. i wasn't sure what it all meant, i just held it as a fact of life the way i held this shaky information about my health. in both cases, it was just there. nothing i could do about it except sit, watch, breathe. no asking questions (there would be no response anyway, in either case) no how-can-i-fix-this, which is my usual impulse. no what-the-fuck-did-i-do-to-deserve-this, no WHY-WHY-WHY?WHHHHHHHYYYY?!?!!!??
just: oh well. shit happens. blood tests come back bad. people disappear from your life without telling you why. what can you do about it? nada. health is random; people are unkind. c'est la vie. move on.
at kalani, which was the retreat center on the Big Island that hosted my yoga posse, i found real peace. i got there a few days early and made friends with the staff. i stayed in a wooden dorm-room with a bunch of other folks; i ate beautiful but simple foods, floated around in the water, read books, walked around, drank tea, tried to calm my jumpy mind and fell for a brit from outside cambridge whose favorite band is motörhead.
a few days later, the bootcamp started; barely a free moment in the day. wake up, silent walk, morning meditation, morning yoga, lunch, afternoon teacher training and evaluation, light dinner, evening practice and then night-time grok sessions: basicially led experiments in becoming as honest as possible with yourself and those around you. one night we all stood face-to-face for long stretches of time, not smiling, not talking, just being. one night we paired off and sat down with someone we didn't know well, hit the lights and poured out (in total confidence) our deepest fears, insecurities and regrets. think what you will; it worked. by the end of the week we were a family.
we learned from each other, we were totally honest with each other, we dug deep and respected one another. there were a few moments that grated on my nerves and struck me as crossing the cheese line, but mostly i was in my element. i was so impressed with all of us. though people poured their souls out, their stories and sicknesses and fears and deaths and general human dramas, the whole process was armored against the self-indulgent and self-pitying and geared towards the fuck-it-be-here-now. my body fell into itself, my hips stopped cracking, my left little toe finally detached from it's co-dependent neighbor. all sorts of shit started going down. i became a better yoga teacher.
i kept my bloody test at bay. i tried not to think about lupus too much.
i cant describe the beauty of kalani, or of hawaii, it's just impossible. there was an easiness about every act that dug into me like a stinging reminder of how hard i've made everything. the air was good, the people were good, the food was good, the place just held you...i felt my bad skin dropping off.
i felt like i was leading a double life, communing with my huge yoga family and then stealing moments with my motörhead crush and his friends on the kalani staff. it felt perfectly balanced to do yoga for 4 hours and then sit in a ganja-filled haze of a cabin and listen to everyone rapping local gossip and planning beer runs. my neck was stiff; i was recommended to a chiropractor down the street. i gave him a call on the staff phone. he picked me up the next day after breakfast, in his jaguar, a half-burned marlboro lite hanging out of his mouth.
you amanda?
fuck yeah.
lets go.
he cracked me 13 times and blasted Foreigner from his boom-box.
i became an addict. the next day he picked me up on his suzuki motorcycle. we hit 85 on the one-mile stretch to his house.
i stayed a few extra days in hawaii after the bootcamp ended. some friends and i went for a guided hike across the lava fields that la at the bottom of the active volcano. it rained and rained and we hiked like madpeople over miles of black glassy rock along the ocean. it was primordial. we finally reached a spot where a piece of the ground had collapsed into the flow and we stood around the edge of the hole into the earth. the magma was flowing right beneath us and you couldn't look too long or too hard; if you did your face would burn off. everybody threw something into the magma, which looked like white-golden crackly liquid and obliterated anything it touched on contact. then we hiked back and art-ed out on the way, taking naked photos lying in the lava fields. we came home frozen and soaked to the bone. richard, the wonderful man who started and runs kalani, let me wander into his cabin whenever i wanted to play his electric keyboard. he would arrive at breakfast every morning with flowers for whoever he ran into first. mahalo, richard. you made heaven.
on sunday mornings the enitre community from that corner of the big island, called puna, gathers for Church at kalani.
Church there means everyone gathers in a covered tent for three hours of strict no-talking: just ecsatically dancing and gyrating to a trance/80s/techno DJ with some wack-ass folk music thrown in for good measure.
hundreds of people wigging out in broad smiling daylight....little kids, dogs, old folks, clothing optional, dancing optional. some people just sat around and watched and smiled. freak-on freak-out time. my god.
then david and i went to the black sand beach, where the party continued into the afternoon, then rented a mustard mustang convertible and drove to kona on the other side of the island with the top down.
we stole a mix CD from the kalani kitchen and had no idea what was on it. i heard a song called "i will follow you into the dark" and wondered who it was by. i played it over and over again. we alternated between that and the chemical brothers. no motörhead. i mean, nothing against motörhead. we climbed the car over the volcano on the way back the next day and the temperature dropped forty degrees. we ate lots of fruit. we danced in the car david drove me the the spot of jungle where he lived for a while with a group of renegade anarcho-hippies called Someland (everybody wants Some Land) and the annex they built a few years later in the space adjacent to Someland (Space City). people live off the land here, in shelters they build themselves, generators, scratch. we got the mustang up to 110 on the way back to kalani.
i flew back from hawaii sunburned and completed. cooked to perfection.
and then....things weren't so good.
for starters, i noticed, for the first time in my life, that i was not even looking forward to coming home. my haven.
i went into the rheumotologist and got the tests run. i had to wait two weeks for the results.
i tried to let things go, hour by hour, minute by minute.
i kept my yoga practice solid and got second, third, then fourth opinions about my hand.
i was told i might have to have hand surgery. that bummed me out.
i started having to wonder what i would do about the june tour if i couldn't play.
other things started to ache on me more and more by the day, especially since i was back in the world of mutual acquaintances and all the gossip flying around exhausted me. i found myself so uninterested in it and so sucked in at the same time, the way you feel compelled yet disgusted picking up a Star Magazine at the dentist's office. i went to the dentist's office. i got my teeth cleaned. you've been grinding, they said.
does it hurt?
i laughed.
things started to really come into focus, in a more profound way than usual. between ben and hawaii, i had been spent such good, quality around people who were open and honest in hawaii that i stayed on a roll. my deep friendships got a little deeper. especially in the face of my weird vulnerability about the tests and my swollen hand, the relationships in my life that were real, honest, caring, good all floated to the surface and the bad and uncaring ones seemed to be sinking away. i took better and harder looks at my good friends and our lives together and was touched at how hard we've tried to care for each other over the years. it's kept me, and them, afloat.
i thought about the friend i missed, when i was gone. it's odd but when i count my deep friends and relationships on my fingers....one, two..........three.......there's a new, odd sort of spot for this community of people who read and respond to my blog. its become a different kind of Friend, its hard to define. it's not a person, it's not even a defined group of people. but i know what it feels like and i feel like it knows me.
its like time magazine said, fucking, it's You.
i love You. i love This.
i love cafe coco in nashville.
i took all the advice that was given to me. i got bodywork twice a week. i bought a parrafin wax bath for The Finger. i started eating lots of fish oil. i bought a gyroscopic tendon-exerciser.
i added bromalain, alpha lypoic acid and tumeric to my already long list of supplements.
a few days went by that were very sad, then a few days went by that were very good. it was like that for a while.
i sat in the Doctors waiting room, hanging up the phone in shock and not crying until i called up a friend to relate.
funny that thing where it doesn't hit you until you say it out loud to someone else.
looking blearily at yet more piles of Star magazine. still waiting.
i wasn't used to this. such low down YO' MAMA kinda stuff.
of course it hurts.
of course it fucking hurts.
things are changing in your life, i thought, looking out the window and waiting to get the test results. just wait. just breathe. just wait. just breathe. don't let them get you down.
i read a lot of paul auster books. i'm on my 5th. somebody here recommended "eat pray love" and i'm about a third of way through that. it's fucking awesome. thank you.
why did it hurt, actually, when somebody yelled YO' MAMA at you? i remember these moments vividly, darren foswell in the hall after reccess shouting YO' MAMA at me, at my classmates, at mr. heneghan our 4th grade teacher, at whoever passing by might have a mama worth insulting.
this yo' mama-ing was so indiscriminate that it really shouldnt have hurt if it happened to get flung in your direction. but it still always did. this rational "but darren foswell doesn't KNOW my mama..." really didn't help. insult hits you, heart gets hurt. period. what matters is not yo' mama, but the fact that somebody wants to insult yo' mama without even knowing her. or knowing you, for that matter.
mr. heneghan always had a clever retort when darren would pull out the YO' MAMA shit during class. he would stare douglas (who was a general discipline problem to begin with) straight in the eye and say:
"No. Not my mama. Yo' mama. My mama's dead."
anyway.
becca and i went to the kaiser chiefs show at avalon and played soccer with them and the drag queens who were sharing the dressing room for their show at axis.
if indoor soccer with drag queens and the kaiser chiefs can't cheer you up, i don't know WHAT the fuck can.
days go by. i clean my entire apartment and throw out everything. this helps a little.
i throw out pots and pans that have mouse shit in them from 2003. i never cook anyway.
i started considering all the balances in my life. what's worth the suffering, what's not. i wondered if i'd ever play madison square garden. i wondered if my soul would have to die before i get there in some inevitable faustian rock-star ritual. i wondered if tolerating bad relationships, bad air, bad food and bad sleep is worth it, to me or to anyone.
while i was in nashville, i hung out every day at the cafe near the studio and did a morning yoga class. i had two blisters on the tops of my feet. i wasn't quite sure how they got there, maybe from flip-flops, but unless my imagination was playing tricks on my, they were growing.
that's it,
i finally said in defeat one day.
i'm dying.
i took a quick trip to new york and back to commune with the city and to see reggie. robyn hitchcock was playing one night (with the venus 3, ie R.E.M. without micahel stope, and they were AMAZING: www.myspace.com/robynhitchcock) and we went over, brought the fabulous ms. emilyn brodsky. she insisted that we go see the elephants being paraded down 34th street at midnight. apparently this is a NYC tradition, they do this every year when ringling brothers comes to madison square garden. so we booked it from robyn's show. the cab got us as close as we could get to 34th, since the streets were shut down, and emilyn texted furiously with a friend who was sending us updates more or less reading "THEY JUST CROSSED MADISON HURRY THE FUCK UP YOU GONNA MISS IT". we ran, literally at top speed with our bags slamming on our backs, gasping for air....down 34th, three blocks behind the elephants, trying to catch up. reggie gave up the chase and said he'd meet up later. we got the madison square garden thirty seconds after they'd led the elephants inside. i ran smack into a protester holding up a sign that read:
"MOMENTS OF ENTERTAINMENT
A LIFETIME OF MISERY"
got my answer.
and i'm glad i missed the elephants.
Doctor called me in, finally.
she asked me do you mind if the resident interns watch?
i'm thinking why does she have to have two resident interns watching?
this is it, it's over.
she's got them here so they can learn first-hand how to be an empathetic doctor while you break the news to a professional pianist that she has a disfiguring joint disease with no cure.
its ok by me i said.
you're clear, she said, the tests were wrong.
you're fine, she said. you're fine.
i did a little dance for the resident interns.
..................
Sunday, February 18, 2007
audi 5.O
(...cue sad, funerary-like violin music, dubbed over with charging horses and bugle...)
in the words of john wayne: i am blowing this popsicle stand.
i have gathered myself up and am heading off into the great unknown and am (gaa) completely unplugging from the interweb and telephone for several weeks.
my email is set to autoreply.
with the exception of a few retreats (never more than a week) to meditate in the woods in western mass, i have never deliberately decided to switch off like this.
i feel like it's an imperative. i really don't like the part of myself that reaches for the phone or the email the minute i have a blank space in my life.
it frightens me. we're all becoming like this.
it's amazing to be connected but there needs to be enough real life occurring so that the connections are not empty.
faster speeds, more friends, bigger webs of contact, finding old contacts, blogging...all doesn't mean shit if the underlying content isn't worth sharing or reflecting on.
we are all, i think, faced with so many choices and so much temptation to plug in, post, respond, search, find, share further, etc. that we are also forced to engage in a constant struggle between self and self-sharing and reflection. you're looking at one of the guiltiest parties. too many times i catch myself living as my own archivist. that, i think, i the main reason i have to unplug for a while.
of course i won't be able to stop collecting experiences, lyrics, mental photos, whatever, in my vast mental shoe box marked "to synthesize"...but at least i'll be forcing myself to synthesize within the hour or the day.
i was on the phone with edward form the pink dots as i was packing this morning. he too says he gets sucked in to the internet addiction, checking email every few minutes, unable to unplug.
he goes to his girlfriends in finland to get away and write, clear head, where there is no internet and he's forced to re-concentrate. we find ways....if we don't have the discipline at home, we leave. i'm leaving.
the retreat im doing is an intensive yoga teacher training camp, no leisure time. wake up at 6 am, meditation and yoga all day, crash to bed in dorm rooms, wake up, repeat.
no caffeine, no dairy, all vegetarian, certainly no drinking and smoking...full-on detox, major self-inspection and physical tuning. godspeed me.
oh
before i forget, there're another place i want to point you guys....several people commented in delight about the "funerary violin" music rotating in my disc-changer.
this is the result of a recent correspondence i have taken up with a highly esteemed and talented Rohan K, who penned the recently hailed book:
"An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin". i suggest reading it, it's full of mystery, sadness and wisdom (and scores for you violinists).
there are clips from historic funerary violin scores up at myspace.com/guildoffuneraryviolinists
in addition, Mr. K fronts his own piano-centric tom-waits-y band, which is beautiful and can be found here: myspace.com/therohantheatreband
more oh
those of you wondering about the title of the last blog (and why there wasn't more fucking and fighting detailed)
the reference was to sxip shirey's song in which he sings (through a megaphone, no less):
"i live in new york city
i live in new york city
i live in new york city
i fuck, i fight in new york city."
songs the SHIT. i hear tell that both brian and reggie were invited to record on sxips album so keep the eye out.
there's a clip of him playing this song at the show we all played at joe pub the other night with reggie watts beatboxing to back him up...
....you can't hear the lyrics in the clip but its STILL the shit: youtube.com/watch?v=rQWR219kbdQ
as far as the gory-detailed chronicling of my fucking and fighting, it will have to wait until my golden-years autobiography, when all the complicit parties are either dead or senile.
i'm writing this on the plane to santa fe, where i'm going to visit my step-sister lisa for a few days before i hit it.
she's almost four months pregnant and this will be the first baby in my immediate family. i cant wait to rub her belly. i'm psyched: auntie manda.
i will bestow on this child his or her first beatles record unless somebody else beats me to it.
shaving your head bald (a la britney) seems to be the last resort when you have no control over your life and need to re-self-define. i did it when i was 21 and freaking out in college. brian did it when we were recording the first record. bob geldof/pink did it in The Wall. it's natural. i personally thinks she looks hot. i'd hit it.
this is the first time in years that i am on a plane heading towards myself.
packing was fucking confusing.
i am so used to packing for tour on autopilot that i had forgotten how to pack for "vacation".
about a year r two ago i stopped packing and unpacking certain things and just left my bags packed when i got home.
road clothes, road bathroom shit, show bag would all just sit in my bedroom until the next flight or tour, which was never far off.
it felt wrong to be hitting the road without an extra roll of black gaffer tape. i relented; i left it at home.
after the retreat i'm heading straight do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-fucking-shit into the studio to start tinkering with the solo record.
i want to step off the plane and immediately hit the piano before my brain has a chance to start gathering junk and static.
i've got folders of lyrics and lists of songs ready to go....and a soul ready to explode, so i can't imagine the pre-production won't go well.
i'm going to stay relatively unplugged in the studio, just to give my brain and fingers a rest.
by the time thats done it'll be mid-march and i'll head back to boston and NYC for re-plugging, talking, emailing, dancing and wine-drinking. wine rocks.
i love planes in general but i especially love planes when there's a 6 year-old sitting behind me who just doesnt get over the fact that we're in the air and keeps giving a running commentary on how awesome everything looks outside the window. america's covered in snow. the Great Lake is covered with patterns of floating ice shifting like membranes over the waves. sun is so low that the buildings on the shore are casting solid shapes on the surface, which is a dark jade color, which makes the whole view look like a deco painting. the kids mom is explaining the ice. i just dropped into my lap an article on barack obama and i felt that surging zeitgeist-feeling of hope for this sad country. right now, things don't look bad from up here.
i also read through the last five months of fan mail while i was at home this week. and everything that came with it, the books, the zines, the discs, the poems, the pain, the love, all the deep connection. i wish i could express to you how insanely fucking lucky i feel, but its impossible. it's impossible but maybe it's not necessary, because you guys already Get It.
read yall on the flipside, motherfuckers.
love
a
.
in the words of john wayne: i am blowing this popsicle stand.
i have gathered myself up and am heading off into the great unknown and am (gaa) completely unplugging from the interweb and telephone for several weeks.
my email is set to autoreply.
with the exception of a few retreats (never more than a week) to meditate in the woods in western mass, i have never deliberately decided to switch off like this.
i feel like it's an imperative. i really don't like the part of myself that reaches for the phone or the email the minute i have a blank space in my life.
it frightens me. we're all becoming like this.
it's amazing to be connected but there needs to be enough real life occurring so that the connections are not empty.
faster speeds, more friends, bigger webs of contact, finding old contacts, blogging...all doesn't mean shit if the underlying content isn't worth sharing or reflecting on.
we are all, i think, faced with so many choices and so much temptation to plug in, post, respond, search, find, share further, etc. that we are also forced to engage in a constant struggle between self and self-sharing and reflection. you're looking at one of the guiltiest parties. too many times i catch myself living as my own archivist. that, i think, i the main reason i have to unplug for a while.
of course i won't be able to stop collecting experiences, lyrics, mental photos, whatever, in my vast mental shoe box marked "to synthesize"...but at least i'll be forcing myself to synthesize within the hour or the day.
i was on the phone with edward form the pink dots as i was packing this morning. he too says he gets sucked in to the internet addiction, checking email every few minutes, unable to unplug.
he goes to his girlfriends in finland to get away and write, clear head, where there is no internet and he's forced to re-concentrate. we find ways....if we don't have the discipline at home, we leave. i'm leaving.
the retreat im doing is an intensive yoga teacher training camp, no leisure time. wake up at 6 am, meditation and yoga all day, crash to bed in dorm rooms, wake up, repeat.
no caffeine, no dairy, all vegetarian, certainly no drinking and smoking...full-on detox, major self-inspection and physical tuning. godspeed me.
oh
before i forget, there're another place i want to point you guys....several people commented in delight about the "funerary violin" music rotating in my disc-changer.
this is the result of a recent correspondence i have taken up with a highly esteemed and talented Rohan K, who penned the recently hailed book:
"An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin". i suggest reading it, it's full of mystery, sadness and wisdom (and scores for you violinists).
there are clips from historic funerary violin scores up at myspace.com/guildoffuneraryviolinists
in addition, Mr. K fronts his own piano-centric tom-waits-y band, which is beautiful and can be found here: myspace.com/therohantheatreband
more oh
those of you wondering about the title of the last blog (and why there wasn't more fucking and fighting detailed)
the reference was to sxip shirey's song in which he sings (through a megaphone, no less):
"i live in new york city
i live in new york city
i live in new york city
i fuck, i fight in new york city."
songs the SHIT. i hear tell that both brian and reggie were invited to record on sxips album so keep the eye out.
there's a clip of him playing this song at the show we all played at joe pub the other night with reggie watts beatboxing to back him up...
....you can't hear the lyrics in the clip but its STILL the shit: youtube.com/watch?v=rQWR219kbdQ
as far as the gory-detailed chronicling of my fucking and fighting, it will have to wait until my golden-years autobiography, when all the complicit parties are either dead or senile.
i'm writing this on the plane to santa fe, where i'm going to visit my step-sister lisa for a few days before i hit it.
she's almost four months pregnant and this will be the first baby in my immediate family. i cant wait to rub her belly. i'm psyched: auntie manda.
i will bestow on this child his or her first beatles record unless somebody else beats me to it.
shaving your head bald (a la britney) seems to be the last resort when you have no control over your life and need to re-self-define. i did it when i was 21 and freaking out in college. brian did it when we were recording the first record. bob geldof/pink did it in The Wall. it's natural. i personally thinks she looks hot. i'd hit it.
this is the first time in years that i am on a plane heading towards myself.
packing was fucking confusing.
i am so used to packing for tour on autopilot that i had forgotten how to pack for "vacation".
about a year r two ago i stopped packing and unpacking certain things and just left my bags packed when i got home.
road clothes, road bathroom shit, show bag would all just sit in my bedroom until the next flight or tour, which was never far off.
it felt wrong to be hitting the road without an extra roll of black gaffer tape. i relented; i left it at home.
after the retreat i'm heading straight do-not-pass-go-do-not-collect-fucking-shit into the studio to start tinkering with the solo record.
i want to step off the plane and immediately hit the piano before my brain has a chance to start gathering junk and static.
i've got folders of lyrics and lists of songs ready to go....and a soul ready to explode, so i can't imagine the pre-production won't go well.
i'm going to stay relatively unplugged in the studio, just to give my brain and fingers a rest.
by the time thats done it'll be mid-march and i'll head back to boston and NYC for re-plugging, talking, emailing, dancing and wine-drinking. wine rocks.
i love planes in general but i especially love planes when there's a 6 year-old sitting behind me who just doesnt get over the fact that we're in the air and keeps giving a running commentary on how awesome everything looks outside the window. america's covered in snow. the Great Lake is covered with patterns of floating ice shifting like membranes over the waves. sun is so low that the buildings on the shore are casting solid shapes on the surface, which is a dark jade color, which makes the whole view look like a deco painting. the kids mom is explaining the ice. i just dropped into my lap an article on barack obama and i felt that surging zeitgeist-feeling of hope for this sad country. right now, things don't look bad from up here.
i also read through the last five months of fan mail while i was at home this week. and everything that came with it, the books, the zines, the discs, the poems, the pain, the love, all the deep connection. i wish i could express to you how insanely fucking lucky i feel, but its impossible. it's impossible but maybe it's not necessary, because you guys already Get It.
read yall on the flipside, motherfuckers.
love
a
.
Friday, February 16, 2007
i fuck i fight in new york city
i'm back from NYC.
max has been sketching and painting ryan rosses all over the cloud club and "frying bread", which i guess is what people do in england when they're hungry.
max is staying here because life in england became too much to tolerate. i see him downstairs in the front room day and night, wrapped in his overcoat because he refuses to turn on the heat, squinting and crunched over ryan ross after ryan ross, clutching his pencil with furrowed brow, as if the world would finally decide to be kind to all of us if he could only capture that las vegas pout in perfect graphite two-dimensional likeness. he'd been sleeping in my bed while i was in New York City and there were still panic! at the disco centerfolds from kerrang! magazine scotch-taped to the headboard. his favorite bands: tom waits, nick cave, panic! at the disco. i forgive him. i have avril. the ryan ross he was working on in the UK before coming here got his nose smudged with jam. the one he was just working on got his nose smudged with red pen. we think it's a sign. we don't know what kind. maybe watch ryan ross's nose for signs of "work". ryan ross is the guitar player. they've become gigantic. i wonder how he's doing.
i noticed how the majority of comments come in immediately after i post the blog.
50% of them come in within the first 12 hours. thus: you are all LIVING online. crazy. but here we are.
new york new york...playing with sxip, corn mo, reggie & co. at joe's pub was like taking a bubble bath of the soul. Church.
the new songs went over really well and i felt so much love in that room. playing, playing, playing. we all sang a song together at the end of the night....a song by baby dee.
conrad from ...trail of dead is now a full-fledged brooklynite and we spent good times together, drinking gimme coffee and planning art takeovers. his visual art is amazing. he's been obsessed with poser, a computer program that creates 3D graphics....he told me many details of Tchaikovsky's life and death. he was apparently forced to commit hemlock suicide a group of his peers due to the fact that he was gay. this wasn't revealed until after the fall of the soviet union.
i recorded some vocals with voltaire, whose tongue-in-cheek goth-folk i have always thought was hilarious. i remember seeing him in boston 5 or 6 years ago, singing "bomb new jersey" at the somerville theater.
we wandered around the village with his 9 yer old son son, mars. i was always in awe of kids who had grown up in the city, especially manhattan. living in a house in the suburbs, i thought it was just inconceivable that you could LIVE in an apartment. i was insanely jealous. we used to drive from boston into cambridge and right off the highway at fresh pond there were three hi-rise buildings. i would state to my parents (this is...age 5) "that is where i am going to live. in the city. on the fifth floor from the top". little did i know, this was NOT the city. this was east cambridge, there happened to be three tall buildings, and they happened to be housing projects. my mother was always dismayed. i stood my ground for years. we would drive by and i would point there and remind her that we were passing my future home. in the projects, fifth floor from the top. it seemed like paradise at the time. walking with mars and his dad through the east village to do mundane things like pick up laundry and groceries was one of my most pleasant experiences.
to whoever picked up on this from the last blog entry:
"....to drive feels like a black mark that land on my head like a 276 pound guilty weight..."
and assumed they were cracking the code on the sing "672"....that was actually a complete coincidence. as was the fact that two pots of tea at cafe pamplona come to total exactly $6.72. two people came up to me wildly excited to have found out my secret. WRONG!
at union pool, watching franz's otherOTHER band, guignol, sxip tells me the story of how his theater director friend had found that one of his young actresses couldn't make a facial expression of surprise.
he concluded that they had entered a world of :) and :( and >:( instead of facial expressions, since teens are rushing home to communicate with each other online and their faces have fallen out of use.
i remember sitting behind my apple IIe in 1993, logged onto the precursor of the internet....it was a strange modem-connected chat board called Argus. i found an indian friend there and i remember asking him why he kept typing ":)" and he answered "put your head sideways and look again" and i still didn't get it. i was slow then, im still slow now.
i went with barnaby and his boyfriend to the Museum of Modern Art party....catpower was playing and it was one of those mexican standoffs between the super indie hardcore fanbase (there for the music, which was insanely quiet with terrible sightlines) and the rest of the crowd (cocktail swizzlin who the fuck is catpower anyway what were you saying types). she sounded ok but left the stage, seeming pissed, after a few songs. then she came back on and sang random a capella nonsense for a while. watching someone else's random trainwreck from the side of stage is always a weird cross between terrible and satisfying, since you're not the one suffering.
we headed out to an uber-gay dance night at don hills complete with nekkid boy pole dancers and i was in heaven, but tired. i left to sleep but got sidetracked by emily text-inviting me to a private karaoke room with the cribs and franz ferdinand. i was starting to feel like paris hilton. i went and it was hilarious (note to self: "fascination street" is the WORST karaoke song EVER).
the next few days saw me all over town and in all sorts of weird-ass places....i saw many many shows, among them: the new broadway hit spring awakening (great play, music didn't cut it), david byrne playing the music from his imelda marcos musical (sort of boring without staging, but david byrne was a gift to watch in himself), little buildings (a musical sung by architects and buildings, it was insanely cute) and point break live! (this one was SICK: a low-budget staged re-make of the early 90's keanu reeves/patrick swayze film. each night an audience member is selected to play keanu reeves and a chick with gym shorts and knee pads supportively follows him around squealing things like "now look really UPSET and say THIS!!!" while thrusting a cue card in his face....and given the fact that keanu basically always looked stunned and dumb in the film, it worked brilliantly. i hadn't ever seen point break and this stranger next to me had a video iPod. he had downloaded the movie that morning, and the show wasnt starting for fifteen minutes, so he gave me his headphones and i watched the entire thing on fast forward, stopping at the crucial bits. its the FUCKING FUTURE. i was there with dave bason who had along a band called motion city soundtrack. i had never heard of them, but the justin the singer got chosen to be the night's keanu and was perfect. then we ate foods and talked about band things. they were incredibly nice and smart. later i looked them up on the internet. they're huge! they're emo! who knew....this parentheses has gone on a long time.)
i went to aaron's house in yonkers and there was a den of rabbits taking up an entire room on the top floor. we listened to ESG and drew on the table,i went to my manager's new apartment and watched his 11-month old take a bath, i went to a birthday party (thrown by an ex-jehovah's witness turning 29. apparently when you're a jehovah's witness you can't celebrate your birthday so she was re-making her 13th birthday party....) with reggie and the whole party did foot reflexology, danced slow dances while people measured our bodily distance with rulers, and danced like mad to olivia newton-john. we all ended up in our underwear and reggie and i didn't leave until 5:30. this was a sunday. this is why i love new york. the cafe near reggie's place in the village is owned and run by a french woman and we got to know each other after i started setting up my office and cranking on my computer there several mornings in a row. i would speak to her in my terrible french, which i am trying to get up to speed for my month there in may. may. may oui.
jac took me to union picnic and we ate like kings. voltaire took me to indochine and we ate like queens. i took myself to cafe gitane (my new york Again cafe) three times. emily took me to her yoga studio in williamsburg and i ended up there another four times. it was perfect.
steve paul, a stunning human being and holdover from the old warhol/factory crowd invited me over to his place to do imromptu keyboard with a puppet named edgar. the huge chairman mao warhol print int he bathroom made me want to die. i ended up playing covers of "satisfaction" and "femme fatale" (the the puppet singing back-up on both).
i found an acupuncturist and went in twice for the hand. its doing better (i also got it shot full of cortizone yesterday by a western doctor. stick WHATEVER you need in there, people.).
people keep asking, so i answer: i read all the comments. ALL the comments. until i post a new blog; once a new one is posted, i rarely go back and read the comments on the previous posts. and to the soul who posted:
"kreig said...
okay if you're really amanda from the dresden dolls, why dont you talk about brian at all?
2:17 PM"
FUCK you've found me out. why has it taken you people so long?
the REAL amanda would obviously be detailing all sorts of painful personal stories of her relationship with brian, cementing the foundations of their already rock-solid friendship even further and insuring a healthy future for their relationship!!
it's one of the hardest things in my life to not write about that shit. don't rub it in.
one night reggie had some friends with tickets to see girltalk, a mashup DJ i had barely heard of. the show was at some random club in brooklyn....we went to his friend's place on the way and picked up beer and sushi. his friends were wonderful williamsburg brainiancs who created www.vimeo.com, a youtube challenger that folks are starting to catch onto. we had a good long talk about the extent of reality in virtual reality. we concluded: if you can't get her pregnant, it's not the same.
there was a girlgroup of four or five in attendance, twenties and super-brooklyn-hipster....the headbands, the striped hoodies, the dark skin-tight jeans stuffed into white pointy boots, the mullets. i was oddly intimidated. if they had ever heard of The Dresden Dolls, chances were they hated the band. even though these girls were ten years younger than me, i felt like i was back in the 7th grade lunchroom, desperately hoping to appear cool. i was, of course, decked out in one large (unwashed, i'd only planned to be in new york for 3 days and i ended up staying 13) swarm of gray sweater and my army boots. my winter couture hasn't changed in 12 years. reggie assured me i was pretty. yet these girls were only a taste of what was to come at the girltalk show, which was like the belly of the beast of hipsterdom. galore: slanted haircuts!!! pointy shoes!!! so many ironic outfits!!! i was enthralled.
and oh ........did the people dance..... they danceddance DANCED and danced (heres a clip from the show:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHGyKhWWDA0) ....we got up front and crushed and shook ourselves to death. i almost lost my beer. the mashups were great, all 80s and 90s pop and hip-hop glory as squished together as our bodies.... people throbbed, the crowd took over the stage and it was quite a sight to behold.
we didn't stay out late enough to see how it ended. but reggie did get a picture of me flailing in the moshing hipster mob of glory:
next thing you know i will move to brooklyn, get a slanty mullet haircut, wear pumps and start adding "beats" to my music.
on that note, things with the solo record are taking beautiful shape. i've been scouring through the collection of songs.
i've been enjoying living too much to write very much, and i DONT CARE. doth i protesteth....? i dunno; im trying not to care.
the last gasp in NYC was playing at Rubulad, a loft party in brooklyn that was so jam-packed with people that the fuzz shut it down about a half hour after i played. it was so crammed you couldn't move from one side of the room to the other. i wasn't supposed to play but i'd run into one of the rubulad guys (named, by the way, for theri old telephone number) the night before and taken up the invite. aaron's band golem (whose record i sang on about a year ago) were playing in a different room and it promised to be an insane night. the piano was wildly out of tune and i banged out night reconnaissance, point of it all and guitar hero...was going to bow out but took a request for bad habit. it was fun and humbling to play again in front of a group of people who were all talking and partying, some listening, some not....no special treatment. i had to convince them to listen. this is also why i love new york.
the very night i got back to boston i headed with max straight out to the world inferno show....where i continued to dance ass off and join in the crowd kick-line during their splendid hit "only anarchists are pretty". since then i've been in hiding, sorting through piles of life, music and fanmail and editing the london roundhouse DVD (which looks AMAAAZING and will be released this june when we tour, if all goes well).
contents of refrigerator and pantry combined: one half avacado, one bottle salad dressing, one odwalla juice.
contents of house: shifting; lee in montreal, pope downstairs, max in lee's apartment, troy and vessela from fluttr effect/pan9 housed next door for now
contents of sink: full of mugs
contents of CD player: rohan theater band and various funerary violin CDs
contents of email inbox: extremely daunting. will not be getting back to anyone in the next four weeks
contents of head: weary but happy
love
a
oh
more links:
ruff cut of the song i recorded with voltaire (studio photos too): myspace.com/voltairenyc
conrad: myspace.com/trailofdead
reggie: myspace.com/reggiewatts
aaron: myspace.com/lycaonpictus
world/inferno friendship society: myspace.com/worldinferno
funerary violin: myspace.com/guildoffuneraryviolinists
point break live! (if you're in NYC you MUST see this - closes feb 24):
www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/128881
................................................................................
................................................................................
www.myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer
max has been sketching and painting ryan rosses all over the cloud club and "frying bread", which i guess is what people do in england when they're hungry.
max is staying here because life in england became too much to tolerate. i see him downstairs in the front room day and night, wrapped in his overcoat because he refuses to turn on the heat, squinting and crunched over ryan ross after ryan ross, clutching his pencil with furrowed brow, as if the world would finally decide to be kind to all of us if he could only capture that las vegas pout in perfect graphite two-dimensional likeness. he'd been sleeping in my bed while i was in New York City and there were still panic! at the disco centerfolds from kerrang! magazine scotch-taped to the headboard. his favorite bands: tom waits, nick cave, panic! at the disco. i forgive him. i have avril. the ryan ross he was working on in the UK before coming here got his nose smudged with jam. the one he was just working on got his nose smudged with red pen. we think it's a sign. we don't know what kind. maybe watch ryan ross's nose for signs of "work". ryan ross is the guitar player. they've become gigantic. i wonder how he's doing.
i noticed how the majority of comments come in immediately after i post the blog.
50% of them come in within the first 12 hours. thus: you are all LIVING online. crazy. but here we are.
new york new york...playing with sxip, corn mo, reggie & co. at joe's pub was like taking a bubble bath of the soul. Church.
the new songs went over really well and i felt so much love in that room. playing, playing, playing. we all sang a song together at the end of the night....a song by baby dee.
conrad from ...trail of dead is now a full-fledged brooklynite and we spent good times together, drinking gimme coffee and planning art takeovers. his visual art is amazing. he's been obsessed with poser, a computer program that creates 3D graphics....he told me many details of Tchaikovsky's life and death. he was apparently forced to commit hemlock suicide a group of his peers due to the fact that he was gay. this wasn't revealed until after the fall of the soviet union.
i recorded some vocals with voltaire, whose tongue-in-cheek goth-folk i have always thought was hilarious. i remember seeing him in boston 5 or 6 years ago, singing "bomb new jersey" at the somerville theater.
we wandered around the village with his 9 yer old son son, mars. i was always in awe of kids who had grown up in the city, especially manhattan. living in a house in the suburbs, i thought it was just inconceivable that you could LIVE in an apartment. i was insanely jealous. we used to drive from boston into cambridge and right off the highway at fresh pond there were three hi-rise buildings. i would state to my parents (this is...age 5) "that is where i am going to live. in the city. on the fifth floor from the top". little did i know, this was NOT the city. this was east cambridge, there happened to be three tall buildings, and they happened to be housing projects. my mother was always dismayed. i stood my ground for years. we would drive by and i would point there and remind her that we were passing my future home. in the projects, fifth floor from the top. it seemed like paradise at the time. walking with mars and his dad through the east village to do mundane things like pick up laundry and groceries was one of my most pleasant experiences.
to whoever picked up on this from the last blog entry:
"....to drive feels like a black mark that land on my head like a 276 pound guilty weight..."
and assumed they were cracking the code on the sing "672"....that was actually a complete coincidence. as was the fact that two pots of tea at cafe pamplona come to total exactly $6.72. two people came up to me wildly excited to have found out my secret. WRONG!
at union pool, watching franz's otherOTHER band, guignol, sxip tells me the story of how his theater director friend had found that one of his young actresses couldn't make a facial expression of surprise.
he concluded that they had entered a world of :) and :( and >:( instead of facial expressions, since teens are rushing home to communicate with each other online and their faces have fallen out of use.
i remember sitting behind my apple IIe in 1993, logged onto the precursor of the internet....it was a strange modem-connected chat board called Argus. i found an indian friend there and i remember asking him why he kept typing ":)" and he answered "put your head sideways and look again" and i still didn't get it. i was slow then, im still slow now.
i went with barnaby and his boyfriend to the Museum of Modern Art party....catpower was playing and it was one of those mexican standoffs between the super indie hardcore fanbase (there for the music, which was insanely quiet with terrible sightlines) and the rest of the crowd (cocktail swizzlin who the fuck is catpower anyway what were you saying types). she sounded ok but left the stage, seeming pissed, after a few songs. then she came back on and sang random a capella nonsense for a while. watching someone else's random trainwreck from the side of stage is always a weird cross between terrible and satisfying, since you're not the one suffering.
we headed out to an uber-gay dance night at don hills complete with nekkid boy pole dancers and i was in heaven, but tired. i left to sleep but got sidetracked by emily text-inviting me to a private karaoke room with the cribs and franz ferdinand. i was starting to feel like paris hilton. i went and it was hilarious (note to self: "fascination street" is the WORST karaoke song EVER).
the next few days saw me all over town and in all sorts of weird-ass places....i saw many many shows, among them: the new broadway hit spring awakening (great play, music didn't cut it), david byrne playing the music from his imelda marcos musical (sort of boring without staging, but david byrne was a gift to watch in himself), little buildings (a musical sung by architects and buildings, it was insanely cute) and point break live! (this one was SICK: a low-budget staged re-make of the early 90's keanu reeves/patrick swayze film. each night an audience member is selected to play keanu reeves and a chick with gym shorts and knee pads supportively follows him around squealing things like "now look really UPSET and say THIS!!!" while thrusting a cue card in his face....and given the fact that keanu basically always looked stunned and dumb in the film, it worked brilliantly. i hadn't ever seen point break and this stranger next to me had a video iPod. he had downloaded the movie that morning, and the show wasnt starting for fifteen minutes, so he gave me his headphones and i watched the entire thing on fast forward, stopping at the crucial bits. its the FUCKING FUTURE. i was there with dave bason who had along a band called motion city soundtrack. i had never heard of them, but the justin the singer got chosen to be the night's keanu and was perfect. then we ate foods and talked about band things. they were incredibly nice and smart. later i looked them up on the internet. they're huge! they're emo! who knew....this parentheses has gone on a long time.)
i went to aaron's house in yonkers and there was a den of rabbits taking up an entire room on the top floor. we listened to ESG and drew on the table,i went to my manager's new apartment and watched his 11-month old take a bath, i went to a birthday party (thrown by an ex-jehovah's witness turning 29. apparently when you're a jehovah's witness you can't celebrate your birthday so she was re-making her 13th birthday party....) with reggie and the whole party did foot reflexology, danced slow dances while people measured our bodily distance with rulers, and danced like mad to olivia newton-john. we all ended up in our underwear and reggie and i didn't leave until 5:30. this was a sunday. this is why i love new york. the cafe near reggie's place in the village is owned and run by a french woman and we got to know each other after i started setting up my office and cranking on my computer there several mornings in a row. i would speak to her in my terrible french, which i am trying to get up to speed for my month there in may. may. may oui.
jac took me to union picnic and we ate like kings. voltaire took me to indochine and we ate like queens. i took myself to cafe gitane (my new york Again cafe) three times. emily took me to her yoga studio in williamsburg and i ended up there another four times. it was perfect.
steve paul, a stunning human being and holdover from the old warhol/factory crowd invited me over to his place to do imromptu keyboard with a puppet named edgar. the huge chairman mao warhol print int he bathroom made me want to die. i ended up playing covers of "satisfaction" and "femme fatale" (the the puppet singing back-up on both).
i found an acupuncturist and went in twice for the hand. its doing better (i also got it shot full of cortizone yesterday by a western doctor. stick WHATEVER you need in there, people.).
people keep asking, so i answer: i read all the comments. ALL the comments. until i post a new blog; once a new one is posted, i rarely go back and read the comments on the previous posts. and to the soul who posted:
"kreig said...
okay if you're really amanda from the dresden dolls, why dont you talk about brian at all?
2:17 PM"
FUCK you've found me out. why has it taken you people so long?
the REAL amanda would obviously be detailing all sorts of painful personal stories of her relationship with brian, cementing the foundations of their already rock-solid friendship even further and insuring a healthy future for their relationship!!
it's one of the hardest things in my life to not write about that shit. don't rub it in.
one night reggie had some friends with tickets to see girltalk, a mashup DJ i had barely heard of. the show was at some random club in brooklyn....we went to his friend's place on the way and picked up beer and sushi. his friends were wonderful williamsburg brainiancs who created www.vimeo.com, a youtube challenger that folks are starting to catch onto. we had a good long talk about the extent of reality in virtual reality. we concluded: if you can't get her pregnant, it's not the same.
there was a girlgroup of four or five in attendance, twenties and super-brooklyn-hipster....the headbands, the striped hoodies, the dark skin-tight jeans stuffed into white pointy boots, the mullets. i was oddly intimidated. if they had ever heard of The Dresden Dolls, chances were they hated the band. even though these girls were ten years younger than me, i felt like i was back in the 7th grade lunchroom, desperately hoping to appear cool. i was, of course, decked out in one large (unwashed, i'd only planned to be in new york for 3 days and i ended up staying 13) swarm of gray sweater and my army boots. my winter couture hasn't changed in 12 years. reggie assured me i was pretty. yet these girls were only a taste of what was to come at the girltalk show, which was like the belly of the beast of hipsterdom. galore: slanted haircuts!!! pointy shoes!!! so many ironic outfits!!! i was enthralled.
and oh ........did the people dance..... they danceddance DANCED and danced (heres a clip from the show:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHGyKhWWDA0) ....we got up front and crushed and shook ourselves to death. i almost lost my beer. the mashups were great, all 80s and 90s pop and hip-hop glory as squished together as our bodies.... people throbbed, the crowd took over the stage and it was quite a sight to behold.
we didn't stay out late enough to see how it ended. but reggie did get a picture of me flailing in the moshing hipster mob of glory:
next thing you know i will move to brooklyn, get a slanty mullet haircut, wear pumps and start adding "beats" to my music.
on that note, things with the solo record are taking beautiful shape. i've been scouring through the collection of songs.
i've been enjoying living too much to write very much, and i DONT CARE. doth i protesteth....? i dunno; im trying not to care.
the last gasp in NYC was playing at Rubulad, a loft party in brooklyn that was so jam-packed with people that the fuzz shut it down about a half hour after i played. it was so crammed you couldn't move from one side of the room to the other. i wasn't supposed to play but i'd run into one of the rubulad guys (named, by the way, for theri old telephone number) the night before and taken up the invite. aaron's band golem (whose record i sang on about a year ago) were playing in a different room and it promised to be an insane night. the piano was wildly out of tune and i banged out night reconnaissance, point of it all and guitar hero...was going to bow out but took a request for bad habit. it was fun and humbling to play again in front of a group of people who were all talking and partying, some listening, some not....no special treatment. i had to convince them to listen. this is also why i love new york.
the very night i got back to boston i headed with max straight out to the world inferno show....where i continued to dance ass off and join in the crowd kick-line during their splendid hit "only anarchists are pretty". since then i've been in hiding, sorting through piles of life, music and fanmail and editing the london roundhouse DVD (which looks AMAAAZING and will be released this june when we tour, if all goes well).
contents of refrigerator and pantry combined: one half avacado, one bottle salad dressing, one odwalla juice.
contents of house: shifting; lee in montreal, pope downstairs, max in lee's apartment, troy and vessela from fluttr effect/pan9 housed next door for now
contents of sink: full of mugs
contents of CD player: rohan theater band and various funerary violin CDs
contents of email inbox: extremely daunting. will not be getting back to anyone in the next four weeks
contents of head: weary but happy
love
a
oh
more links:
ruff cut of the song i recorded with voltaire (studio photos too): myspace.com/voltairenyc
conrad: myspace.com/trailofdead
reggie: myspace.com/reggiewatts
aaron: myspace.com/lycaonpictus
world/inferno friendship society: myspace.com/worldinferno
funerary violin: myspace.com/guildoffuneraryviolinists
point break live! (if you're in NYC you MUST see this - closes feb 24):
www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/show/128881
................................................................................
................................................................................
www.myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
respoooosiobiloioto
.
this is what i started the other night, it was thursday i think:
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as i sat down to write this new blog, i broke another wine glass.
this time it didn't slice my finger off but rather collided face-on with my laptop.
how did this happen, you ask? well, i was sort of holding both, idiotically, in order to ... now i can't even remember what. i wasnt even drinking....the wine glass was left-over from the night before....i was tossing the dregs of it in the sink, and the computer? i think i was moving from one place to another. the screen sustained minor injuries and my floor probably has some hints of shrapnel embedded amongst its inhabitants (note to self: don't walk around barefoot until you vacuum....or better: just dont walk around barefoot, at least until the glass has ground itself into the carpet and floorboards, THEN walk around barefoot is OK). but it's a greater symbol. i have been a complete flake lately.
i've missed interviews, forgotten dates, locked my keys in my car, forgot to show up for my second day of jury duty (i ALMOST got the rape case on day one but was dismissed on account of being "bohemian"....no shit....i went up and was questioned by the judge and lawyers of the case and then had to stand aside while i heard mumblings of "mrmrmrmmmm bmbmmrmmbohemianmmrmrmmrmmmrmgrmgrhrgggbohemian?mrmrmrmrhhm hhmhmrh mbrbmbrboHEmian,mmrm rmrmrrrr......juror dismissed" WHO fucking uses that word anymore? i loved it) and have sliced my hand, fucked my finger, whatEVS, the list goes on.
what is happening? i think i'm giving myself too much freedom, i mean, i'm rushing around so joyously enjoying my freedom that i forget there's also respoooosiobiloioto
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that was not a typo.
that was my keyboard dying a liquid death.
i should have known. why did i leave my delicate electronics ON when i should have shut the bitch down, turned it over, hit it with the hairdryer, chanted, done a rain dance?
why? because i'm a fucking post-modern addict and i felt the need to blog about my misfortune instead of handling it like a sane person. wait. not sane. there's got to be a better word. responsible??
was god laughing at me by making my keyboard die exactly t the time i was typing out that fucking word? for fuck's sake.
anyway, things went from worse to worser. i drove cloud one into a curb and blew the tire within 25 hours of destroying the mac. miss glenna and i waited in the car for two hours for triple A to show up and two me back to the cloud club...it was late late, we'd been dancing, drinking, screaming, yelling, laughing....i had thought i was ok to drive. was i? was i not? was it just the excitement of the night? was i sober...yet special?? i must have been out of my mind. i'll never know. i've been pushing the limits over the past few months, always managing to stay within the scary grey area of not drunk but fuzzy enough that you question your own questioning and then turn round and question that. its not something you ever want to discuss, i fear even discussing it here....because admitting that i may have been too drunk (notice the qualifier) to drive feels like a black mark that land on my head like a 276 pound guilty weight, i can feel my mother's email right now. better to face up to it, better to admit it. i have a breathalizer coming and i will be keeping it in the glovebox. i am not into taking risks, not these kind. no fucking way.
i offered glenna an apology in the morning. we had loved the tow-truck driver. an experience, we agreed, not to be rgeretted. sxip and the luminescent orchestrii (www.lumii.org) who had provided the soundtrack for the dancing all came out to breakfast with me and glenna, becca and max. we feasted. back at my house, i played them the song i'd finally finished after months of putting off. i'll try to debut it on wednesday at joe's pub. it hurts to play, its a pounder, i'm proud of it. i knew it was good when sxip winced and whispered "oh my god" during the last verse. maybe it was "oh jesus". either way, it was all i needed.
it's called Guitar Hero.
it was max's birthday, so we went to the gardner museum and sat around, looking at the beauty and talking about life. that's the perfect day. and then later a movie too.
but my head kept nagging, the tire was another nail in the coffin. why am i so distracted, amanda amanda amadna, why am i moving so fast? i went to yoga yesterday and upon leaving almost pulled straight into a truck. punch drunk on my own freedom, moving so fast to fit in my life that i've missed so dearly, my self that i've missed so much.....and i've just scheduled myself to the teeth for the next 4 months, so i'm not even that free. maybe that's whats killing me. i don't know.
i am taking the time, real time, to slow down soon. part of me doesn't want to. im going on a 8-day intensive yoga retreat at the end of february. no phone, no computer, no shit. may is earmarked for a month, also without accouterments, in bordeaux france where i've landed a sweet-ass apartment for free through the city's arts council. i imagine myself eating croissants and finishing a book every other day and occasionally practicing a chopin prelude while my friend jean-francoise lights a hangover cigarette from his spot in the bathtub.
"amONdah, what eeees thees thing we are calling LIFE"
and i answer
"jean-francoise, do not ash in the toilet, i get you an ashtray"
i am starting to worry that i am fucking up because i can pay for it.
has this happened to anybody? i'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm not scarping my rent together anymore and i don't sweat getting parking tickets like i used to. as soon as i was able to not sweat a parking ticket, i found myself lazier in racing back there to feed the meter. what the fuck, i think. it's fifteen dollars and probably not going to happen. fuck it. these choices can make life dangerous. i can fix the tire. i have the money. i can fix the computer. but not everything is fixable by far. with money or not. do the rich, the truly rich, live carelessly? if so, have i not noticed? i think it's a personality thing.
i know that a large part of me is just distracted by the pain of huge change. i'm used to seeing brian viglione the drummer every day, have been for years.....i'm used to being part of a whole no matter how unwholesome, and the void hurts. i dont talk much about our relationship here (against the moral code of blogging) but it's no mystery that its a long and deep and complicated one. the play was a brutally painful way to end things, for me at least, with so much weirdness in the air. blah blah blah, we need our space, i know how it goes, time will heal most wounds. we went on too long, way longer than we should have, about a year or two longer than we should have. i voted for a break before the last record and got vetoed. brian tried to veto the play and i strong-armed him into it. we kept at it. maybe we shouldn't have. maybe it would have changed things. maybe it wouldn't have changed dick. we were running on tired and toxic fumes for the past year. who knows. nobody's asking any questions and so nobody's thinking much about answers. still, i must remind myself that nobody will ever care about our relationaship as much as us. weird as it seems. i watched the raw footage for the roundhouse DVD tonight and it seems like a relic from years ago....we were trying, trying, trying so hard.
i am putting all of my solo songs from the last many years together for pre-production on a new record. i laid them all around me in a pile on the kitchen floor until it was covered. i was happy with what i saw. norah jones it will not be. commercially viable,,,,well, no. probably not. no way. more like a travelogue in music of the past 5 or 6 years. all the intimate, long, commercially-unviable, this-one-is-way-too-long/slow/whatever-to-go-on-the-record. my own choices, how overwhelming and frightening and beautiful and scary. any blame and glee will be mine all mine to put on myself. i cant wait to begin, i can't wait to hear the sound of the piano coming through my headphones and to know that it's my voice in there, my notes, the sound i can make, as ugly and beautiful as it wants to be, with nobody to answer to but myself.
lee put a bell above the stairwell leading up to the top floor. a bell on a string at head-height. if you're not paying attention, you walk straight into it and smack your head on the thing. and it rings, oh it rings. lee calls it " the consciousness bell: a friendly reminder to stay awake and aware". i call it "the masochist bell: an evil reminder that we deliberately put shit in our own way." we joke. but it's all too fitting. we do these things to ourselves, we build up more and more levels. when do you decide that something is there as a god-sent reminder to stay present and patient and when do you see it as something caustic that just brings you anguish? it's like tying a red string to your finger to remind you to take the trash out....and you sit there admiring its pretty color and texture as the fucking truck pulls away.
like the old man on the porch with his dog sitting next to him, yelping in pain.
"why's he cryin'?" asks a neighbor passing by.
"sat on a nail" answers the man.
"why don't he get up?" asks the neighbor.
"don't hurt enough yet" shrugs the man.
i was thinking about the party metaphor from the last blog. and about what bands in general go through. a party, a scene, a band, nobody wants to be a member of a club thats huge and non-exclusive. wait, i take that back, lots of people do. thats why we have sports. sports sort of represent the opposite. but the downtrodden, the self artists and misanthropes, the thinkers, the hopeless romantics, they all want to find a smaller elite. i remember being shocked when people started posting things to our board about liking the band more before we got big. we got big? when did that happen? why didn't i get the memo? people may adore you until you hit the mainstream and then you're just as useful as the red sox, a team taht anyone can love and so the bond formed over a beer and love of something in common becomes about as meaningful as a love of...i don't know, beer. or food. or air.
however, song on radio is one thing and reading paragraphs of the written word is another. maybe why this blog works, why i continue to feel so connected to all of you reading it. it doesnt take as much effort to hear a song on the radio and like it. it does take some degree of effort to sit your ass down and read this far into a bunch of word typed out by a maniacal songwriter who is a self-admitted mess (but aren't we all?) a perpetually recovering narcissist, a serial epiphinast. you can only relate to me because i can relate to you. every comment that i read back proves me righter and righter. i know i'm not talking into a vacuum. is that so odd? the fact that you have arthritis, messes, pains, NPR addictions, jobs as pool designers, dying fathers, it kind of doesn't matter, all the shit that goes down, its a small little world, we're sharing it in spades, all the time. there's no way around it.
on that note, some thoughts on the last round of commets, while we're at it:
re:
myspace "kudos". right. i have no idea what they are, except that in the land of myspace, it is the potentially lame and misguided name that they have given to what i would prefer they label "acknowledgment". what i find totally bizare is that you can either give one "acknowledgment" or two. i mean, how can that be? don't you either "acknowledge" something or "not acknowledge" it? what i weird fucking word. acknowledge. stare at that one for a minute and see what i mean. ACK. but i mean really. if you give one kudo, does that mean youre only half-acknowledging what the person has written? and how fucked is that?
re:
the possibility of commenting back to someone's comments on myspace....thank you all for pointing that out...i'd never noticed that you could indent the conversation thread that way. now i am happy to know that one comment can give rise to another.
avril is recording a new record? o good. so is panic at the disco. our lord works in mysterious ways.
re:
the onion cellar blog, i 'm still working on it. distance is lending perspective to that dark time of my life already. i learned more lessons in that few months than i may in my lifetime, and i'm still processing it all.
some german fans decided to make a video about baking a chocolate zucchini cake.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWbr7Amh1KU
i watched this and peed my pants with glee and wondered in awe at the randomness of the world. anything can happen.
small things like this make me happier than you can possibly imagine.
re"
the finger. the finger is healing, slowly. acupuncture before bedtime is helping.
re:
"You're left with flakes of paint and corners of posters left from old and reccurent efforts to create a bohemia."
whoever said this....you summed up my life nicely. thank you.
re:
books.
i have to thank all those of you who have recommended books via this blog in teh past year or so, i've kept them piled up and i've been devouring them lately with (finally, joy) time to read again. towelhead, don't lets go to the dogs tonight and oracle night all came from here. i ate them up. oracle night (paul auster) fucking blew me away. i want to recommend it back to everybody here. i didn't want it to end so i ordered the book of illusions and that too was quickly gone. he has ten more books. i'm working on timbuktu.
re:
my total lack of caps.
for those of you upset or querulous about my lack of capitalization, i have only one thing to say to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings.
please note how they fucked up his name in the url.
re:
"It's also comforting to me to see how much what goes on in your head resembles my own thought patterns. Are most people like this? And we didn't realize it until now with the invention of the blog where everyone's thoughts are made public? Somehow all the zines and novels failed to capture this accurately."
i must say. i think most people ARE like this. we all deal with the same shit. most people just don't talk about it.
re:
you.
me.
and everyone we know.
i'm going to new york in the morning. i'll be there all week. i love the train to new york more than life itself.
i was listening to someone's demo CD (sort of ambient techno, a la the great aphex twin) tonight and was really impressed by the way they managed to create a really cool song using the sampled sound of a skipping CD. it was done truly artfully, the skip never lasting too long and not sounding too perfect or precious or too random. id been wondering when someone would finally use the skipping-CD sound to create a whole track. i enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes then decided it was actually getting a little too wanky and irritating. plus i needed to concentrate on something else. i went into my bedroom to kill the sound.
i was wrong.
the CD had been skipping for fifteen minutes.
indeed, again,
it's strange how sometimes the fuzz between stations is sometimes more compelling than a clear signal from either side.
love
a
this is what i started the other night, it was thursday i think:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
as i sat down to write this new blog, i broke another wine glass.
this time it didn't slice my finger off but rather collided face-on with my laptop.
how did this happen, you ask? well, i was sort of holding both, idiotically, in order to ... now i can't even remember what. i wasnt even drinking....the wine glass was left-over from the night before....i was tossing the dregs of it in the sink, and the computer? i think i was moving from one place to another. the screen sustained minor injuries and my floor probably has some hints of shrapnel embedded amongst its inhabitants (note to self: don't walk around barefoot until you vacuum....or better: just dont walk around barefoot, at least until the glass has ground itself into the carpet and floorboards, THEN walk around barefoot is OK). but it's a greater symbol. i have been a complete flake lately.
i've missed interviews, forgotten dates, locked my keys in my car, forgot to show up for my second day of jury duty (i ALMOST got the rape case on day one but was dismissed on account of being "bohemian"....no shit....i went up and was questioned by the judge and lawyers of the case and then had to stand aside while i heard mumblings of "mrmrmrmmmm bmbmmrmmbohemianmmrmrmmrmmmrmgrmgrhrgggbohemian?mrmrmrmrhhm hhmhmrh mbrbmbrboHEmian,mmrm rmrmrrrr......juror dismissed" WHO fucking uses that word anymore? i loved it) and have sliced my hand, fucked my finger, whatEVS, the list goes on.
what is happening? i think i'm giving myself too much freedom, i mean, i'm rushing around so joyously enjoying my freedom that i forget there's also respoooosiobiloioto
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
that was not a typo.
that was my keyboard dying a liquid death.
i should have known. why did i leave my delicate electronics ON when i should have shut the bitch down, turned it over, hit it with the hairdryer, chanted, done a rain dance?
why? because i'm a fucking post-modern addict and i felt the need to blog about my misfortune instead of handling it like a sane person. wait. not sane. there's got to be a better word. responsible??
was god laughing at me by making my keyboard die exactly t the time i was typing out that fucking word? for fuck's sake.
anyway, things went from worse to worser. i drove cloud one into a curb and blew the tire within 25 hours of destroying the mac. miss glenna and i waited in the car for two hours for triple A to show up and two me back to the cloud club...it was late late, we'd been dancing, drinking, screaming, yelling, laughing....i had thought i was ok to drive. was i? was i not? was it just the excitement of the night? was i sober...yet special?? i must have been out of my mind. i'll never know. i've been pushing the limits over the past few months, always managing to stay within the scary grey area of not drunk but fuzzy enough that you question your own questioning and then turn round and question that. its not something you ever want to discuss, i fear even discussing it here....because admitting that i may have been too drunk (notice the qualifier) to drive feels like a black mark that land on my head like a 276 pound guilty weight, i can feel my mother's email right now. better to face up to it, better to admit it. i have a breathalizer coming and i will be keeping it in the glovebox. i am not into taking risks, not these kind. no fucking way.
i offered glenna an apology in the morning. we had loved the tow-truck driver. an experience, we agreed, not to be rgeretted. sxip and the luminescent orchestrii (www.lumii.org) who had provided the soundtrack for the dancing all came out to breakfast with me and glenna, becca and max. we feasted. back at my house, i played them the song i'd finally finished after months of putting off. i'll try to debut it on wednesday at joe's pub. it hurts to play, its a pounder, i'm proud of it. i knew it was good when sxip winced and whispered "oh my god" during the last verse. maybe it was "oh jesus". either way, it was all i needed.
it's called Guitar Hero.
it was max's birthday, so we went to the gardner museum and sat around, looking at the beauty and talking about life. that's the perfect day. and then later a movie too.
but my head kept nagging, the tire was another nail in the coffin. why am i so distracted, amanda amanda amadna, why am i moving so fast? i went to yoga yesterday and upon leaving almost pulled straight into a truck. punch drunk on my own freedom, moving so fast to fit in my life that i've missed so dearly, my self that i've missed so much.....and i've just scheduled myself to the teeth for the next 4 months, so i'm not even that free. maybe that's whats killing me. i don't know.
i am taking the time, real time, to slow down soon. part of me doesn't want to. im going on a 8-day intensive yoga retreat at the end of february. no phone, no computer, no shit. may is earmarked for a month, also without accouterments, in bordeaux france where i've landed a sweet-ass apartment for free through the city's arts council. i imagine myself eating croissants and finishing a book every other day and occasionally practicing a chopin prelude while my friend jean-francoise lights a hangover cigarette from his spot in the bathtub.
"amONdah, what eeees thees thing we are calling LIFE"
and i answer
"jean-francoise, do not ash in the toilet, i get you an ashtray"
i am starting to worry that i am fucking up because i can pay for it.
has this happened to anybody? i'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm not scarping my rent together anymore and i don't sweat getting parking tickets like i used to. as soon as i was able to not sweat a parking ticket, i found myself lazier in racing back there to feed the meter. what the fuck, i think. it's fifteen dollars and probably not going to happen. fuck it. these choices can make life dangerous. i can fix the tire. i have the money. i can fix the computer. but not everything is fixable by far. with money or not. do the rich, the truly rich, live carelessly? if so, have i not noticed? i think it's a personality thing.
i know that a large part of me is just distracted by the pain of huge change. i'm used to seeing brian viglione the drummer every day, have been for years.....i'm used to being part of a whole no matter how unwholesome, and the void hurts. i dont talk much about our relationship here (against the moral code of blogging) but it's no mystery that its a long and deep and complicated one. the play was a brutally painful way to end things, for me at least, with so much weirdness in the air. blah blah blah, we need our space, i know how it goes, time will heal most wounds. we went on too long, way longer than we should have, about a year or two longer than we should have. i voted for a break before the last record and got vetoed. brian tried to veto the play and i strong-armed him into it. we kept at it. maybe we shouldn't have. maybe it would have changed things. maybe it wouldn't have changed dick. we were running on tired and toxic fumes for the past year. who knows. nobody's asking any questions and so nobody's thinking much about answers. still, i must remind myself that nobody will ever care about our relationaship as much as us. weird as it seems. i watched the raw footage for the roundhouse DVD tonight and it seems like a relic from years ago....we were trying, trying, trying so hard.
i am putting all of my solo songs from the last many years together for pre-production on a new record. i laid them all around me in a pile on the kitchen floor until it was covered. i was happy with what i saw. norah jones it will not be. commercially viable,,,,well, no. probably not. no way. more like a travelogue in music of the past 5 or 6 years. all the intimate, long, commercially-unviable, this-one-is-way-too-long/slow/whatever-to-go-on-the-record. my own choices, how overwhelming and frightening and beautiful and scary. any blame and glee will be mine all mine to put on myself. i cant wait to begin, i can't wait to hear the sound of the piano coming through my headphones and to know that it's my voice in there, my notes, the sound i can make, as ugly and beautiful as it wants to be, with nobody to answer to but myself.
lee put a bell above the stairwell leading up to the top floor. a bell on a string at head-height. if you're not paying attention, you walk straight into it and smack your head on the thing. and it rings, oh it rings. lee calls it " the consciousness bell: a friendly reminder to stay awake and aware". i call it "the masochist bell: an evil reminder that we deliberately put shit in our own way." we joke. but it's all too fitting. we do these things to ourselves, we build up more and more levels. when do you decide that something is there as a god-sent reminder to stay present and patient and when do you see it as something caustic that just brings you anguish? it's like tying a red string to your finger to remind you to take the trash out....and you sit there admiring its pretty color and texture as the fucking truck pulls away.
like the old man on the porch with his dog sitting next to him, yelping in pain.
"why's he cryin'?" asks a neighbor passing by.
"sat on a nail" answers the man.
"why don't he get up?" asks the neighbor.
"don't hurt enough yet" shrugs the man.
i was thinking about the party metaphor from the last blog. and about what bands in general go through. a party, a scene, a band, nobody wants to be a member of a club thats huge and non-exclusive. wait, i take that back, lots of people do. thats why we have sports. sports sort of represent the opposite. but the downtrodden, the self artists and misanthropes, the thinkers, the hopeless romantics, they all want to find a smaller elite. i remember being shocked when people started posting things to our board about liking the band more before we got big. we got big? when did that happen? why didn't i get the memo? people may adore you until you hit the mainstream and then you're just as useful as the red sox, a team taht anyone can love and so the bond formed over a beer and love of something in common becomes about as meaningful as a love of...i don't know, beer. or food. or air.
however, song on radio is one thing and reading paragraphs of the written word is another. maybe why this blog works, why i continue to feel so connected to all of you reading it. it doesnt take as much effort to hear a song on the radio and like it. it does take some degree of effort to sit your ass down and read this far into a bunch of word typed out by a maniacal songwriter who is a self-admitted mess (but aren't we all?) a perpetually recovering narcissist, a serial epiphinast. you can only relate to me because i can relate to you. every comment that i read back proves me righter and righter. i know i'm not talking into a vacuum. is that so odd? the fact that you have arthritis, messes, pains, NPR addictions, jobs as pool designers, dying fathers, it kind of doesn't matter, all the shit that goes down, its a small little world, we're sharing it in spades, all the time. there's no way around it.
on that note, some thoughts on the last round of commets, while we're at it:
re:
myspace "kudos". right. i have no idea what they are, except that in the land of myspace, it is the potentially lame and misguided name that they have given to what i would prefer they label "acknowledgment". what i find totally bizare is that you can either give one "acknowledgment" or two. i mean, how can that be? don't you either "acknowledge" something or "not acknowledge" it? what i weird fucking word. acknowledge. stare at that one for a minute and see what i mean. ACK. but i mean really. if you give one kudo, does that mean youre only half-acknowledging what the person has written? and how fucked is that?
re:
the possibility of commenting back to someone's comments on myspace....thank you all for pointing that out...i'd never noticed that you could indent the conversation thread that way. now i am happy to know that one comment can give rise to another.
avril is recording a new record? o good. so is panic at the disco. our lord works in mysterious ways.
re:
the onion cellar blog, i 'm still working on it. distance is lending perspective to that dark time of my life already. i learned more lessons in that few months than i may in my lifetime, and i'm still processing it all.
some german fans decided to make a video about baking a chocolate zucchini cake.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWbr7Amh1KU
i watched this and peed my pants with glee and wondered in awe at the randomness of the world. anything can happen.
small things like this make me happier than you can possibly imagine.
re"
the finger. the finger is healing, slowly. acupuncture before bedtime is helping.
re:
"You're left with flakes of paint and corners of posters left from old and reccurent efforts to create a bohemia."
whoever said this....you summed up my life nicely. thank you.
re:
books.
i have to thank all those of you who have recommended books via this blog in teh past year or so, i've kept them piled up and i've been devouring them lately with (finally, joy) time to read again. towelhead, don't lets go to the dogs tonight and oracle night all came from here. i ate them up. oracle night (paul auster) fucking blew me away. i want to recommend it back to everybody here. i didn't want it to end so i ordered the book of illusions and that too was quickly gone. he has ten more books. i'm working on timbuktu.
re:
my total lack of caps.
for those of you upset or querulous about my lack of capitalization, i have only one thing to say to you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings.
please note how they fucked up his name in the url.
re:
"It's also comforting to me to see how much what goes on in your head resembles my own thought patterns. Are most people like this? And we didn't realize it until now with the invention of the blog where everyone's thoughts are made public? Somehow all the zines and novels failed to capture this accurately."
i must say. i think most people ARE like this. we all deal with the same shit. most people just don't talk about it.
re:
you.
me.
and everyone we know.
i'm going to new york in the morning. i'll be there all week. i love the train to new york more than life itself.
i was listening to someone's demo CD (sort of ambient techno, a la the great aphex twin) tonight and was really impressed by the way they managed to create a really cool song using the sampled sound of a skipping CD. it was done truly artfully, the skip never lasting too long and not sounding too perfect or precious or too random. id been wondering when someone would finally use the skipping-CD sound to create a whole track. i enjoyed it for about fifteen minutes then decided it was actually getting a little too wanky and irritating. plus i needed to concentrate on something else. i went into my bedroom to kill the sound.
i was wrong.
the CD had been skipping for fifteen minutes.
indeed, again,
it's strange how sometimes the fuzz between stations is sometimes more compelling than a clear signal from either side.
love
a
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
news from the crippled front
.
so i found out that i have arthritis in my right index finger, from overplaying. It's been bothering me for months, since about september, but i've been doing almost nothing about it. now i'm facing the ice and the arnica.
despite that news, i sit here and type away, exacerbating the problem i am sure with my clickity clackity habits. late last night as i was bemoaning the state of my sad swollen digit and washing out a wine glass in the sink, the glass exploded (i was NOT drunk, yet) and gashed a half-dime-sized chunk out of the finger on my OTHER hand. so now i'm a fucking bi-lateral cripple. actually, i am writing this using a stick in my mouth.
the rest of the night was good. we took all the cash that we'd collected for the pan 9 fire disaster (give at www.par-don.com/pan9) at the onion cellar and steven counted it on my kitchen table and all the piles of cash were funny so noah and becca and katrina and i set up the table to look like a drug den. we used white face powder for cocaine and dumped it all on a falco LP (yes, "rock me amadeus" falco). steve bundled up the tens and twenties while i shot pictures, trying to make everything look incriminating. if the feds come, i'm fucked. maybe this entry will prove me innocent.
the responses from that last entry destroyed me. how many times do i have to say it? yes, i read every comment. every comment on myspace, every comment on the website journal page.
it blew me away to imagine so many people within such a short time reading and responding. must have hit a nerve. i will come back to this. it got me to thinking about why i love this so much, why i do it.
i am constantly called on to explain, to journalists, to whoever, why i do what i do, why i write, why i perform. i feel like it's taken me years to discover (admit?) what it is about this that's compelling.
people laugh nervously when i tell them that i'm not passionate about music and never really was. i've always been passionate about what music DOES, what it CREATES. when and if i find other ways of doing it, it's all the same.
making theater can be similar. music has it's own special magic that nothing else touches, nothing achieves. but being honest about it seems to ruin the fun for people, for fans, for journalists. i don't LOVE writing songs. i love having written them, i love HAVING them. i love watching them WORK. it's hard to explain. i try:
when i was 10 or 11, i remember being really bored one summer weekend and coming up with a fantasy that i could create a fair/circus in my parent's backyard. oh my god, i was unstoppable. i wasn't as concerned with the details of how to arrange for people to attend this stupendous event as i was with spending every waking minute of the next three days sitting behind my parents ancient apple IIe and creating a FLYER for this non-existent wonderland. i created a map of what it would like like, where the rides and vendors would be, what you could buy at the merchandising stand. this was, fucking, 1986. then i got distracted by the likelihood that it would be an abortion-like, unromantic yard sale with the neighborhood kids and i moved on to other things.
when i was 18 or 19, i remember living in the basement of eclectic, the society i belonged to at wesleyan university. i had somehow gotten ahold of a 3-disc collection (stolen from the college radio station, i'm pretty sure) called "the beat generation". it was a compilation of wicked hip 50s ephemera, music, spoken word, it truly set the scene. allen ginsberg, lenny bruce, recordings of kerouac reading aloud, bop and more bop, burroughs....they were all there. i was unhip. i'd had no idea. it was like all of a sudden someone had walked me in the backdoor of a place i'd been craving to visit since birth. i remember freaking my shit out night after night thinking "what are we DOING???? we're doing NOTHING!!! fuck. we could be DOING everything!!!!" i felt like i had found what i came to college for, but instead on it being on campus, it was on compact disc. eclectic was an old house with lots of character and there was a large room across from mine, in the basement, with a padlock on the door. i found the key from someone and came upon an empty, dingy space the size of a large living room and my mind went wild: "yes, YES ! here ! this is where we'll put the tables and chairs. this is where we'll put the stage. i'll make coffee. we'll drink whiskey. we'll chain-smoke. fuck this is going to be AMAZING." i even (and this part i'm embarrassed to admit) started donning my hip russian sailor shirt and hep fifties beret when cleaning out the space (oh yes, with awl and broom and vacuum, it took days, and my papers and grades suffered most likely). i was so convinced i would create bohemia for my campus. the only problem was, i had no friends and no idea what to do next, after i'd cleaned it. so i got distracted by the likelihood that it would be an abortion-like, unromantic cesspool of unsuccessful beer-drinking and uninspired chain-smoking, much like the parties we were having weekly on the top floor, where even things as hip and hep and shooting heroin didn't have any substance, everyone was just so blase, bored and over it all. i moved on to other things.
when i was 24 or 25, i moved into the cloud club and immediately started organizing events. the cloud club is a fantasy space, four floors of architectural exploded vintage wonderland gaudi bliss. pope would help me run the parties...we would have 300, 400 people over. we called them (after the shadowbox theater that i was running at the time) the Box Events. The first was Box I, the second Box II, and so forth. I booked performers of all kinds...bands, dancers, poets, filmmakers, whatever, we squeezed it all in and people performers upstairs in the attic-space, in the garden, in my bedroom, in the empty apartments, wherever there was space. but i noticed something about my quality of time during these events. i was RUNNING them, not really attending. much like the brigade nowadays when we're on tour, i couldn't really enjoy what i had created.
but i sort of enjoyed it that way. i sort of loved floating around all night, wearing a stained and ripped kimono and always having a sloshing wine in one hand and a nat sherman cigarette in the other and feeling like i was some sort of self-made art deco portrait gone bad. greeting people, meeting people, but most of all (my favorite) wathcing people come into the house and seeing their reaction to the atmosphere. watching people light up, watching people get inspired, excited, everyone sharing some feeling that we were somewhere special, all together and maybe never to be repeated. good conversations come out of a space like that. it that sense, i always assumed, that's what these events were for. the art, the performers, the stained kimono were just there so that person A might actually get into a better conversation with person B than if they met at a downtown sports bar. i loved running through my kitchen to by bedroom to grab something and seeing people i barely knew sitting on my couch, engaged in some sort of profound conversation. my head would turn and see them and say YES YES YES ye sYES !! this is why i do THIS//////but i could never slow down to sit there and be a part of it. i was always moving too fast. this is what it's like at shows. no matter how much i want to enjoy the world i've created, i'm usually too tired or too busy and distracted. i always wish i could bottle it, take it home and enjoy it in peace, in small and luxurious doses.
here;s the thing. in a totally bizarre way, i feel like the blog fills this gap. though there's no hep music and no intimate mood lighting to enhance your experience, these calls and responses are basically distilled essences of profound party conversation. even better, they're here for me to peruse at my leisure and respond to at will, without having to rush off and make sure the house/club isn't on fire. the quality of the comments is exactly representative of the party swath. some people don't respond, they stand in the corner and smile and clutch on to their beer for dear life. some people add sharp and short but perfectly timed comments. some people talk a blue streak (i was mesmerized by the 2-foot comment one of you left about your entire life and ex-girlfriend sasha and how it';s all intertwined. jesus. but awesome). but the fact that we're all here at the same time, riffing on the same subject, this is miraculous. there's an incredible book by nicholson baker called The Fermata in which the protagonist has the secret power to stop time and move through the world as everybody and everything else holds perfectly still. this is sort of how it is: the blog is like a fermata at a perfect party. you can stop at one conversation and enter it. you can skip forwards and backwards in time and find those things and utterances with which you connect. the band did have to come first, but jesus, now there's tHIS? how did i get so lucky? i finally went to visit pete wentz's blog to see what he was writing about. i was disappointed. i want DETAILS, motherfucker. give me some soul. lets' not even get INTO avril's blog., it's a tragedy. the only thing i regret is that the comment section of these things doesn't work like a forum in which you can comment on people's comments and actually start a conversation. this would be more interesting. maybe you can do that. i am a luddite.
anyway that is my I Am Amazed By technology speech of the day.
i was driving home yesterday (in my benevolent landlord's car, which is named cloud one, which is what the license plate says, since the volvo is resting peacefully in inert woe) from having dinner with my folks out in lexington. this fucked up thing had happened earlier in the day to the driver's-side window...it just broke off it's track and jutted out of it's window-bed like a huge menacing triangle. it wouldn't roll up or down, it was just stuck and letting in all of the freezing rain. i cranked the heat and was barreling down route 2 and listening to NPR, which had been loaded with martin luther king (jr) speeches and stories due to the holiday. somewhere, the windshield wiper in front of me stopped working. i mean, it moved, but the wiper blade just crapped out completely and the freezing rain collected in front of my field of vision, blurring the road completely. i tried, at two separate red lights, to get out and wipe the blade off, straighten it, tame it, but it was fruitless. the blurred patch in front of my face (whihc was really only about 4 inches, but it was EXACTLY where i needed to see the road ahead of me) was still covered in frozen schmutz.
so i was getting freezing-rained on while trying to figure out which was wiser: try to adjust to the blurry version of the road through the frozen schmutz or try to artfully tilt my head to one side, to the left or the right by 4 inches, to get a clear view of the road in front of me. while i listened to martin luther king rallying for the general strike in memphis. it occured to me that this was fucking life, most of the time. you don't ever get a clear view of whats in front of you, the wiper can't be fixed, and you';re basically left with the decision of whether to adjust your eyes to the blur or crane your neck. your choice, but you gotta make it or you're going to crash, motherfucker. when king started to ramp up the speech to the part about not fearing anything and how the march had to be and stay non-violent, i lost it and started to bawl. three days later he was shot. this really helped in the visibility department. wait, it gets better.
as i pulled onto storrow drive, i started to get static. this has been happening every day for the past 2 months, since i've been driving on storrow to get from boston to cambridge. it's only with NPR, it's just like a void that cuts out. you can get about 45% of whats being said but i usually get so sucked into the news that i deal with the static for that 3 minutes, knowing it will go away. it usually sounds something like this: ".BRRRZZZrrrrrttttsaid that the US shshshshhhshhhhtackle the violence or it would spiralsshshshshshsggghhh as a result of Shias killing Sunnis anzzzrrrrrrrrrromments came after 70 people ZZZZrrrrrrrrSHHHHH injured in a double bombing at a Baghdad univerZREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEblew up outside Mustansiriyah UnivzzzrrrrrrrrrrKAAAAARRRKKKKAAAAAsuicide bomber then targeted studeBBSSSSZZZZZZttttt" etc. sometime there's some beats form a nearby frequency in there to give the news some nicely needed soundtrack/irony. anyway, i was dirving into the static pocket and for some reason, instead of just static it was a complete warp between two stations. i recognized the song. o, did i recognize it. it was "lost cause" from beck's Sea Change album. the universe was definitely lining shit up. it was pairing up the song (beck would have loved the poetry of this i'm sure) with MLK jr's "I've been to the mountaintop" speech and it sounded sort of like this:
pzzZSHHHHHHHHHHZZZZHhhh/KKzzzi'm tired of fightingzzzzzzzrrrrrreZZZZZZZZZZhhhhthe nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all aroundzzzzzzhhhhhthe masses of people are rising upzzzhhrrrrrr assembled today, whether they are in johannesburg, south africa; nairobi, kenyazzzzzzzhhheeeI'm tired of fightinghRRRgggggyork city; Atlanta Gerogia; zzzzzzzrrror memphis, tenessee, the cry is always the same: we want to be freeZZZZZZZHHHHHHfighting for a lost cause.....
it dried my tears and made my entire night.
p.s. no word from mr. dark haired/hat man.
then again, i haven't emailed him.
.
so i found out that i have arthritis in my right index finger, from overplaying. It's been bothering me for months, since about september, but i've been doing almost nothing about it. now i'm facing the ice and the arnica.
despite that news, i sit here and type away, exacerbating the problem i am sure with my clickity clackity habits. late last night as i was bemoaning the state of my sad swollen digit and washing out a wine glass in the sink, the glass exploded (i was NOT drunk, yet) and gashed a half-dime-sized chunk out of the finger on my OTHER hand. so now i'm a fucking bi-lateral cripple. actually, i am writing this using a stick in my mouth.
the rest of the night was good. we took all the cash that we'd collected for the pan 9 fire disaster (give at www.par-don.com/pan9) at the onion cellar and steven counted it on my kitchen table and all the piles of cash were funny so noah and becca and katrina and i set up the table to look like a drug den. we used white face powder for cocaine and dumped it all on a falco LP (yes, "rock me amadeus" falco). steve bundled up the tens and twenties while i shot pictures, trying to make everything look incriminating. if the feds come, i'm fucked. maybe this entry will prove me innocent.
the responses from that last entry destroyed me. how many times do i have to say it? yes, i read every comment. every comment on myspace, every comment on the website journal page.
it blew me away to imagine so many people within such a short time reading and responding. must have hit a nerve. i will come back to this. it got me to thinking about why i love this so much, why i do it.
i am constantly called on to explain, to journalists, to whoever, why i do what i do, why i write, why i perform. i feel like it's taken me years to discover (admit?) what it is about this that's compelling.
people laugh nervously when i tell them that i'm not passionate about music and never really was. i've always been passionate about what music DOES, what it CREATES. when and if i find other ways of doing it, it's all the same.
making theater can be similar. music has it's own special magic that nothing else touches, nothing achieves. but being honest about it seems to ruin the fun for people, for fans, for journalists. i don't LOVE writing songs. i love having written them, i love HAVING them. i love watching them WORK. it's hard to explain. i try:
when i was 10 or 11, i remember being really bored one summer weekend and coming up with a fantasy that i could create a fair/circus in my parent's backyard. oh my god, i was unstoppable. i wasn't as concerned with the details of how to arrange for people to attend this stupendous event as i was with spending every waking minute of the next three days sitting behind my parents ancient apple IIe and creating a FLYER for this non-existent wonderland. i created a map of what it would like like, where the rides and vendors would be, what you could buy at the merchandising stand. this was, fucking, 1986. then i got distracted by the likelihood that it would be an abortion-like, unromantic yard sale with the neighborhood kids and i moved on to other things.
when i was 18 or 19, i remember living in the basement of eclectic, the society i belonged to at wesleyan university. i had somehow gotten ahold of a 3-disc collection (stolen from the college radio station, i'm pretty sure) called "the beat generation". it was a compilation of wicked hip 50s ephemera, music, spoken word, it truly set the scene. allen ginsberg, lenny bruce, recordings of kerouac reading aloud, bop and more bop, burroughs....they were all there. i was unhip. i'd had no idea. it was like all of a sudden someone had walked me in the backdoor of a place i'd been craving to visit since birth. i remember freaking my shit out night after night thinking "what are we DOING???? we're doing NOTHING!!! fuck. we could be DOING everything!!!!" i felt like i had found what i came to college for, but instead on it being on campus, it was on compact disc. eclectic was an old house with lots of character and there was a large room across from mine, in the basement, with a padlock on the door. i found the key from someone and came upon an empty, dingy space the size of a large living room and my mind went wild: "yes, YES ! here ! this is where we'll put the tables and chairs. this is where we'll put the stage. i'll make coffee. we'll drink whiskey. we'll chain-smoke. fuck this is going to be AMAZING." i even (and this part i'm embarrassed to admit) started donning my hip russian sailor shirt and hep fifties beret when cleaning out the space (oh yes, with awl and broom and vacuum, it took days, and my papers and grades suffered most likely). i was so convinced i would create bohemia for my campus. the only problem was, i had no friends and no idea what to do next, after i'd cleaned it. so i got distracted by the likelihood that it would be an abortion-like, unromantic cesspool of unsuccessful beer-drinking and uninspired chain-smoking, much like the parties we were having weekly on the top floor, where even things as hip and hep and shooting heroin didn't have any substance, everyone was just so blase, bored and over it all. i moved on to other things.
when i was 24 or 25, i moved into the cloud club and immediately started organizing events. the cloud club is a fantasy space, four floors of architectural exploded vintage wonderland gaudi bliss. pope would help me run the parties...we would have 300, 400 people over. we called them (after the shadowbox theater that i was running at the time) the Box Events. The first was Box I, the second Box II, and so forth. I booked performers of all kinds...bands, dancers, poets, filmmakers, whatever, we squeezed it all in and people performers upstairs in the attic-space, in the garden, in my bedroom, in the empty apartments, wherever there was space. but i noticed something about my quality of time during these events. i was RUNNING them, not really attending. much like the brigade nowadays when we're on tour, i couldn't really enjoy what i had created.
but i sort of enjoyed it that way. i sort of loved floating around all night, wearing a stained and ripped kimono and always having a sloshing wine in one hand and a nat sherman cigarette in the other and feeling like i was some sort of self-made art deco portrait gone bad. greeting people, meeting people, but most of all (my favorite) wathcing people come into the house and seeing their reaction to the atmosphere. watching people light up, watching people get inspired, excited, everyone sharing some feeling that we were somewhere special, all together and maybe never to be repeated. good conversations come out of a space like that. it that sense, i always assumed, that's what these events were for. the art, the performers, the stained kimono were just there so that person A might actually get into a better conversation with person B than if they met at a downtown sports bar. i loved running through my kitchen to by bedroom to grab something and seeing people i barely knew sitting on my couch, engaged in some sort of profound conversation. my head would turn and see them and say YES YES YES ye sYES !! this is why i do THIS//////but i could never slow down to sit there and be a part of it. i was always moving too fast. this is what it's like at shows. no matter how much i want to enjoy the world i've created, i'm usually too tired or too busy and distracted. i always wish i could bottle it, take it home and enjoy it in peace, in small and luxurious doses.
here;s the thing. in a totally bizarre way, i feel like the blog fills this gap. though there's no hep music and no intimate mood lighting to enhance your experience, these calls and responses are basically distilled essences of profound party conversation. even better, they're here for me to peruse at my leisure and respond to at will, without having to rush off and make sure the house/club isn't on fire. the quality of the comments is exactly representative of the party swath. some people don't respond, they stand in the corner and smile and clutch on to their beer for dear life. some people add sharp and short but perfectly timed comments. some people talk a blue streak (i was mesmerized by the 2-foot comment one of you left about your entire life and ex-girlfriend sasha and how it';s all intertwined. jesus. but awesome). but the fact that we're all here at the same time, riffing on the same subject, this is miraculous. there's an incredible book by nicholson baker called The Fermata in which the protagonist has the secret power to stop time and move through the world as everybody and everything else holds perfectly still. this is sort of how it is: the blog is like a fermata at a perfect party. you can stop at one conversation and enter it. you can skip forwards and backwards in time and find those things and utterances with which you connect. the band did have to come first, but jesus, now there's tHIS? how did i get so lucky? i finally went to visit pete wentz's blog to see what he was writing about. i was disappointed. i want DETAILS, motherfucker. give me some soul. lets' not even get INTO avril's blog., it's a tragedy. the only thing i regret is that the comment section of these things doesn't work like a forum in which you can comment on people's comments and actually start a conversation. this would be more interesting. maybe you can do that. i am a luddite.
anyway that is my I Am Amazed By technology speech of the day.
i was driving home yesterday (in my benevolent landlord's car, which is named cloud one, which is what the license plate says, since the volvo is resting peacefully in inert woe) from having dinner with my folks out in lexington. this fucked up thing had happened earlier in the day to the driver's-side window...it just broke off it's track and jutted out of it's window-bed like a huge menacing triangle. it wouldn't roll up or down, it was just stuck and letting in all of the freezing rain. i cranked the heat and was barreling down route 2 and listening to NPR, which had been loaded with martin luther king (jr) speeches and stories due to the holiday. somewhere, the windshield wiper in front of me stopped working. i mean, it moved, but the wiper blade just crapped out completely and the freezing rain collected in front of my field of vision, blurring the road completely. i tried, at two separate red lights, to get out and wipe the blade off, straighten it, tame it, but it was fruitless. the blurred patch in front of my face (whihc was really only about 4 inches, but it was EXACTLY where i needed to see the road ahead of me) was still covered in frozen schmutz.
so i was getting freezing-rained on while trying to figure out which was wiser: try to adjust to the blurry version of the road through the frozen schmutz or try to artfully tilt my head to one side, to the left or the right by 4 inches, to get a clear view of the road in front of me. while i listened to martin luther king rallying for the general strike in memphis. it occured to me that this was fucking life, most of the time. you don't ever get a clear view of whats in front of you, the wiper can't be fixed, and you';re basically left with the decision of whether to adjust your eyes to the blur or crane your neck. your choice, but you gotta make it or you're going to crash, motherfucker. when king started to ramp up the speech to the part about not fearing anything and how the march had to be and stay non-violent, i lost it and started to bawl. three days later he was shot. this really helped in the visibility department. wait, it gets better.
as i pulled onto storrow drive, i started to get static. this has been happening every day for the past 2 months, since i've been driving on storrow to get from boston to cambridge. it's only with NPR, it's just like a void that cuts out. you can get about 45% of whats being said but i usually get so sucked into the news that i deal with the static for that 3 minutes, knowing it will go away. it usually sounds something like this: ".BRRRZZZrrrrrttttsaid that the US shshshshhhshhhhtackle the violence or it would spiralsshshshshshsggghhh as a result of Shias killing Sunnis anzzzrrrrrrrrrromments came after 70 people ZZZZrrrrrrrrSHHHHH injured in a double bombing at a Baghdad univerZREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEblew up outside Mustansiriyah UnivzzzrrrrrrrrrrKAAAAARRRKKKKAAAAAsuicide bomber then targeted studeBBSSSSZZZZZZttttt" etc. sometime there's some beats form a nearby frequency in there to give the news some nicely needed soundtrack/irony. anyway, i was dirving into the static pocket and for some reason, instead of just static it was a complete warp between two stations. i recognized the song. o, did i recognize it. it was "lost cause" from beck's Sea Change album. the universe was definitely lining shit up. it was pairing up the song (beck would have loved the poetry of this i'm sure) with MLK jr's "I've been to the mountaintop" speech and it sounded sort of like this:
pzzZSHHHHHHHHHHZZZZHhhh/KKzzzi'm tired of fightingzzzzzzzrrrrrreZZZZZZZZZZhhhhthe nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all aroundzzzzzzhhhhhthe masses of people are rising upzzzhhrrrrrr assembled today, whether they are in johannesburg, south africa; nairobi, kenyazzzzzzzhhheeeI'm tired of fightinghRRRgggggyork city; Atlanta Gerogia; zzzzzzzrrror memphis, tenessee, the cry is always the same: we want to be freeZZZZZZZHHHHHHfighting for a lost cause.....
it dried my tears and made my entire night.
p.s. no word from mr. dark haired/hat man.
then again, i haven't emailed him.
.
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