:: Why The Kimono Is Beautiful ::

:: Sunday, July 28, 2002 ::

Played an absurdist gig last night. Geezerpolooza III, Cootstock II or Loserpolooza I, depending on how you're counting. It's an anyone's-invited reunion of people from the high school I went to. My brother organizes the music for it so I feel obligated to go if I'm around. I go as a kind of lettrist sociologist. Though last year I swore I wouldn't do it again after a rhinoceros pulled the plug on my friend Scott who was just beginning a tribute to a classmate who'd died that spring. There he was strumming away poignantly and the power went out and the tribute quickly turned into something out of 'Hurlements en faveur de Sade'. But since my brother had given me an epicurean recipe for Turkish mint lamb on Thursday -- which I cooked up in tribute to Zack's triumphant return from his mini-vacation in michigan -- I felt I really had to make an appearance. 3/4 of my high school band was there. All but Timmy Hillman who lives in L.A. and works as a location picker for one of the film studios. We also had a horn section and did 'Mustang Sally' and some James Brown. My attorney brother was there was as well. Also my high school girlfriend, whom I hadn't seen in a bunch of years. Who was also, now that I think of it, later my attorney brother's girlfriend. (It was a small town.) (And she was really good at math.) There's usually this yodelling woman who shows up. And Jabu and the Tribesmen. But neither was there this year. Actually, Jabu's drummer was. And he's really excellent. There aren't too many younger, local bands; though Jen, the 19 year old who did some singing for me when I first got my recorder, was there and did some vocals with us. And the trombonist in our horn section is superb; I think someone said he's 1st trombonist for last year's college big band of the year. I did get a couple of 'yeahs' when I asked if anyone wanted me to do 'Metal Heart' by Cat Power. There were a bunch of other guest musicians and it was all quite communally fun, though getting things to degenerate into some kind of paltry contest might have been more fun. I've been thinking about Lacan lately. His views about the Real as this unaccomodatable kernel of meaningless unalterability. In opposition to the Symbolic. I think it's influencing my dreams. Not for the good, let me tell you.
:: 4:34 PM [+] ::
...

Golf Birds

First bird I ever loved
I was caddying for
A small band of high rollers
In candy colored golfwear.
They had those clothes
And a beautiful girl in tow.
Las Vegas green-on-brown golf.
Lives were shorter then.
Men too.
The girl said prayers
And the birds listened
And they forgave us
In the name of Universe Central.
One jackdaw remained behind
When the golf men began
Firing at eternity.
Flew close to my nervous head
And in the one brief span of calm
Dropped a cigar-shaped
Projectile at my feet and departed.
As expected, the projectile was the spare
Ring finger I'd been asking for.

In the morning the men had
Magically reinvented themselves
And gave good god
And brought the outside in;
Came back as golf birds themselves
And twinkled in the baking trees like
Feathery phase-shifted stardust.

:: 3:18 PM [+] ::
...

Having once believed in the Popular Science promise of hovercraft, monorails and the 2-day work week, it's hard to let go. It's an idee fixe. A bit of seriously arrested development. Like my archetypally warping eidetic image of Priscilla; or Valerie and Victoria, the dentist's canny daughters; or Apteryx, the freak show hipster nightclub my friends Nils, Dave and I would hitchhike from Sandwich to Hyannis to visit. So the Situationist Internationale and, in particular, the whole question of a revolution in leisure time, remains a vague preoccupation. Urban adventures. There was a group of girls I once hung out with. I remember being derided by my basketball male acquaintances because I wasn't 'going out' with them. They were just my friends. I remember one guy in particular asking me, totally seriously, incredulously: 'Why are you hanging around with them?' I said, not even understanding at first: 'Huh? Because they're cool. Smart, funny as shit, cynical and adventurous.' I'm recalling this because later, when a bunch of us ended up moving to Boston, my friend Nancy was always trying to spur us on to assemble and go out and have urban, situationist adventures. So we would. She'd say: "What'll we do." I'd always say: "Let's go to some stupid dance club and vault around the dance floor pretending we're drunk or tripping." She'd usually counter with some weirder scheme, like going to a cafe together but each getting our own table and trying to carry on a conversation. Usually, we'd end up at some stupid dance club vaulting around like we were drunk or tripping. My father was the master of the urban adventure and the revolution in leisure time, way before DeBord; ably aided and abetted by two of my cousins who worked for the phone company and could patch him in to anyone's line, as well as a friend who worked for one of the big Boston newspapers. He pulled off stunts that ended up in the papers. Like completely manufacturing a parade out of thin air in honor of James Michael Curley w/ two grand marshalls, each of whom despised the other. There was a fist fight involved and a lot of headscratching. But this huge parade actually happened. He also used to stay at the Biltmore Hotel in New York for months at a time and wreak havoc with the guests. Again, the operator cousins were an essential part of the operation. One stunt involved his impersonating, alternately, Monty Wooley and Woody Herman, both of whom were staying in the hotel; and were at the time bitter enemies because of Woody's having stolen away Monty's mistress; or the other way around. He somehow managed to arrange a party that they both were invited to which turned into a drunken brawl that made the headlines in the New York papers the next day. Etc.

My online friend Lesley, geeky cool slacker poet from British Columbia, and I used to try to transact trans-continental/national urban adventures. We'd have a plan. It would usually be me scripting the thing and Lesley carrying it out. For example, one time we decided that she needed to go buy a bunch of girlie make-up and a mirror and then sit in a cafe all afternoon being the perfect narcissist. Just trying on different stuff at her table and staring at herself in the mirror. To inject a little energy into the adventure, she'd sometimes aim the mirror at guys who were staring at her. Just briefly. Then back to total self-absorption. She'd come back later and write-up these hilarious accounts of what she did and who approached her and what they said. Another time, there was this guy she thought was kind of cute; hip with a slight hint of menace about him. We decided that she should wear some kind of safari outfit and a net and hang out and wait for him, make some eyes at him, see what happened. For all his attitude, he was never able to say anything to her at all. He completely froze. Though a couple months later at some bar she was completely ripped and the guy walked up to her and said: 'Hey, you're that lion tamer girl, aren't you. What's up with that?' She feigned complete non-comprehension. I think the denoument was the guy got trashed and hit on her for the rest of the night. He was completely freaked out by the whole thing. Maybe some of her friends had to intervene. The menace part wasn't just an act. I must have some of her write-ups somewhere.

My friend Steve takes me to task for my comment on rummaging around through cracked software, after my righteous rant re: Napster from a few weeks ago. I pointed out that my attitude was the same w/ the software as with the music. Anything I end up using I'll buy. Um, yep.

:: 10:05 AM [+] ::
...

Notes from Underwater

- Yesterday's waves were big menacing fun. We pull up to Old Silver and Andrew says: 'Cool. Ok, Quentin. Let's play 'White Caps'.' I think Andrew and Quentin have probably invented several thousand games that only they know the rules to. Once in the water, Andrew is transported. We know not whither. But the boy is 'gaiety transfiguring all that dread' in action. I was having own zen wave oneness fun. Though there was a bizarre moment of terror as well.

- Went to see my brother's band last night. It's kind of a warmup for our gig on Saturday night. Was a bunch of fun. Robbie Jarvis' face effulgent with the effects of pulling Jimi Hendrix' 'Spanish Castle Magic' together. Now there's a song I want to cover. On the other hand, I was also thinking yesterday I'd like to record 'A Foggy Day'.

- I've got a cd full of reams of cracked software to try out and master in order to create a few virile dance tracks for the couple of remaining things I want to get done for the
record. But as I stare at the listing of stuff, I feel overwhelmed by the ancient myriad of possibility. Fuck it. Time to unload a few things and begin.

- Out of the blue someone asked me what religion I was last night. I said, 'Uh, buddhist episcopalian animist, steeped in the King James, Shakespeare, Bach and the Tao.
Big conversation stopper. But I thought it was a weird question.

- Last night about 2 a.m. a beautiful rainstorm. I was just lying in bed watching Anne breathing in her sleep and the rain pounded out gorgeous tribal unpurged musical imagery. It had been threatening for hours, so it was also a kind of blessed relief. Then suddenly several F-18s scrambling from Otis flew right over the house. A really terrible sound. I suppose I'm meant to feel comforted. But I just held onto Anne and started reciting 'Dover Beach' to myself.

:: 11:37 AM [+] ::
...

Sitting here in the kitchen in falmouth and Andrew's CDs are on the table. He brought 4 of them down with him. They are: Basement Jaxx, 'Rooty'; James Kelly, Paddy O'Brien, Daithi Sproule [fiddle, accordian, guitar trio], 'Traditional Music of Ireland'; Miles Davis 'ESP'; Frank Sinatra, 'Songs for Swingin' Lovers'. FYI.

------------------

The other night my friend Dave described to me research that shows if you put a monkey in a situation where it's the best at something, its brain becomes awash in seratonin and the monkey is happy. It turns out to be the case with humans as well. Moreover, relativizing or perspectivist thinking ("well, yeah, but I'm only the best basketball player amongst these 9 year-olds") seems to have little or no effect in dampening this seratonin-spurting trigger. This would argue for everyone getting out and finding little ponds to be big fish in.

-------------------

Here's my 9/11 song, which sort of haunts me, whatever the merits of the song. Words are here. Obviously a private bit of processing on those events. In addition to the missing slinky curtis mayfield guitar part, one is to imagine large gospel chorus and real human claps flamming away at the finish.

:: 9:07 AM [+] ::
...

Last night Anne and I went to a surprise birthday party for my most durable friend/de facto brother David. It was at his new S.O. Dominique's in Cambridge. A whole bunch of David's friends and/or neuropsych/psychiatrist colleagues were gathered in Dominique's cozy, nicely shaded Cambridge back yard. Food was great and since Dominique is Belgian the desert table was completely over the top. For a while it was mostly shop talk, but at some point David, David's sister Sarah and I got on a roll telling sandwichmassachusetts stories (twist my arm) and then things took a mighty turn for the surreal. I told the amazing story of Scott Holt (coming here soon) and my serendipitous, sad story about Shawn, my first love. David told a story about his running the jr. prom committee (during a time of admittedly protracted unrequited love) and resigning when they wouldn't adopt his proposal to cancel the prom outright because the pitiless Junior girls were going to procure dates with Junior boys, get them to rent tuxes, buy corsages and alcohol and then perfidiously drop them for their older boyfriends as soon as the formal broke up and the real partying began. He was hooted down, of course, by all the Neville Chamberlains who went on to experience things pretty much as predicted by David. And, ok, speaking of durable. One other thing. Today I come clean (sorry Josh): I've had a durable crush on Lisa dating back to ~ 3/4 of the way through the previous century. Or since whenever it was I met her, which I think was at some harvard dorm party when I was visiting David. Though I no longer remember things like dates and places. And since >95% of my crushes have been on lesbians, what was it about Lisa? She's married to Josh and has two boys. Well, I know the answer. It's the Jokes. Lisa is a non-stop wonder of verbal ridiculousness. Like a Rosalind/Falstaff/Touchstone rolled into one and come to life. From the moment she arrives anywhere, she's ON. Jokes and puns flying. There was some conversation going on about divorces and she said something about just taking on a second husband. Or something. I said, 'Well, that's big of you.' Lisa snaps her head in my face and instantly quips: 'Do you mean that's bigamy?'

Anyway, now I'm back to Falmouth for a whole week! of impersonating a potted plant. An empty picture frame. A missing ceiling. Talking to the sand. Banishing paint and confine. Finding the moisture. Limbo's anti-volcanoes. The lissome sane fullness of not having to care.

:: 10:55 AM [+] ::
...

After a surreal forty-eight hours, had a joyous day picking Andrew up in Putney, Vt. Left at the crack of dawn and got there just as his concert was beginning. The ensemble had changed a bit from the previous year. But Sarah Cantor was still directing and other returnees included Will McCraw on all kinds of weirdo wind instruments and the amazing Anthony DiBeneditto, pitch black hair down his back, on harpsichord. The hour-long set began with Dowland's 'Lachrimae Antiquae'. Andrew had a cello solo just after the opening so of course I was having optical focus problems w/in about 20 seconds. Other highlights for me were Anthony D. ripping apart a killer Dominico Scarlatti Sonata (the program had no opus # and since he wrote about 500 of the things I can't just go put on a CD) and the Canzona #2 by Giovanni Priuli, which changed meter about every 12 measures. Afterwards we ate and then strolled around as Andrew pointed out various of his favorite sites and hugged and joked with the incredibly close friends he always seems to develop. Just below the crest of an adjacent mountain there's a wonderful elliptical clearing. Andrew said that when he got homesick he'd run outside and just stare at the ellipse. It reminded him of a mysterious lost world and assured him that other stuff existed. Like his family. He had slightly more homesickness this year. Mostly because of sleep deprivation. He told me that at night the sounds revealed by the silence were haunted and kept him awake. Indeed Sarah called me at one point to ask if she could give him some benedryl to take on a weekend camping trip, things were getting so bad. But even insomnia had its pleasant side; as Andrew spent about fifteen minutes describing to me the kinds of amazing games that mist coming in and out of the Green Mountain valleys at 4 a.m. can play. As we walked to Andrew's dorm I met some of his best friends, like Noah, a poet who lives in Manhattan and Ellis, a 17 year old writer and cartoonist ('amazing' according to Andrew), also from Manahattan (his mom watched the towers go down from a scarily small number of blocks away). Ellis and I discussed bands and movies (he gave a thumbs up endorsement of Andrew's suggestion - from the time he was 5 years old - that I call my band 'Central Business Machines') and then Andrew and he recreated their performance for me of a slow motion 'Fight Club' parody they did for the Last Night of Camp gala. It's also gratifying to see how many girls Andrew has as friends. His other best pal was Hanna, ('Dad, this is Hanna. She loves Sonic Youth and Cat Power.') who was apparently also nocturnal and would regularly recruit Andrew for commando missions to do stuff like get 3 a.m. parties going via precision rock throwing on select windows. As Andrew was saying good-bye she launched into this mad rant about how in love she was with Forrest, this slightly pompadoured violist, and pleading with Andrew to do whatever it took to make sure Forrest came next year and did Andrew have Forrest's number and email and did Andrew see how clean the white shirt Forrest had on during the concert was, etc. As we walked away I said to Andrew, 'That's pretty intense.' Andrew said, 'Dad. She thinks Forrest's an idiot'. 'Oh.'

On the way back to Brookline Andrew regaled me with about a hundred stories until he finally fell asleep. Stories like this: 'One day we had this dorm bonding trip to a bowling alley. Danner, our dorm head, was driving us in his mini-van and it was Nathaniel from Brookline, you know him, Noah, Nathan [a poet from Maine and a wonderful kid], Jonathan, Mike and Yaz, a Japanese exchange student. Suddenly we pulled up behind this green truck and the driver is this perfect redneck. Fat; purple face; greasy black hair with a vast bald spot. And on his back bumper he's got two bumper stickers. One says: 'STRAIGHT from VERMONT'. With 'from' so tiny it's supposed to look like 'STRAIGHT VERMONT'. The other one says: 'REAL VERMONTERS SPREAD SHIT; THEY DON'T PACK IT'. So Danner says: 'Alright guys, listen up. As I pass this truck, everyone flip this bastard off.' So he guns the mini-van and as we pass the redneck we all smile and flip him the bird. Even Yaz. The guy goes berserk. Just pumping his fist at us. The best part is Jonathan had told us that since we were going to a bowling alley we all needed to dress up in the weirdest getups we could come up with. So like Nathaniel had on this sailor's suit he got in Northampton. Not the white kind, but this awesome blue one. I had on this biker shirt with all kinds of moon designs on it. Mike had on a massive straw hat. And Nathan was wearing a blue Sunday best suit. Oh, and Yaz had on the tightest jeans he was able to find in the dorm. The redneck looked like he was going to drive right off the road.'

When we got home Gabe and Nikko were there. Everyone was excited to see Andrew and listen to his ridiculous stories. I cooked dinner and we all screamed and yelled through maybe the final bachelor dinner of this excellent summer. Afterwards Nikko and I were going to play some music, but I ended up getting preoccupied writing, yawn, another new song. It has this weird modal harmony line for Bridget, which I was battling with. I think I must've been autonomically thinking of this Orlando di Lasso duet from Andrew's concert. I don't know. And it's only 45 seconds long. So they all multi-playered WarCraft III and stayed up to watch Saturday Night Live. [This morning Gabe was telling me about a Jeopardy parody they did with Bjork as one of the contestants. After some trippy answer she gives, the host says: 'Are you Icelandic or retarded?']

In the morning, another sign of the end of this phase of summer: Zack's bass lying in my dining room next to the stereo. He'd come in in the middle of the night and left to catch a crack of dawn flight for a camping trip in Michigan. With Quentin out of camp his A+ stint as Quentin's best buddy in Falmouth is over. I felt really sad for some reason. I guess I hate endings. I really need an eschatologist. But since I don't have one I tried to picture Andrew's ancient and divine ellipse across the valley from Mt. Putney. And it helped.

:: 8:47 PM [+] ::
...

Art came for dinner Tuesday night and we split a bottle of wine and discussed epistemology; specifically the recent swirl around Stanley Fish's defense of post-modernism against attacks from people like Edward Rothstein. Without going into this business very deeply, I can't help but comment that Fish (for once) seems so reasonable in his pieces on this topic. And that his comment that much of the criticism is ignorant isn't just him slashing. I find disheartening amounts of the contemptuous dismissiveness of post-modern epistemology really not to have moved much beyond Johnson's famous, hilarious and utterly beside the point kicking-a-stone refutation of Bishop Berkley. Anyway, we played through a bunch of my tunes and then went into a bit of bluegrass before heading out to the Cantab.

The Cantab, always packed lately, was mobbed like I've never seen it. Apparently that Boston Globe Magazine piece on Sunday hit a nerve. Of course I didn't notice intially how extra packed it was. We went downstairs upon arrival and it's a little less dense there. Jeremy and Alison were there and Jeremy was well on the way toward the gutter and the sawdust and the oyster shells. The bartender, whom I obscurely, perhaps dangerously, referred to as 'the Walter Mondale of bartenders' since he wasn't Mike-of-the-Specials, was lining up full priced 'specials' at the bar, which Jeremy seemed to be going through like gatorade. I really didn't do much playing. The band featured one of my favorite banjoists Loch Benson, who seems to be getting just better and better (though it's hard to get used to him not wearing a fez and a dashiki). So we went upstairs to do some whooping. Zack showed up but Geoff Bartley recruited him to do the sound. So while the sound was consequently the best I've ever heard it there, I was temporarily without someone to spew my beam of running spiritually anarchic commentary at. Which can be dangerous if I'm not among friends. For instance, as soon as Zack left some woman I've never seen before commented on how 'cool' it was that I was drinking wine and asked me what I thought about the band. I told her I thought it was time for a return to Monarchy. Fortunately Bridget showed up about then. She looked 7'1" and it occurred to me that I was maybe blotto for the first time in my life. But no. I was okay. She was wearing huge heels, had on a cowboy hat and, indeed, Jeremy really was bobbing back and forth like a penguin in an auburn fog. Afterwards we played outside on the street and were joined by a blues/soul singing cat with a harmonica and with Greg, Hide, Jeremy, Nick and probably others, Eric?, accomanied this guy in stuff ranging from standard blues to Al Green to 'Stayin' Alive'. It felt both silly and yet totally uncompromised, like we stepped out from under history's gray bucket for a moment. It wasn't Cabaret Voltaire, but the combination formed a nice new chain.

Last night Bridget came over for a low-key bit of tweaking some stuff and then just running tunes, before I leave for Falmouth for ten days (yay!). She played me a totally excellent low-fi gem on her new MiniDisk player. It's called 'Spoon Bending' and was written completely independent of my recent imprecations about her telekinetic energy. I said it's going on the record, as is. She smiled and the spoon in my shirt pocket withered. Anyway, here's some more audio:

* Dave's Ant Farm: A poem sausaged into a song. Needs some vocal tweaks, Bridget's funky nylon guitar, plus Zack's bass (tonight). The, ahem, poem is right here.

* The Girl Who Laughed Like Unmortared Brickwork: Another poem. This is actually going to be a short pumping dance number. But this versions isn't. Lyrics, plus transcript of creative process verite is here, right where it should be.

* Secret Place: A song originally written for Inner beauty that just seemed timely. This is a slow piano demo version. I'm thinking this one over, arrangement-wise. Lyrics are here.
:: 1:21 PM [+] ::
...

I have a small announcement for anyone I've ever played pool with: I was recently recalling how my friend had this huge pool table in the room next to the music room our band, 'The Clap', practiced in when I was in eighth grade. [Somewhat bewilderingly, only the stodgy biology teacher, Ms. Phillips, got the jejune attempt at a joke [she laughed; and was kinda my friend thereafter]; the rest of the faculty, smiling at the 500 lurid signs we hung around the school must've thought, i don't know, we wanted applause? I guess we did.] I have no idea how they even got the pool table up there. The thing was collossal. Anyway, I remember once experiencing a rare moment of bleakness. My normal place of meditation was at the very top of a huge sugar maple in my back yard, which had an amazing form-fit seat, facing the Atlantic Ocean. I could even fall asleep there. It was incredible. It's where I should have gone. But I was bleak, not my standard, quiet euphoric. So I was confused. I went over to my friend's and just walked inside his house and up the back stairs. His mother shouted out he wasn't home. I said: 'That's okay'. (It never occurred to me until just now that it might not've been okay with her.) When I got upstairs I thought for a minute about just wailing away on his drums. But the pool table looked even more inviting. Big oak legs, the smoking-room archetypal green cloth on slate. I just lay down and fell asleep. It was one of those sedated-like dreamless knock-out sessions. I woke up a couple of hours later and went home. It occurred to me recently that's the reason I always get vaguely bored and restless when I play pool. It's my fucking eidetic memory of a pool table as one of the best, most curative beds I've ever slept in!

---------------------

Another one of the best weeks of my life: wasted. j/k. But it's pitch black here as it nears midnight. Total Nstar blackout. Just me and my laptop. Earlier, Gabe and I were walking around Coolidge Corner getting milk and ice cream. We were discussing the virtues of an open society after some back and forth over a feature we saw on the front of a New York tabloid enumerating specifics on how a terrorist might use a power plant to wreak some havoc. His last thought was that maybe we should divide the country into two zones: 1) the censored zone where anyone who likes things censored for them can live; 2) the uncensored zone for everyone else. I said, 'Maybe we already have that.' Eventually I had to change the topic. You can only speak so long about the spectre of terror with your child. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Though it was slightly odd to me that by the time we got to back to our neighborhood, all was in darkness. Like the battle of Britain. Gabe said: 'I want some high beams for my eyes.' I laughed. Reached up to put my arm around his impossibly high shoulders.

-------------------

Last Monday Bridget came over for some recording. I wasn't in my usual state of complete preparedness, but it was really the only night that worked. She was feeling somewhat under the weather (see below) but managed some grace under pressure (see below). We've been doing a bunch of performerish things. Pretending we'll gig. I'm finally thinking we have some musical overlap in, like, Bjork. We both like dance stuff. Plus Bjork's words can be both femslap-upside-the-head AND trippy as a banana boat. I think I asked her about Bjork but I forget what she said. Anyway, pigpiles of audio below.

Tuesday went to, well, ok, the cantab (featured in the Globe magazine today, with great quote from Geoff Bartley about how true bluegrass music is so fiery it could never be mainstream). Mostly stayed downstairs. Both because Zack and Josh and Jeremy were there, but also because the main band has this despotic leader, full of contumely. Corrosive. That dare not speak its name. But let it be known that I can now check off another important personal growth+development experience: I've drunk moonshine. Zack and Ritter and I were sitting at bar and suddenly Josh's friend Carrie (?) says: 'Wanna go drink moonshine?' And I'm the only one laughing. Everyone else follows her straightfaced upstairs and out into the back lot where she pulls out, i shit you not, a mason jar (!) full of a clear liquid. We start passing it around. Turns out she's from Tennessee (or one of those places that'd probably be in the Censored Zone) and had just returned. I was expecting it to taste like rocket fuel; you know, big manly chug, followed by my spraying the entire assembly with a fine mist of distilled corn liquor as my upper GI tract says, 'no NO NOOOOOO!@' But it was smooth. Really. Me 'n' my moonshine.

Wednesday I went to a cookout at Gretchen's, which was kind of a birthday party for Gretchen. Gretchen's living with Barb so it was over there in Cambridgeport and a bunch of houses seemed to be joining in a canonical kind of urban hot fun in the summertime. I was mostly hanging with Art and Susan. Susan was telling some pretty good jokes, which I forget, as I do all jokes. Art and I then went to my place and we hung out with Gabe for a while and then played some music. I showed Art 'Saturn Jane' and he started charting it. Not sure what to do with it. The previous weekend I'd practiced it with Zack on drums and we just kinda flung it around the room like a dirty piece of bratwurst. Now I'm confused.

Thursday morning I wrote this new tune, called 'Bored With Me'. It's white indie-nerd trying to do smokey robinson. Actually, here's a fragment, recorded on mini-disk about 1 minute after I'd finished the song (c'mon guys, this is priceless bootleg fodder). The former's from about 30 minutes later, following a bizarre dizzy spell.

Thursday night I met Anne in Brookline for what's becoming a sweetly mysterious weekly ritual and then headed down to Falmouth for the weekend. Upon arrival Zack and Quentin served up a superb gourmet mexican feast, followed by some music and a series of bizarre male contests, like doing push-ups on a stool. Quentin's training to become a Marvel Comic book character. Actually, he told Anne that as soon as he gets out of high school he's going to move to Manhattan, get an apartment and start publishing his own comic books. A couple years ago during dot bong I would've said: "Cool idea, Quent." Now I just shut up, do my stool push-ups and think to myself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Next day spent big gobs of one of the best days of my life getting the Rock Lobster (Anne's '72 red Wagoneer) suitably road-worthy. As always, aided and abetted by my irascible older brother, whose birthday it was. I took him to lunch and then just rattled around, up and down the coast waving at all the neo-beach bums in their physics-obscuring SUVs.

After spending the late afternoon transferring tons of bits from my misc. recording devices to Zack's mac n motu unit, I whipped up a shrimp/risotto improvisee (courtesy of birthday boy), Zack dj'ing up a fine batch of eclectic music (what was the name of that strange indie band again? the one yr friend from virginia gave to you?). Then played some more music, tossed Q. around and wound up all buddha-ed out on the front lawn, listeninng to Zack run down his frenetic fall schedule and privately wondering what the fuck ever happened to Debord's exciting postulate that: "Leisure is the real revolutionary question."

Anyway, lots more revolutionary leisure occurred. Anne came down at 7 a.m. Saturday after dropping Gabe off at 6 a.m. for another weekend-eating crew meet; my friend Watts visited and played me a fucked-up Elvis Presley re-mix that's #1 in England; Art visited and stayed over (and finally did chart 'Saturn Jane'); Andrew called to say that one of his buddies in Vermont brought '69 Love Songs' and that they were spooting around Putney singing 'And nothing matters when we're dancing/In tat or tatters you're entrancing/Be we in Paris or in Lansing/Nothing matters when we're dancing.' And now it's midnight and the power's out and I'm weirding out and my laptop battery is screaming at me, so here's some audio. Have a nice day.

-------------------------

Audio:
* Bored With Me. Beautiful words.
* Bored With Me, fragment, 30 seconds after writing (recorded on mini-disk; and, btw, apologies for the corny reverb on all the MD recordings; somewhere in my x-fer process some bullshit reverb is being inserted; need to debug; too otherwise perplexed to do so right at the moment)
* Limbo Road, FU: a collage of fuckups and withering exchanges, Gustavo, all by way of capturing ->
* this very beatific prototypish, pre-bjorked up demo of Crown of Jennifer: a small thing, obscurely about my mommy going ta-ta. Beautiful words and scorching dialoghere
* Bird singing. What is says. MD recording from the deck off the master b.r. in falmouth. Listen closely and you can also hear Cape Cod Man Hammering, plus Chris, Jeremy and Zack discussing New Ideas in Europe. Or something.
* Mercy In Paint. Neo incredible string band tune w/ hippie epigone performance by me and faux hippie musings by bridget. This was 30 seconds after i'd trotted it out. Lacks sitar, oud, licorice and backwards flute. Lyrics and guitar experiment dialog here.
* Pop Off the Top. Whiteboy attempt afro-pop tune, immortalizing the time I threw a copy of Finnegan's Wake across Harvard Ave. Haven't taught this to Bridget yet.

Genug.
:: 6:22 PM [+] ::
...

I have a friend who's having a crisis of confidence. There are a variety of confidence crises. This particular species is one I have a name for. I call it 'composite fallacy'. (I know, Steve, you'll find it's not my coinage and means something completely different than my version. But hey, 'it's my blog, and I'll make shit up if I want to, make shit up if I want to'.) Like other crises of confidence, it results in an individual feeling unworthy or in a state of low self-esteem. Feeling unworthy is something common, and seems to me to be vaguely, fluctuatingly indexed to circumstance or chemistry. But there's a version of it where the causality seems especially pernicious and vexed, and goes something like this: 'I'm no good because, well, look at Malachai, he can play Bach fugues on the harpsichord; and Electra has a green thumb; and Molly Bloom has a good bod; and Moses can get the sun in his mouth.' Composite fallacy is the pysychological predisposition to roll all of that dispersed competence up into a single imaginary entity against which the composite fallacist compares himself. The fallacy lies obviously in the fact that while Moses can indeed swallow the sun, he has a very shitty body, which the fallacist for some reason is prevented from recognizing. It's actually even worse than that. Often, in the fallacist's tortured imagination, not only does Moses possess sun-swallowing abilities, but the other enumerated talents to boot. Same with Malachai, Electra and Molly Bloom. Damn them. All appear to the CFist to be super human. So that super humanity seems the norm. Ergo, feelings of worthlessness. All for a mirage of a cause. So let's all try to stamp out composite fallacy wherever it may be found. If your friend Medea says to you: 'Everytime I see Martha Stewart I just feel like total shit. She's so perfect,' don't hesitate to mention that Martha will soon be rotting in jail, overweight and watching too much tv. Ok?

:: 4:51 PM [+] ::
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I've been in Falmouth since early a.m. of the 4th. Gabe and I just got back. The usual paradox of frenzied pursuit of relaxation to the point of exhaustion. Of course 'relaxation' on the cape has this strange property of regularly morphing into riotous living. My one regret is missing the vestiges of the old world Independence day activities in my former home town of sandwich. They were over by the time Gabe and I arrived in sylvan n. falmouth. A bit later on Jeremy and Chris joined all of us, sans Andrew, plus Zack, plus enough of my various family members and the extended crew of wacked-out lawyers, judges, WHOI PhDs, lefties, nieces, nephews, etc. to make for a perpetual critical mass of movable feasting.

We started right off with picking just to get our collective bearings, followed almost immediately by a preposterous 2-on-2 basketball game. Temp was 90 degrees, humidity 80%, the sun just baking the basketball court. After a rocky start, J-robb and I got into a first order approximation of a give-and-go rhythm and out-lasted the diabolical Zack/Chris amalgamation. From there we hobbled to Megansett Beach and bobbed around in the bathtub warm great green mother of us all like four clumps of flesh-toned sea algae. After al fresco-like showers in the locker roomish master bath, we began readying for the Feast #1, a cookout at my sister's house. Anne had brought down a duffel bag sized sack of grillable stuffs, marinated every which way but loose, and there were tons of vegetables and drinks and deserts. I was especially happy to see that Peter's friend Kenny, a tough, cerebral, earthy new york lefty, had driven down from Truro to hang out. We immediately jumped into the pros and cons of Don DeLillo's 'Underworld', and a general discussion of weird words. Afterwards Zack, Chris, Jeremy and I did a set of bluegrass and swing in the twilight; Zack finishing things off with a pretty damned thrilling, unaccompanied, double- and triple-stop filled rendition of 'Amazing Grace,' aka Amazing Bass. After desert we lolled inside for a while, Quentin and my cousin Vicky's son Ben regaling us with jokes, alternately precocious and just plain weird. Back at our place, the intrepid musicians decided it was time to go barhopping and bravely ventured toward the turgid mass of humanity that ritually gathers in Falmouth Heights for the huge fireworks display. Anne and I just lay on the bed and talked for two hours while Gabe and Quentin watched 'The Piano' (Q:"Dad, Harvey Keitel has this gross brown spot on his butt. I'm serious.") We were just falling asleep when the phone rang. It was Andrew calling from camp in Vermont. Turns out some kid there had gone berserk, some drug overdose or psychosomatic overdose, and was running around screaming, sobbing, smashing his head against walls. Andrew was so freaked out he said he couldn't go into his dorm room without crying. So a whole group of kids (mostly high school age; Andrew's one of the youngest kids there) just sat around together in the common area trying to calm one another down. I was dying to just drive up and give him a hug, but it's 4.5 hours away and it was midnight. Once he was calm, I said goodnight and we hung up. In the morning he seemed fine.

Next day I woke at 5 and went for a short run to see whether the fucking blister I'd got the day before playing basketball in my function-follows-form next-to-no-soled Converse low tops had healed. I'd resisted the many, ahem, offers from Zack and Chris to get me a knife and some Jack Daniels for a blister lancing; but the blister was healed enough to allow for a nice slow jog. Once the guests awoke (no trumpet reveille this time) we headed to the North Falmouth diner for some of their exquisite fry-o-lator avoirdupois. Chris and I have this riff going about J.D. Crowe's suppurating pustulant face, like the human equivalent of the scariest corners of the darkest of fry-o-lators, baking in the sun, lesions spurting continually, but replaced just as continutally from the flesh petrie dish located in the blazing, living, rubicund, undulant area surrounding his inner jawline. This got extended to include notions like toilet bowls filled with whiskey, and aphoristic spin-offs like 'madder than J.D. Crowe when there's a line at the men's room' or Chris': 'your brain is like a jello mold of Crowe's whiskey piss'. Needless to say, this stuff reaches a kind of aesthetic apotheosis whenever we're in range of the N.Falmouth Diner. My many hats off to Jeremey and Zack for their patience. After breakfast those guys met up with some friends and headed off to Oyster Harbors for a day and evening of near-violent comeptitions involving everything from basketball and bocci to tubing N2O and huffing anything you can light with a match. I, on the other hand, spent the day variously swimming, writing a song (I was shooting for ten), doing some cleanup and maintenance stuff, putting up a mail box for Z., and just hanging with Anne and boys. The evening consisted of seafood dinner out in the back yard; some night swimming; trying to write another song (I've gotta stop) and reading 'Love's Labours Lost'.

Saturday was my birthday and I woke at 5 again. I'd been making mini-disk recordings of the variety of religiously cool birds singing in the backyard. And for some reason the birds were absolutely berserk at 5. But I was feeling too feckless to get my recorder out and capture it. I remember telling myself I'd get it tomorrow (today). Sadly, this morning was overcast and there was a very muted response from the birds. Maybe they were annoyed I'd missed them yesterday. Anyway, I finally got up and on my way into the kitchen I heard Quentin croak from the loft: 'Happy Birthday, dad. I love you.' Just as I was thinking that nothing could possibly top that, he started singing: 'Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you'. I was in heaven. And then it took one of Quentin's neuralizing hair-pin turns: 'Happy birthday George Bush/ Happy birthday to you.' [Yes, 7/6 is that asshole's birthday too.] I ran up the stairs to the loft and threatened to paper-plane him over the railing. He was laughing so hard, legs and arms spidering all over me, I thought he was going to pass out. No, I thought I was going to pass out.

After breakfast Gabe, Anne and I all suited up and donned our numbers for the Paul White Memorial North Falmouth Road Race. Things had cooled enough so that the running was superb. It's a great course that wends around N. Falmouth, through town, down to the ocean, finishing at the Library. Gabe took the family 1st ("I'm just going to take it easy, jog lightly, and assume I'll come in first overall"), followed by Anne, followed by me. Quentin met me for the last half mile, in his bare feet. I'd been running with this random black lab and the three of us came across the finish line together in a photo finish.

In the afternoon we did some more picking, bunch of Django swing tunes, then went to Megansett for yet another swim, where we decided we were going to start a power trio called Perry Garcia (Chris was wearing sea algae on his head, claiming to be Jerry Garcia; but since they looked more like Perry Farrell's dreads, I dubbed him Perry Garcia) that does jacked-up thrashing versions of Grateful Dead tunes. We'll be making our debut at Zack's September Nahant party. Be there. We already do a blitzkreigian 'Casey Jones'. Chris does a wicked death metal dwarf grunt.

While we were starting preparations for the evening, Chris and Zack were giving Quentin a law boards-like examination on the big fat manual for a video game Gabe had just bought. Quentin had been studying the thing for the past day and both Chris and Zack swore he had total photographic recall of the entire manual. Chris would ask something like: "what are the 11 properties of X". Quentin would pause for a few seconds and then just start reciting with perfect fidelity pages worth of text to answer the ridiculous question, like he was reading from a page inside his head. They did this for over an hour.

My birthday celebration really started kicking in at about 4. Anne gave me my card, a custom-made beauty featuring a gargantuan close-up of my favorite red poppy; plus a note inside that made me cry. I also got misc stuff, including Flaubert's 'Sentimenal Education'. My friends Tom and Linda came over with a bunch of their provisional microsociety friends; and Tom, a bona fide gourmet grill chef, brought over a brisket, fresh off the grill, that had Stanley making some pretty valiant attempts at speaking English. After dinner we made a conga line across the street to Ruth and Eric's for a 250-person party, w/ live funk soul brother check it out now cover band and onsite rock climbing. I talked with some judge friend of my sister's about Shakespeare for a while and then we all danced for a couple of hours. Since my version of dancing consists, to a large extent, of constantly bouncing up-and-down without regard to tempo, I eventually pulled a muscle in my calf; something the basketball, the road race and all the swimming and biking had failed to do. Dancing would be better than anything if you could shut gravity off. We went to my sister's for a while and then went home. I was happy and Wallace Stevens came into my head, the way he sometimes does: 'This is the day/that we desired, a day of blank, blue wheels,/Involving the four corners of the sky.'

Later, as I was lying in bed reading, Zack tapped on the door. He said, c'mere quick. I followed him into the computer room. There on the screen was an Ebay page featuring a picture of one of those astonishing, ravishing, sublimely stoidal Casio guitar-synths. Zack said: 'That was supposed to be yours my friend, but I just got scooped. But, hey, there's more where that came from.' I tried to say, No. No way, man. Don't do that. Please. But nothing came out. My left brain had finally been beaten senseless with the sticks of overwhelming family love and the camraderie of luminant friendship. Again.

Today Gabe and I drove back to Brookline. I want to record his beautiful desultory conversation, but I've run out of time. I have some audio to put up as well. Ok, then. In the immortal words of Mark Miller: More later.

:: 2:26 PM [+] ::
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The other thing I did this weekend, besides mowing the lawn, was hang out with my younger two brothers on Saturday night. My youngest brother lives in Boulder, Colorado and I hadn't seem him in a year. We weren't expecting him because his wife had a minor medical issue crop up just as they were leaving. But there we were, sitting in my sister's backyard when this unfamiliar car pulls up their dirt road. A vaguely familiar-looking guy sat in the passenger seat. He gave us all the finger. My brother-in-law was the first to recognize that it was my brother.

I haven't described Bill before. I love him a lot. He's a guy filled with lots of interesting, gentle contradictions and enigmas. He's in many ways the most literate of us, or at least the guy who had the deepest philosophical grasp on what he read. Though he's also into crazy stuff like Extreme Fighting. I remember him reading Camus and Hamlet very early on and truly internalizing them. One time, in the midst of his shooting up to his full height of 6'3", he ran into a neighbor, Carol Morrow. She hadn't seen him in a while and said: "My god, Bill, I can't believe how much you've grown!" Bill answered, in his laconic fashion: "Yes. I'll be dead before you know it." Or when he first got married, at a disastrously young age to a disastrous partner, his stance about why he was doing this was right out of 'L'etranger'. Me: 'But Bill, why are you marrying her? You don't have to.' Bill: 'Because she asked me to.'

Despite his bookishness and his beat road trips with Swedish exchange students he was also a very earthy, outdoorsy guy. He worked, as did my other younger brother, as a fisherman and when the seasickness eventually became unbearable, he built houses. He went to RISD for a year, but quit and started building houses full-time, which he still does. He's also extremely gentle and generous. And yet, below the surface, or under unpredictable kinds of stimulation, he's capable of real rage. He's the only one of us who actually got into fights after high school. (My last was in 7th grade.) And he's huge to boot; which is perhaps related to why he gets into fights. I don't know.

On Saturday night he showed up with his 2nd wife, who's great, and his daughter Emily, aka Lou, a stunning beauty. He was extremely garrulous and happy to see everyone and just launched into a million stories, some about his current life but, over the course of the evening, increasingly about crazy old cape codders from our youth. He talked about he and his friend Billy Eccleston visiting this hermit-like descendant of an ancient Cape Cod family, the Hoxies (family settled in about 1630). Crawford Hoxie was about 70 at the time and lived on several hundred acres of land (now the site, no doubt, of several of the type of unspeakably hideous developments that certain cape contractor miscreants will burn in hell for) out in the middle of nowhere. Like lots of these cape outliers, he seemingly had no job and only appeared in town for supplies or to gas up his truck or to go to the Yankee Clipper and drink. Even then, it was rare to see him. Bill said Crawford was unfomfortable in the extreme with them being at his house, even though he knew our family and Bill's friend's. But he awkwardly showed them around his land and then took them inside the house for a quick snort out of a bottle filled with some kind of clear liquid. Something from Crawford's still, no doubt. As they were leaving he said: 'Thanks a lot for coming over boys. Don't ever do it again. Okay?'

My two younger brothers' best friend was another 70 year-old named Clarence Van Buskirk. He ran the Highway Department and was larger than life in the way that character actors like Walter Brennan in 'Rio Bravo' and John Huston in anything are. Giant, practically hairless dutchman's head, massive arms, cro-magnon hunch, jutting lower jaw. His speaking voice was so distinctive that it was impossible not to imitate him. So everyone did. My brothers would just go over to his house and hang out and listen to his amazing stories about growing up in a Sandwich, Mass. that had changed remarkably little since the Glass factory went bust in the 1880s. Or drive around with him in his massive Cadillac during snow storms, drinking from a jug. And of course since there was pretty much always drinking involved, things would often get out of hand, especially when Clarence's immediate family was around. Bill was telling us about a time Clarence Jr. was over visiting as well as Clarence's brother, Bogus. (Clarence had another son, Beavo, who died of asphyxiation following a bar fight w/ members of the crazy Cahoon clan, mortal enemies of the Van Buskirks). For some reason, Clarence, Jr. kept slipping mysteriously out of the house and then coming back. Bogus got suspicious and watched out the window. He saw Clarence, Jr. get into his car, pull out a jug of wine, guzzle it, then scurry back into the kitchen to drink Clarence Sr.'s whiskey. Bogus was sitting at the table with Clarence, Sr. and my two brothers. Maybe a couple of other drunks. Bogus was telling some fetid tale about a guy named Bull Govoni, who lived alone and typically had his clothesline full of women's undergarments. Clarence, Jr. was pretty hammered by now and he lit into Bogus about being 'A goddamned gossipy bastard'. Bogus lashed back: "What are you, some fucking wino? Drinking in your car like a gawwwwd-dammmmmned old woman." Clarence, jr. at this point flew into a rage, picked up a hammer that was lying on the kitchen table and smashed Bogus in the shoulder. Clarence, Sr. sat in his chair laughing as Bogus, howling in pain, ran to the stove, grabbed the boiling tea kettle and began chasing Clarence II around the house trying to scald him to death. Eventually the chase led out the front door, at which Clarence, Sr. jumped up and locked the door. The remaining party had a good laugh listening to Bogus and Clarence, Jr. running around the yard trying to kill each other.

One other story. One fourth of July (a huge day in the life of our small -- though large in the summertime -- town) a contemporary of ours, Dave, and a bunch of his friends, who had been drinking most of the day, decided to play some basketball. Dave was a fisherman at the time which, as in Melville's time, meant you tended to be slightly berserk whenever you were on land. Dave had sandals on and was getting increasingly pissed off at slipping and sliding around. So he eventually decided he'd do better in bare feet. This worked for a while. But by the time they'd finished a couple hours of full court 3-on-3 the parts of his feet that weren't completely skinned were covered with bulging blisters. Dave screamed over to Mike Finnerty: 'Take my knife and cut them!' Finnerty said, 'No way'. Dave screamed: 'CUT THEM!' So Dave lay on the ground and Finnerty got out a swiss army knife and started lancing the blisters. All the while Dave was pouring a steady stream of Jack Daniels onto his feet and shrieking so loud you could hear it for miles. Several times Finnerty offered to stop. But Dave insisted. 'KEEP CUTTING!!' he bellowed, a second bottle of Jack Daniels alternately pouring into his mouth and onto his open wounds. Eventually they stuck Dave in a wheelbarrow, pushed it up the hill and dumped him on his front lawn. (As a footnote: The last time I saw Dave he was happily married, proud father of a couple kids and was delivering a heartrending eulogy for his brother who was killed on 9/11.)

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My friend Chris writes that he's going to see the second show of the Who's tour. Should be intense. Perhaps I can tease a review out of him.

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RIP: Philip Whalen, 1923-2002.
:: 10:08 AM [+] ::
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Pete Townsend's blog, w/ some thoughts on why they're continuing w/ the Who tour.
:: 1:19 PM [+] ::
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