Unhealthy Distractions: a Travelogue

The Time Following Rilo

2012-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Originally published in Stone Highway Review, Dec. 2011

I wake up Sunday staring like a dog staring, a bone in its mouth.

Now it rains.

It was everything as you imagine it being beforehand: the patio with the paint flaking off in tiny spirals, a wooden cornice and a root knobbled walkway. Nature as perfect as your own back yard. Inside there is plush carpet, deep blue and the kind you could grab handfuls of while getting screwed from behind. I found a new boy named Ben, a name I had never loved before. We made pasta and all the other useless things that lovers make, drinking bottle after bottle of red wine without labels. The sex was so hard it bruised your ankles. It was spring, of course, and needed to be this way.
Fresh bread, we baked, and all the sugar-coated drugs that made our lives slug by as if they were syrup themselves. Heroin, candy, cigarettes. We even cooked up some of the wallets we stole, just softened them up over medium heat and ate them with everything inside.
I open my eyes and its all still there, him and her behind me whispering.
A pair of wings to keep me warm.
With a slow groan I open up, letting the sweet flower in my belly roll out - out of my mouth and down my chin where it becomes a dark spot on the carpet I will contemplate the next day while vacuuming.

Spooky Story ContestI

2011-11-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

I really thought I was going to win HCTC's annual Spooky Story Contest this year. I didn't, but here it is.

You can hear the chosen story read on-air at http://www.serverroom.us/radio/269251

Thieves

Brylle is walking fast, his footsteps popping as if the ground were bubble wrapped and his sandled feet high-heeled. He has just found a purse, a stumbled-upon item though he wonders how anyone could have missed it, its gold-sequined sides reflecting the rainwater around it like the scales of a September mudfish. He is making haste to avoid strangers as a boy like him with a purse like this was sure to arouse suspicion.
Next to the purse had been a locket, also golden, and two rain-stained cigarettes that had rolled out onto the cracked asphalt. Brylle had considered them - the possibility of drying them out over low heat and smoking one with his friend – but heard footsteps and so left them. He was heading for his friend’s house, a friend who had once before scolded him for stealing but would most likely understand the situation now: valuable-looking things found tossed on the street. Brylle believed, as did his friend, in fate and this would have been a fool’s chance to pass up.
Cutting around a chain-linked corner he saw the shortcut that lead through a neighbor’s yard, just a sidewalk and twenty short feet of grass between him and the screened-in porch where he would soon be sitting. The path was blocked by a small brown boy who had parked his tricycle there. Brylle was stuck, not wanting to step over or around the child as it seemed a mere brush might topple him. He could see his friend’s porch from here. Fall leaves on the roof, shadows laughing inside.
“Every story has a beginning,” the boy said.
--
It was Nina’s first time in the Philippines. She was on a three day holiday away from her job in Japan where she worked as an English teacher. The plan was to meet her friend Andrea at the airport and relax for a few days with long white beaches, outdoor markets and maybe a puff of the local smoke. On her first tour of Cebu, however, only hours after the plane had touched down, she was amazed by the juxtaposition of drooping fruit trees and the rib-cagey boys just lying on the sidewalk, the little dogs that picked through alley trash – the white-furred ones brown and mottled as if someone had spilled coffee all over them – and cowered away or bared their teeth when she approached.
“This is the real Cebu,” Andrea said as they were dropped off from the airport at her hotel on Mango Street. “We’re going to take you out for a good time tonight.” The good time turned out to be a night club, a dark clapboard room with bass-driven music. Despite the Day-Glo swaths of paint on the wall and the fact that the place was filled with grinding Filipinos she could have been anywhere.
“Let’s go to the beach! I want to go to the beach!” Nina yelled into her friend’s ear. It felt like such a change to be speaking English: to order a drink in English like a whiskey and Coke with no lemon and there be no confusion about the lemon like there always was back in Tokyo, Nina yelling, “No lemon!” and making a throat-cutting motion, something that translated remarkably well considering what it might look like to a bystander. She ordered two more, one for her and one for Andrea, who said, “Whooo! The beach!”
After three more night clubs and several more cocktails the two of them stumbled out to one of the nearby beaches, avoiding the octopus arms of the nightclub men and the beachcombers as they said, “Where you going? What you doing? You need help?” It wasn’t until Nina was back at the hotel when she realized that her purse was missing; her cigarettes, the locket inside.
--
Back safely on his friend’s porch, Brylle opened the purse and dumped its contents onto the floor. A lighter, the locket and a wallet with a California state driver’s license, a credit card and $12 cash tumbled out. “That babae travels light, eh?” his friend said, picking up the locket and opening it. Brylle watched as the locket flew up and stuck to his friend’s face like a little cuyo, like a butterfly. His friend struggled, his cheeks wrinkling like the skin of an old egg. Brylle tried to wrap his fingers around the thing but it was as slick as a ghost, tried to pull but it wouldn’t come. His friend’s face turned ash grey and crumbled. The locket now looked more like a ghoulish oyster, slightly bigger than it was before. A long silver tongue lashed out, his face reflected on it. The boy with the tricycle was still standing outside, squinting up at them through the screen. Brylle opened his mouth to cry out and felt the air being pulled from his lungs.
--
Nina remembered the last time someone had tried to take the locket. It was stolen from her during a party at her house. She thought she knew who had done it but didn’t have any evidence to accuse the boy with. Sure enough, a week later it was back on her nightstand, the boy, his friends and a host of strangers between their house and hers being searched for by the local police department. She revered the thing, passed down through her family for generations, and tried not to think about the things it had done to get back to her. Loyalty was important, trust. Some secrets were meant to be kept.
“It’s just funny how these trails all keep leading back to you,” the detective had said. That’s when she decided to get a job outside of the country. Her return flight for Tokyo left in two days and the locket didn’t travel so fast.
She wondered how long it would take to find her again.

Frailty

2011-10-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

Originally published on EveryWritersResource.com Sept, 7th 2011

The frailty in man is thinking that you can give your heart, your hard-earned life, to a woman and she will know how to take care of it. You were a victim of this, too, friend, when your woman left and you went home to hang yourself. When you told me this, perhaps the last thing you would ever say to anyone, I recognized my Jon Cheever moment: the moment in which I would drive out and rescue you from drowning, get there just in time, find you drunk on the beach and take you home. The trouble with this was that you were right there in front of me and so determined.

This was all in Florida, years ago, me having pulled up stakes at a young age and South Florida being so far out of the way of everywhere else in America: 54,000 mi. of flat highways, scruff pines and the piggy-eyed locals who bejewel the parking lots. I got you liquored up and picked you off the barroom floor. I put food in your stomach because you hadn’t eaten in three days. You told me how you had already thought the whole thing out, “researched” it. What kind of research, friend: the strength of the rafters, the weight-bearing ratios of clothesline?

There would be a flash unlike lightning as the rope took hold, your eyes ogling the chair where no note was left, five minutes of your tongue turning black and kicking, quiet, unceremonious other than the low glow of the soap slick wound that the officials would later reveal as the rope uncoiled and her thinking, Another burden, another bad memory.

That’s why, sitting at the all-night diner, I told you that dying slowly is more fun and that killing yourself for a woman is unoriginal. Your reply, no it’s not and the crash of your head falling forward onto the table (they never did find your glasses) and the waitress refilling my coffee, lying her dovelike hand on my shoulder and asking me if you were going to be okay, if there were anything she could do to help.

Inky-Gayo: Korean Popular Music Says "Anneyoung-haseyo" to the World Market

2011-09-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

The Evolution of K-Pop
Originally published by PerfectSoundForever April, 2010

One cannot begin to write about inky gayo, Korean popular music, without first taking the nation’s history into account. Japanese imperialism, for example, restricted all forms of creative expression until nearly halfway through the 20th century. China’s presence is still felt, as well, as the Chinese consider Korea to be more of a misbehaving borough than an independent neighbor: an Eastern seaboard that, for some reason, still denies its station in the glorious Chinese empire. This is funny to consider, cute even, until you remember that China felt the same way about Tibet until 1950 when they decided to invite themselves in. Kim Jong Il’s missiles hang like a storm cloud to the North, a threat so consistent that it is rarely mentioned except by waiguks (foreigners) in close company, and even then only in a casual, passing tone. Indeed, it seems everyone around here wants a piece of this enigmatic peninsula.
My experience with K-pop began when I first arrived a few months ago, being assailed by what I didn’t know then to be 2 p.m.’s hit single, “Again and Again.” This was a curious introduction as 2 p.m.’s leading man, Park Jae-Bum, a Korean-American, or “twink,” (Footnote.1) returned to his home in the States after an uproar that developed around a comment he left on the official 2 p.m. MySpace page describing the Korean music scene as, and I quote, “gay.”

2 p.m. was not to be my last exposure to K-pop. In fact, it’s hard to conjure an unexposed moment. K-pop blares from convenience store speakers - hip-hop from the store across the street - rolling down the halls and alleys into every window, every ear, in reach: coalescing in ways that sound like static or a tree limb heavy with insects. If it seems like over kill, remember: Koreans are a proud people and K is the new culture. It is not unusual to walk into a low-lit, smoky makoli (traditional Korean rice liquor) bar (Fn.2) and see old men trading stories, getting shit-faced as the new Brown Eyed Girl single plays in the background. They don’t noticeably respond to the music - don’t seem to even recognize its presence - but one of these guys had to have put it on at some point in the evening, right?

As previously mentioned, the history of Korean popular music is short, evolving from Westernized boy/girl acts that mimicked the sounds brought over by American soldiers during WW2 in the 1940’s and, shortly thereafter, the Korean War to a folk explosion with simple arrangements and lyrics as sad and evocative as Korea’s own introduction to the 20th century. While one may imagine the copy culture that may have evolved as a now-sovereign nation attempted to catch up to what the rest of the world had been listening to, what actually occurred was more a melting pot of copyright laws (Fn.3) and certain artists stand out. Hahn Dae-Soo, also known as the Korean Bob Dylan, began his noteworthy discography under the oppressive Park Chung-Hee government that came to power after the war. His records being, in the spirit of that era, somewhat anti-oppressive government were banned and Hahn was forced to New York City where his band Ghengis Kahn played venues such as Trude Heller’s (a Broadway disco in operation from 1961 – 79; home to Blossom Dearie and the Manhattan Transfer) and CBGB.

Yang Hee-Eun, although not coming to prominence until the early seventies, could be called Hahn Dae-Soo’s feminine counterpart: more refined and coupled with an unmistakable element of jazz. An artist who avoided political commentary and, therefore, ugly scenarios such as Dae-Soo’s somewhat forced expatriation, Yang Hee-Eun (also known as the Korean Joan Baez) is a favorite among the older generation and the young housewives I teach in the afternoon. I realize that it seems cheap and unfair to refer to another country’s artists as versions of American artists but there is a good reason: the majority of musicians in the early folk/acid folk genre were all part of a family tree, a veritable genealogy of players in which status and skill were believed to be passed down from one artist to the next, categorized by fans and collectors into lineages such as the “Kim Min-Gi tree” or the “Lee Jeong-Sun family.” To be labeled in association with a foreign, American artist was paramount to being labeled a traitor, an outsider (Fn.4). Artists with such associations are said to be “fallen from the sky;” wholly original. This term, “fallen from the sky,” became an important moniker for Korean music in the years to come as the 1970’s brought not only an enormous economic boom as the per capita GNI shot from US$67 to US$1,000 but also the sound of psychedelia.

Also known as the Group Sound (i.e. band) Era, the late 70’s and early 80’s pioneered some seriously good psychedelic music, although the term itself is a bit of a misnomer here as laymen’s terms would consider the word “psychedelic” only in association with music that’s either drug-induced or good to listen to while on drugs. Seeing as how Asia’s intolerance to drugs of any kind (except, of course, for Thailand, where anything goes) is pretty much universally well-known, it should be mentioned that there were no vigilante rockers brewing LSD in rusty tubs. Concerts were not orgies. Psychedelic is, as it should be, merely an adjective, a genre. Groups such as San Ul Rim and Little Giant fully embodied this sound: composing with extended feedback, earth-shattering swells and that chunky, dreamy attack pattern I’ve only ever heard described as “that shoe-gazing sound.” While I wouldn’t mind popping in a copy of San Ul Rim’s, “You Are Already Me,” at some point during my next trip, it is better to imagine the Korean psychedelic scene less like a dimly lit, Led Zeppelin-style “put the coke on my dick” party and more like your son’s birthday potluck where he asks the kids from down the street to play a few songs and freak out all of the adults in the audience. This style of music was popular well into the eighties.

In 1992, with the debut of Seo-Taiji and the Boys - coupled with the event of Korea’s per capita GNI jumping to a miraculous US$10,000, a 200 fold increase from 1963 – K-pop was born. Seo-Taiji is still around, making appearances on talk and reality shows along with other artists, and is considered somewhat of a humble hero, a visionary whose efforts defined what the future of the Korean music scene would sound like. Bands in the wake of Seo-Taiji are uncountable, spiral arms that embrace every waking moment.

Currently, hip-hop is the new deal, which is cool except for the gratuitous use of auto-tuned vocals a la Kanye West. The pop is “flavor-of-the-week” style, meaning that you hear the same ten songs playing everywhere you go for about a month until they are phased out by new ones, a characteristic that is somewhat annoying yet strangely comforting - as if you are witnessing evolution. While I don’t casually listen to K-pop, it is nice to hear a familiar melody wafting through the shouts of a crowded bar, a moment where you can turn to the friendly Ajusshi next to you and confer in broken English, “I remember this one. Those were the days.” K-pop is reaching out its little fingers, as well, most recently with New Jersey’s own DJ Relic remixing the G-Dragon song, “Heartbreaker.”

I’m either a sucker for a good cause or soaking up jom like a cold toe under warm blankets, but the longer I live here the more attached I become. The money’s good, the future is bright - the hunchbacked old men who worked so hard to make things this way are taking it easy. With little natural resources to burn or dig up, Korea is reliant on production and export: Samsung, Hyundai, LG, products you use every day and never stop to think about where they come from. K is the new wave. We all have our fingers crossed.

Footnotes
1- I’d previously only heard the word "twink" tossed around in reference to thin-boned homosexuals - those vacuous ladyboys who hang like fresh linen dresses from the arms of their Daddy-O's. However, this is not the wildest of associations considering only thirty years ago the word "punk" hit the world by storm as a musical genre and lifestyle while at the same time being synonymous with, in the words of William S. Burroughs, "Someone who takes it in the ass." In all fairness, the official term for an American-born Korean is kyopo. A twink is a kyopo that talks shit about Korea, like Jae-Bum did.

2- Maekoli is a fermented rice broth of sorts, and is growing in export popularity due its addictive taste and probiotic, yogurt-like qualities. Also, the effect is quite nice. The first sip tastes like cold champagne that someone left open in the fridge for a few days. Three bowls into a teapot later, however, the world starts to shine. Other drinks one might find in Korea are:
• Soju, an incredibly cheap (though pricey overseas) liquor that goes down like watery Vodka and comes back like a bonfire,
• Makju, otherwise known as beer. Korean beer is light, clean, and almost completely tasteless, a characteristic I find endearing – a perfect counterpart considering almost every other thing you eat/drink in Korea is either fermented or incredibly pungent - though a characteristic that cheeky Englishmen will never shut up about with their “What I wouldn’t give for a pint of bitters!” Soju may be mixed with Makju for a drink called SoMak that will end your night early if you’re not careful,
• Over 10 varieties of flowered, flavored whiskeys: Korean originals that are sweet on the tongue and should not be confused with the plethora of Scotch and American whiskeys that line the bar. This is a drinking culture.

3- Korea has been unfairly labeled a copy culture, the last stop, where copyrights go to die. While it is true that popular foreign candies can be mimicked and re-packaged in an identical wrapping or that you can buy a cheap leather purse with PRADA stamped on the side from a street vendor for the same price as a taxi ride in Manhattan, innovation is not inherently absent (see next footnote). One problem is that Korea doesn’t deal with international copyright laws – doesn’t even consider them to be an issue, in fact, which has led to some trouble with the FTA and international business deals. A very recent development is that the G-Dragon song, “Heartbreaker,” the newest to break out onto the world scene, has about 30 seconds of sound unabashedly ripped from Flo-Rida’s “Right Round,” a song which is, essentially, a remix of the original Dead or Alive song, “You Spin Me Round (like a Record).” Personally, I could give two shits about this as even the original version of the song is pretty boring, but the controversy has put G’s record label, YG Entertainment, on the chopping block and is a good counterpoint for reconsidering the nation’s stance on intellectual property.

4- The Korean peninsula has been invaded by foreign aggressors over 3000 times in recorded history. Its location, climate, and accessibility make it a perfect port of entry when trading with China, Japan, or the greater Pacific regions. Koreans, as a result, have been subjected to a bloody and unfortunate biography - many of the invasions/occupations occurring less than 10 years apart from each other. In the 19th century alone Korea has suffered: colonization by Japan, a major war between North and South, a coup d’etat, 18 years of military dictatorship (under the aforementioned Park Chung-Hee), a massacre at Gwangju, and ideological battles between powers on the left and right. Only the notion of jom (essentially “neighborly love,” although the term can only be defined through analogies such as, “if Korea were an egg, jom would be the yolk”) and a remarkable sense of perseverance that the culture remains intact. References to Koreans being a proud, resolved, or traditional people are no joke: it is this dedicated nature that allowed them to create a functional democracy over a period of only 50 years, to rebuild their cities and flailing economic status from the poorest nation in the world in 1953 to the 13th wealthiest nation over the same span of time – achievements that have taken other world powers nearly 3X as long. Considering that almost every instance of contact with the outside world has had negative repercussions, it is understandable that Korea is resistant to foreign influence and strong supporters of anything and everything Korean, meaning that the “Made in Korea” tag on your BeanPole brand jeans isn’t just there to look pretty. It is a taegukki, a celebration of patriotism, a century won despite staggering difficulties.

DIY or Die: On the Road with E6's The Visitations

2011-09-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

The smashed-together posts.

Originally Published by PerfectSoundForever October, 2009

_________________________________________________________
Proof That Indie Rock is Alive and Well in the U.S. of A.
_________________________________________________________

The Switch.
“We’re going to pull a switch. You’re going to give that girl to me and go back to dudeski’s house or I’m going to fucking leave you in Wilmington.” Lucas was drunk again, cannonball, and full of it if he thought I was going to give away my pick-up, a redhead with a bird tattoo who was sweet enough to buy a CD even though some inept sound engineer had just wrecked our show. This was day six of a forty day tour.
My gig with the Visitations started when the former guitarist flaked out two weeks before a nationwide string of performances, meaning that I was sort of a switch as well. I had been a bartender in Athens, GA, where Lucas was working door. One night, cleaning up, he told me that if I could learn at least ten of the songs off the new album within a week then I could take said flaky guitar player’s place and go on rock tour. I had just spent the past six months finishing school and watching my long-term girlfriend grow tired of me, which sucked because together we were sharing some of the only affordable housing in town and I knew that I was probably going to be the one who would have to move out - abandoning our cats and everything. With a dead-end job slinging drinks and nothing but steep rent to look forward to, I figured I’d be a fool not to take Lucas up on his offer.
For those not familiar, Elephant 6 is a music collective that started in Northern Louisiana and later relocated to Athens, GA, in the mid-90’s. The great thing about E6 is, that during the grunge/alternative craze of the 90’s, all a band could hope for was to a) write some rockin songs, b) pay a bunch of money to someone with a studio and cut a record of their rockin songs, and,
c) get their record picked up by SubPop or Vice records and get started on their music career. E6, instead, cut all of their songs at home on tape and gave the music away to their friends - who gave the music away to their friends, to their friends, etc. - thereby creating a massive sound library while at the same time avoiding traditional avenues of promotion such as touring and kissing corporate ass in an attempt to get your record on the market.
Preliminary artists you might have heard of include The Gerbils, The Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power, and Neutral Milk Hotel - the latter of which’s album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea can still be heard echoing through freshman dormitories across America and was definitely my first exposure to the E6 phenomenon. While the collective has splintered since its inception, their participation in what was at first an attempt to subvert the music industry turned out to be a key move in making E6 some serious hot shots of the early American D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) and indie rock movement in America. I myself wooed many a lady during my formative years by chopping out NMH’s “King of Carrot Flowers” on acoustic guitar, mimicking Jeff Mangum’s ghostly wail and sounding like my pussy was about to explode. While this memory is somewhat embarrassing to look back on, the idea that I could have some small part playing for real in a happening much larger than my own musical ventures was alluring.

Terms and Terminology.
Back in Wilmington, when my first bout with Lucas occurred, I was still pretty green as far as the knowledge of what is done on tour was concerned. For example, Lucas was upset because he had at first brushed my pick-up (girl w/ bird tattoo) off as a goober and was stuck going back to dudeski’s house while I was stupid and hung up on worrying whether or not the guys would be able to find me and pick me up in the morning. These were foolish thoughts on both of our parts, but especially on L.’s because the girl was definitely not a goober.
Goobers are women who seem likely candidates for a hook-up, that is, they smile a lot, sway to the mood of the room and keep the conversation going. Granted, goobers don’t advertise or wag their asses in the air, but considering that chasing tail is about the only exercise you can get on tour it seems a pretty safe bet to get in good with a goober if she’s not too bad looking. The trademark move of a goober, the one that wins them the title, is to either meet a friend and take off unexpectedly or to get lost looking for something and never return, stranding you mateless and late in the game. As mentioned, goobers aren’t necessarily meaning to lead you on. It’s more a matter that they just don’t know what the hell they’re looking at.
This is far better than pumpkins, women who will actively lead you on and maybe even give you a little sniff but will never take you home. A likely situation with a pumpkin is that she’ll take up all of your time, cock-block other women who might seem interested and even suggest you head back to her place to the point where you give the nod to your bandmates and are, thereby, cut loose for the evening. A pumpkin will change her mind on her way out the door, give you a ride back to the host’s house and not let you kiss her in the driveway. In fact, expect her to leave the engine running and send you off with some tight-lipped. I’ll-find-you-on-Facebook dismissal. Be thankful for the ride home, however, as it is way more than you would get from chasing goobers all night.
The last ditch hook-up is a dudeski, a guy with an extra couch and a record collection he will insist on you listening to. He’ll probably get stoned and talk your ear off upon getting back to his place either about a) indie rock, b) life on the road, or c) women.
A dudeski is also:
a) Not a frat boy, although may occasionally be seen wearing a fitted baseball cap,
b) Not a complete idiot, as they often have some unique/endearing personality trait – most commonly being the ability to play guitar or a formidable knowledge of pop music,
c) Not necessarily a bad conversationalist or bad person in general, but definitely lacking in some grand, unspeakable way. They are the dudes who throw their hands in the air when someone says, “everybody throw your hands in the air.” They are the chum that leave bars first and get D.U.I.’s, allowing you to later slink by the busy cops, drunk and unscathed. A dudeski can be friendly, talkative, accommodating, and even intelligent, yet he will hold no opinion or personality of his own: as if he were born into the world without a mind and then, out of necessity, crafted one from the objects he found lying around. While this is as honest an approach as any to living and getting by in the world it does demonstrate an irresponsible lack of critical thinking skills. Perhaps we all have moments like these.
Anyway, Lucas mistook a hot score for a goober, wasted a lot of time chasing a girl that turned out to be a pumpkin and was pissed off that he had to crash on dudeski’s couch. This was how a lot of our arguments got started.
Other terms that might come in handy:
Troller: a woman who comes to the show with the specific intention of taking a musician home with her. While much of the goober/pumpkin stuff I’ve been throwing around may sound a bit misogynistic, be assured that the majority of women we encountered knew exactly what they were looking for: a roll, a stand, a score. Even if I had been a local they wouldn’t have wanted to be my girlfriend. I’m a bad sell anyway, restless and $40,000 in debt.
Just think of a live performance as a sort of meat market: we present our physical bodies, personalities and creative efforts under bright lights for forty-five minutes as the audience (whom we can’t see as a result of the aforementioned bright lights) takes note. We are from out of town and therefore unassociated with the local gossip circle, a key factor when one wants to avoid ugly rumors of “being a slut.” Band boys are a good score, too, because what happens on the road stays on the road and chances of recapitulation are, given the need to hit new venues in new areas every tour and the effectiveness of D.I.Y. promotional methods, slim to none.
Boner: an unaccommodating sound guy. Boners will get haughty at the simplest of sound requests. For example,
“More beats in the monitors, please.”
“I’ve been doing this for thirty years. I know how to work a sound board.”
Boners are generally failed musicians.
FFL: fan for life. A true FFL will talk to you about songs you’ve forgotten how to play and, if you end up crashing on their couch, ask you to sign some limited release album you played on eight years ago that they tracked down on eBay and bought two copies of on vinyl. FFL’s are great until you wake up in the middle of the night and they’re watching you sleep.
Band Fund: the untouchable mass of money that will be split up after the tour is over and is sometimes dipped into for special “band” expenditures, this last time including: trips to the local titty bar in Ypsilanti, MI ($60), spray-on tanning oil so that we were bronze as Colossuses for a show in Manhattan ($40), and, of course, gay marriage in Massachusetts ($15).
Jaundice: otherwise known as cock starvation. Even if you’re not starving, something about being on rock tour makes the little guy real hungry.
Nozzle: a new word for douchebag; invented upon hearing some douchebag call another douchebag a douchebag.

Leaning with Intent to Fall.
One becomes painfully self-aware when moving daily from state to state, living out of a backpack, and digestion becomes a solid concern. The perfect J is a good sign, but pushing bog water for too many days in a row is cause for alarm. Much like the aforementioned jaundice, ingestion and excretion become prominent fixtures of overall health. Grabbing a turd, or taking a quick shit in whatever squalid (gas station, heavy metal club) bathroom you can find, becomes a sort of treat and, much unlike the humdrum BM’s of domestic living, it wasn’t unusual for us all to pull off at a highway rest stop and have the whole band crapping in harmony for five beautiful minutes. Although I’ve tried to recall this natural awareness in my recent return to society, the sensation is more like the buggy reminder that you need to quit smoking someday or that the mushroom cloud of poo-goo that floats from the toilet after every flush might actually contaminate your beer and make you sick somehow, that is, the thought is too easily ignorable and arguably fey.
Extreme self-involvement is another coincidental factor of tour, and possibly a survival mechanism considering your sole soldieresque mission is to play the same ten songs from the new record every night, shamelessly self-promote your merchandise, secure a band bar tab and find a place to stay while at the same time chasing tail and muscling the promoter and other bands on the bill for a bigger chunk of the cut. News such as Theodore Bayly killing his wife and family the same night and in the same Ohio town where you played a house show strikes you like a fly on the eyelid, rolling off as you remember the loud-mouthed mulatto with the knockout tits who stood in the front row and who you had meant to talk to even though she left before the show was over. A tragic story concerning strangers seems comic and inconsequential.
Perhaps this accounts for all stories of egomaniacal rock stars, concerned only with the kill, bragging openly about their expertise concerning all sorts of taboo subjects. I conjured this attitude, as well, and after only a few shows: feeling that bars owed me for entertaining them, that friends and audience members were rude not to raise their eyebrows and say something like “Tour. Wow, that must be ---” in amazement. It is the same selfishness I remember conjuring when I was fifteen and running away from home for the first time, my backpack stuffed with sweaters and CD’s, perched on my parent’s windowsill and knowing that this was the moment that would forever define me as a Stayer or a Leaver.
If all this sounds fun, add in a steady diet of bad food and long drives. Add in exotic landscapes such as the American Midwest where the scenery is akin to counting sheep. Add in that torn-out feeling you get from two months of waking up in a different town, in a different bed every day with the realization that you could make a life for yourself in any small town, find love and probably stay relatively happy - that landscapes and accents are the only noticeable differences between locations.
While comparisons such as days like film frames in a wheeling Cinemechanica or seeing the world as if through a greasy window come to mind, the actual feeling is something much more personal. To add to my previous comment: you discover that either you could be happy living anywhere in America or that you have to leave the country ASAP because what you’re looking for isn’t here. That’s sort of what it’s like.

The Negative Effects of Undeserved Positive Reinforcement.
The third time Lucas and I came to blows was in Lexington, KY. He booked the show, it sucked, and I ragged on him for it afterwards. Walking from the car to our host’s house, I had my sleeping bag tied up under one arm and my everything else bag under the other. I think the conversation went something like, “Fuck you, Bender. You book the next show in Kentucky,” and him swinging at me with his laptop computer. It was wet, cold, and I refused to drop my stuff, ending up in a sleeper hold with a mouth full of parking lot, cursing his name, spraying spittle and old teeth. For those of you who think it was Lucas and I who got gay married back in Massachusetts then you’re wrong. I’d be better off marrying a grasshopper.
We actually ended up dropping L. off for good in Austin, TX, where, instead of exploding into rock n’ roll sparkles or even saying goodbye he boarded a plane and flew to his new home in Phoenix, AZ. I still get text messages once in awhile.
It would be great to have some sort of conclusive ending, like this is the part of the story where Lucas dies, or, then we were discovered by a scout from Matador records. However, like all great relationships, The Visitations tour tapered off to a small troupe of refugees drinking beer in strange cities and snaking our way down I-20 back to Athens, stopping at places like the Katrina-ravaged coast in Waveland and saying shit like, “Look at that,” killing time and prolonging the inevitable return to pedestrian life. My share of the surplus split-three-ways band fund turned out to be $130. I payed my bank $120 in overdraft fees and spent the remaining money on as much Tex-Mex/carne guisado as I could eat. I returned safely, unpacked my instruments, got another bartending job, whatever.
Some small kernels, hard learned:
• White rice and split red lentils take the same amount of time to cook and can be prepared over a camp stove. I recommend investing $2.49 on some bullion cubes,
• Listen to the bands you’re sharing a bill with to avoid being stuck, back-lined behind some hardcore band in which the singer unironically dedicates every song to his “beautiful blonde fiancé with the deep blue eyes,”
• Have someone sober and businesslike around at all times. It helps if he/she is big, too, as you sometimes have to flex on the promoter in order to get paid,
• Spend lots of time on the record. Make it something you’re proud of.

Book your own tour in 3 easy steps:
1) Invite a touring band to play your next house party,
2) Make friends, exchange information,
3) Collect donations and give them to band. Expect the same treatment when you show up to play at their house. Repeat as necessary. Also, check out www.byofl.org, www.diyusa.org, and the HouseShowDatabase.

The Free Song Project.

2009-06-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

Howdy kids,

I'm moving to Korea soon so there will be plenty of travelogues to come, however, please take a minute to check out my new pet @ www.freesongproject.org

Every Face a Facet.

2009-03-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

In punishment for a relatively accidental cock-block (somewhat explained later), I am hereby posting all of the supposedly inappropriate comments I've been getting cracked on for the past 3 days.

Ottowa, IL: "If you close your eyes and forget that there's 5 white boys on stage, it actually kind of sounds like Parlaiment Funkadelic."

Kansas City: KS "The piano is really the Rosetta Stone of the musical world. I'd get into that first."

Saint Louis, MS: "I'm not trying to cock-block you, I'm just genuinely intrigued by what's going on here."

Dammit.

This tour is over, btw. Visit www.thevisitations.net for new member bios, merch support, and updates on the next national clusterfuck.

For the Meek of Smart.

2009-02-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a good quote from Chuck Klosterman:

"I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation."

- Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan,
attempting to recount a 3 a.m. exchange
we had at a dinner party and inadvertently
describing the past ten years of my life.

Only a week left of touring in relatively warm weather zones.
I'd write more but really don't feel like it right now.

Rocking the World's Biggest Rollercoaster.

2009-02-24T19:11:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Wisconsin is home not only to the delectable fried cheese curd, but also to some of the world's biggest rollercoasters. Clearly, February is too cold of a time to go riding, but the band kicked our shoes off and slid around the icy mezzanine of the carnival grounds. Frostbite would normally have been inevitable in such a situation, our pretty toes shriveled to raisins, however, fried cheese has a warming effect and I'm beginning to think I'm part Yeti.

In short:

* Milwaukee is pretty much the sexiest city I've been to. Not only are they easy and heavy-handed with the grog, but the architecture is similar to Chicago, that is, a lot of thought clearly went into it at some point rather than the sprawl or mashed-togetherness of cities such as Cleveland or Dallas. Also, the residents are great. We were gifted some American Apparel gear which is warm and made out of some thin, space-age material that hugs the frame. Despite this, I can't help but think matching jackets and T-shirts make us all look like slick faggots. Our hosts informed us of many things, such as:

- "leaning with intent to fall" is a punishable crime in New Orleans,
- Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to KFC as the result of a clause in the original contract stating that any man who was homeless would be freely fed at any Colonel Sander's Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant,
- Denny's (blech), as part of an artist's outreach program, frequently sponsors touring bands and will give you free food and drinks as long as you"re registered and polite to the waitstaff.

* Madison, WI, is sort of like the Berkely of the Midwest; lots of hippie-type stuff like 30,000 coffee shops and Jamaican food. As much as hippie culture has been getting cracked on in the past 10 years, I am empathetic to the scene as I like weird food and feel like I probably have a dirty kid squirming around somewhere deep inside of me. I am, however, beginning to cringe whenever I hear the word "organic." Also, we were the music pick of the week in the local, hilarious paper, The Onion, which tickles.

Silo, Windmill, Snow.

2009-02-23T10:34:00.000-08:00

Silo, windmill, exit, fencing, diner, fencing. Midwestern landscapes through car windows, akin to counting sheep. We've been having a lot of fun out here, though. Strangers are pleasant in that 'borrow a cup of sugar, rosy-cheeked children sneaking kisses' sort of way.
In leaving Grand Rapids yesterday we were enveloped by a snow storm. I was at the wheel during the latter half, after dark, and had a truly psychedelic experience: snow blowing in from the fields sidewinding over the road like salt tornadoes revealing momentary images like screaming faces and waving sheets of pigeons, completely obscuring the road and midnight windshield.
Anyone who's ever failed (like I just did) to effectively describe the details of a terrifying ordeal should now, please, conjure that sensation and just take my word on it that last night's ride was fun/frightening/totally surreal.

Lucas recently made the mistake of letting a cute, drunk girl give him a haircut and has been having the look of a runaway from the children's cancer ward. Luckily, our host last night spent some time in 'the joint' on haircut duty and hooked L. up with a semi-professional fade from front to back. Ironically, L. minus his shaggy hair and beard looks more like a 1st grader's drawing of a chimpanzee than he does the Don Juan he's going for. This begs the question, however, of what the appropriate lengths to go to are just to have somebody groom you and run their fingers through your hair.
Would a direct approach work in such a situation and maybe save somebody a maiming?
"Excuse me, but you're beautiful and I want you to groom me in the oldest sense of the word."
In this case, cute girl dropped the scissors and ran off with a boyfriend who had seemingly materialized from nowhere. As much as I love Lucas, I especially love to see him humiliated; patchy-headed, dumbstruck and clueless as a parakeet; sexual frustration personified. Har-har.

The new joint is Wis-kahn-sin, where hoagies are called grinders and the tapwater is supposedly pretty good.

A Southern Discomfort.

2009-02-20T19:23:00.000-08:00

Old man winter finally found us again, and has been filling my life with new vocabulary words such as ice fog, black ice, and thick sleet. Ice fog is a bitch. Watch out for that.

We've all been eating a lot of fried food lately, as well, which seems to be the standard way of cooking things out here. No shit, Midwesterners will actually differentiate their goodies from the competition's by bragging on the type of oil that it's fried in.
In short, the past few days have seen:

* A fried chicken eating contest at the Colonel Sander's Original Kentucky Fried Chicken Restaurant (soybean) in Kentucky, foodstuff that lies heavy on the prostate when you have an 8 hour drive ahead of you, but pumped up our show that evening at C.P.R. (Cultural Preservation Resources), a DIY joint connected to several surrounding bars via secret passageways. The kicker was when Lucas sprayed chicken fat from his tear ducts while Davey and I slid across each others' soggy backs during the solo of Fresh Dog. We later made out with some Christian girls.

* Fried pickles (vegetable) in Bowling Green, OH, which were served as a meal in a huge basket. I'm not one to snoot at anything fried and/or pickled and, in fact, have fond memories of "fried pickle and 40oz. night" at the Louis Gator movie lounge in Asheville, NC, but Christ--- a food basket big enough to curl up and go to sleep in? Despite the wide variety of sauces offered it wasn't long before I found myself jealous of my dining partners' double-stacked sandwiches.

* Fried gizzards (peanut) in Ypsilanti, MI, which I don't want to talk about. I think they're what cat food is mostly made of.

I feel strange here. Long distances between cities, landscapes so flat that a hilltop in the distance is mildly exciting, and well-hidden, mean police patrols salt and peppering the highway. The steel grey skies and oddities such as Kentucky's own History of the World through Creation museum are, however, fun to ponder. Waking up in a new town, in a new house with new roommate tensions and places where the coffee is hidden is also beginning to take its toll on me. While comparisons such as days like film frames in a wheeling Cinemechanica or seeing the world as if through a greasy window with Amityville flies on it, the feeling is much more personal and something an image can't quite touch on. Imagine being torn between the sensation that either you could be happy living anywhere in America or that you need to leave the country ASAP because what you're looking for isn't here. That's sort of what it's like.

The mid-tour blues are manifesting themselves in different ways on the other members of the band, too. For example, Davey is sleeping like 12 hours/ day and Lucas has been occasionally challenging me to a man-battle, last night's having ended with me popping him on the top of his gnomish head and, shortly thereafter, finding myself with a mouthful of parking lot, locked in a sleeper hold and held tight to the cold, cold ground. Despite having "lost" this fight, I definitely cracked my neck and back in some hard-to-reach and very relaxing places whereas Lucas, upon waking up this morning, discovered that his index finger was wrecked and must have jammed up somehow during the takedown.

Tonight, we're in Grand Rapids, MI, which is frigid and pretty.

Best of the Last Few Days in 6 Words.

2009-02-16T01:16:00.000-08:00

Idea stolen from The Best American Series' Best American Non-Required Reading 2007:

This form was originally made famous by Ernest Hemingway, who, after being challenged to write a complete story in 6 words, wrote, "For sale: baby shoes, never used."

My submissions:

* Small towns are all quite similar.
* Secret recipes, talking dogs in Midwest.

You Can Stand on a Sword, but You Can't Slip.

2009-02-10T06:04:00.000-08:00

We're each freshly shaven from a rough neck couple of days thanks to a laundromat restroom and a razor that's dull as a pipe. Internet access is becoming fewer and farther between as of late, so I'll paraphrase as much as possible---

Cake Shop (2/3), in Manhattan: thanking again the lovely Ms. Isabel for doing sound. Any sound engineer who takes the time to watch from the front row and then run back to the control booth to turn up a too-quiet accordion is a breath of fresh air and, of course, the kind of care that is generally only shown by fellow musicians. Check out her music at www.myspace.com/dizzyspellsmartian.
The Cake Shop itself is an interesting building: located around the heart of the Village, an unimposing door leads into a coffee/cake shop with an underground live music venue that must take up more than a fraction of the tumbling octopi-tunnels of underground NYC.
Favorite band of the night was definitely Diet Kong, whose video projections and rhetorical lyricism (for example: "Bears and beards/ this year, this year." This year? are we measuring time by fashion trends and the illogical fears of Steven Colbert? So much to consider---) made them a form of multi-sensory entertainment. The Cake Shop also got us all pretty drunk, so that was fun, too. And bagels. They gave us bagels.
Strangely, Lucas's ADHD and natural tendency to be a weirdness magnet were punctuated this particular night while he was chasing (quite literally) two English girls around the village, hooting like a boiled owl: he turned down the hard-earned offer to go back to the hotties on holiday's hotel room and instead headed with the rest of us back to our cozy host's house in Queens. This is unusual behavior and, though no explanation was offered, I would like to think of it as a result of him envisioning himself stumbling down a strange set of hotel steps, bleary-eyed in the bright winter sun, phoneless and fearing his bandmates had taught the computer to play itself and split town.

2/4 and 2/5 were spent catching a cold (I'm still scouring it from my system with Cold-Eeze and various hot liquids) in Baltimore and driving up to a -4 degree liberal arts college in Vermont. Lucas and I, having never experienced -4 degrees before, went midnight hiking all around the thin pines and moose mosses of VT with nothing but a cat scratch of a moon and spiderwebs of steaming breath. On the drive back we were held up in the second-longest traffic jam of my life while passing through the Holland Tunnel. The bottleneck was apparently an alternately blinking light with a sign that said, "New Yorkers, please merge considerately."

While we thought we would be on time to the Pilam house in Philadelphia, Lucas really stuck his pessimistic dick into my silver lining by criticizing my Manhattan driving skills. In truth, he's right. I'm not sure or especially pleased when considering what this says about my inability to conform to any situation and, in this case, drive like an asshole. Strange, as most face-to-face encounters I've shared with New Yorkers have been quite pleasant, however, something seems to take over the residents of Manhattan once the degree of separation offered by 1000 lbs. of powered steel comes into play. I drive nicely and it's a hindrance, possibly even a hazard.

Most of the past week has involved driving and listening to talk radio where the new (I suspect Obama induced) trend is to discuss the economy via a series of flowery metaphors. Some of the funnier ones include: running into a burning building and pulling things out, feeding a hungry family but not so much that they get fat, a drinking game (no shit) where the goal is to have fun but not get tumbledown, and the difficulty of following blueprints that don't exist.
We eventually reached the Pilam and played a way fun show.

On 2/6 I fell in love with Philadelphia.

2/7 was Pittsburg, remarkably full of bridges and beauty despite its industrial exterior. We played at the Garfield Artworks gallery and partied late into the night with some nice girls until all of their boyfriends showed up at around 4 a.m. to retrieve them.
I inadvertently set a public wastebasket on fire with a cigarette butt that looked stumped out enough.

2/8 was in New Haven, CT, at BAR on what was, according to the local newsrag, the "biggest indie music night in CT!" Unfortunately, there were only about 30 attendees for this huge event, but the bar treated us very nicely with drinks and a pizza that was almost 2 hoagies (Philly slang; about 2 ft.) long.
On an unexpected note, the house we ended up crashing at was owned by a member of the 6th nationally ranked Captain Beefheart Cover Band. This is significant because I happen to have played (a small part) in the 3rd nationally ranked Captain Beefheart Cover Band (The Big-Eyed Beans from Venus) and the motherfucker knew who I was. This is all very entertaining not just because I had the opportunity to engage in a friendly nerd-off with a 250+ lb. septegenrarian, but also because there is a national ranking of Captain Beefheart Cover Bands (currently 25, I think, though there are always those young up-and-comers to worry about) that is not a joke but a phenomenon that is recorded and tracked with academic precision, publications and official dinners and everything.

Karaoke and the control group.

2009-02-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

Lucas is now actively picking up women via techniques he learned on the internet, which is pretty cool as this Mystery writer actually provides links to text diagrams and escape/scenario-based methods on how to seduce (as he claims) any woman in 4-7 hours. Surpringly, for a work of this caliber, the writing is really good and somewhat poignant with observations such as the anti-slut factor (ASF), a rule claiming that even a woman who is looking for seduction does not want to seem responsible for what happens between the two of you and thereby "look like a slut." She must instead be lured to the point of seduction by some other method such as "Hey, let's go check out these tropical fish I just bought---" Lots of other entertaining tips and acronyms.

Since Lucas is doing his homework I've volunteered to be the control group, that is, I'm on my own with whatever pick-up system I've developed over the past 28 years. The goal is, clearly, to test Mystery's method. Me being the control group is perhaps a result of me, envious of Mystery's great success and good writing, claiming that I could write a pick-up book, too.

The site of the experiment was karaoke night at the Galaxy Hut in downtown Arlington, VA. I'm not sure if this testing ground was perfect or unfortunate as nearly everyone in the room was already coupled up together. Lucas, with wolfish precision, picked out a thick young single and plied his trade with eye contact and the indispensible fatherly hand on her knee until closing time, whereupon they left together. I drank three overpriced PBR's, sang Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" and, leering at Lucas and his lady so happy in their happy-couple coma, tried one of Mystery's "perfect pick-up" lines on a German girl sitting next to me.
Something like this:

"What else do you do aside from looking so good?"

"Vat?"

"I mean, what do you have going for you aside from your looks?"

"Oh, you know---" (clenching lips and staring hard at her friend on the other side of the table)

I suspect it was a cultural misunderstanding.
I can only guess what the pick-up will think when she locks lips with Lucas and discovers the first-hand results of his current "sugarless gum as a toothbrush substitute" routine.

Wilmington, NC and several slots in Virginia---

2009-02-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

1/29 in Wilmington @ the Soapbox. We arrived frazzled from a long drive and started drinking pretty much immediately, not the worst of options until we got onstage and discovered that our soundman was drunker than we were (more computer in the monitors, please!), testing our ability to play along with an inaudible rhythm section.

Two hilarious notes of the evening:

1) the sound "engineer" assured us that he was not inept but that, unbeknownst to us, almost all of our equipment had somehow become defective over the 24 hour interim since our last show.
Way to take responsibility, dude.

2) the E6 nerd who came specifically to see us (and bought us several drinks before the show) got flustered and left about halfway through our performance.

1/30 in Blacksburg, a benefit show for Engineers Without Borders @ The Lantern, a great lineup with lots of modern and Bikini Kill-esque punk. We sounded phenomenal onstage and I started a beer-soaked mosh pit during the Two Funerals show that ended the night, getting all of the aerobic exercise I had been jonesing for.

While there are a variety of ways to turn a docile crowd into a raging octopus, I chose to find a docile-looking head bopper and slam into him. Being in a crowd of strangers, one must keep a manic, aggresively friendly grin on their face at all times in such a situation, thereby appearing to be either overly-excited or clearly insane. Such a representation will earn, at worst, a grudging dismissal. Luckily, said young head-bopper slammed back into me, upon which point I held my PBR high and swung it like a helicopter blade, blaring foamy beer and fun all over the floor and surrounding audience.

This is the trick: when the floor is wet, even the simplest back and forth moving to the music will cause someone to crash into his neighbor. Also, when you're already soaked in beer and sweat and an onstage singer is screaming, "It's alright, it's alright, it's alright!" to guitars tuned to the sack of mad weasels setting then its pretty much hard not to lose your inhibitions and dance.
All hail entropy.

1/31 in Charlottesville @ the Tea Bazaar, playing with our friends Hot Lava (www.myspace.com/hotlava) and the Invisible Hand (www.myspace.com/adamsmith).
The Tea Bazaar is a sultanish cave (Persian rugs and hookah circles) where bands get hummus platters along with all the tea they can drink. I drank a gourd of Yerba Mate' and enough green tea to inflict satori before climbing up on the tiny stage, leading to a high-energy set in which I played the drum part to Television at about triple speed.

Today is our first day off because who wants to compete with the Superbowl. The plan so far is to drive up to The Galaxy Hut in Arlington, the site of our 2/2 show, for karaoke and to break bread with the management. Also, since there is a surplus of money from the shows we've played so far, Davy and Lucas are out buying a fog machine and a set of red jumpsuits.

Charleston, SC 1/27

2009-01-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

Great show @ the Oasis playing with M-Tank.

Afterwards, our hosts took us to an estuary where we fished out oysters and mud-wrestled in the thick, grey soup. Silica-rich estuary mud is an interesting substance as it has the sort of surface tension that allows you to momentarily think that it will hold you, that you can float Christ-like across the marsh and make friends with the shifty-eyed herons on the other side, gig for fishes with a bird's-eye view. This is, of course, a false impression. Estuary mud also dries to a porcelain white which is, though hell to scrub off, genuinely cool in the sense that it makes your crusty, post-wrestling companions look bog monsters or banshee type creatures.

I should mention here that the mud-wrestling was not initially anyone's great idea, as limited amounts of clothing and tolerable levels of overall funk should always ride high in the mind when traveling. You wouldn't, after all, want to find yourself freezing and filthy in Madison, WI. Lucas, however (the member with the least amount of extra clothes and, apparently, inhibitions), dove in and showered everyone with big scoops and soggy oyster shells.

The funny thing about immersing yourself in an unusual substrate (my experiences to date include sour cream, creamed corn, Jell-O, mayonnaise, and cottage cheese) is that once you're already covered from head-to-toe with the madness, you'd might as well continue for as long as you can as the only thing you have to look forward to after the fun is the almost post-coital bond you share with your friends as you crawl out one-by-one to lay on the shore, smoking cigarettes with shaky hands, feeling tight-skinned and gross.

Our hosts ate oysters straight from the soup, a cultural anomaly that I generally love to participate in (I once killed a snail with my teeth while eating with a Chinese family), but the idea that the oysters were filter-feeders in who-knows-where-we-even-are marsh water and the thought of actually wrestling one with a shucker knife and bare brawn seemed wildly unappealing.

In short: Charleston is beautiful, oysters look like alien vaginas (with a dangerously sharp exterior), and nature is your playground.

Orlando, FL 1/23-1/24

2009-01-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

Anyone uncomfortable with confusing road systems should avoid Orlando, FL. Also, keep a fresh supply of dollars and cents for the incessant toll booths. Other than that, the whole city is owned by Disney and looks like the inside of a casino. Also, the large Vietnamese population of the area contributed to some enlightening road signs, my personal favorites being Raper Dairy Rd., Dong-A Blvd., and Phuket Ln.

Our good friend Matt, a DIY saint for putting up traveling bands and member of the most excellent TeleVCheeseburger, helped us out by throwing a Friday night house party that we, unfortunately, missed as a result of the unnamed (because any press is good press) crappy hardcore band that insisted on playing before us and stretching their repetitive, derivative set out for over an hour. Blarg.
A point of advice: if you're going to give a sappy send-off to your doe-eyed girlfriend before each song, the least you can do is not suck. Lay around in bed listening to the radio for Chrissake.

On the bright side of that evening, I got to hang out with Not Them (myspace.com/notthemfools), two mulleted youngsters who were cool enough to buy me a few beers and let me kick a mad freestyle rhyme onstage with them at the A.K.A Lounge.

Saturday night ended up with us blowing off the DeLand show at Stetson University to play an even better show at the BackBarn (a set Matt TeleVCheeseburger was kind enough to tack us onto) with the Future Tapes on Film. The sound guy at BackBarn made it a point to make everyone sound phenomenal onstage and the entire experience felt like a breath of fresh air.

Our party addiction was fixed that night, too, as the local bands took us out to a midnight garden party of sorts with a live DJ, dancing girls, and lots of free drinks. I ended up doing the robot and losing a breakdance battle in the mud to some guy who does production for Michael Franti and Spearhead. Next time, sucka---

On other notes: we have new T-shirts for sale and are anticipating staying with my good friend, Reba, in Charleston.

Ganinesville, FL. 1/22

2009-01-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

the Kickstand was an intriguing venue, somewhat of an operational bike repair/arts and crafts barn with no heat and a stage that bounced up and down as we played. An interesting post-punk sort of folky schtick preceded us: the regular gamut of guitars, ukuleles, toy pianos, and other odd instruments used by players in this genre.

My favorite performer of the evening was Lindsey Mills (http://www.myspace.com/lindseymillz), a sexy librarian with moving, liquid guitar parts and great lyrics, that is, not made of the insincere sentimental shit that you normally hear solo save-the-world performers playing. Even the "let's hold hands and go vegetarian" song was cleverly done, which is saying something as those songs are, as a rule, never clever. Davy and I both tried the pick-up game on her after the show, but she wasn't having any of it and ended up leaving with some slick Canadian who played bossa-nova songs on his guitar and love ballads on a (who saw this coming?) toy piano.
It should also be mentioned that the Kickstand has no heat and it was 28 degrees by the end of the night, yet the kids who showed up stuck around for the entire show and even bought some of our CD's afterwards which is badass. Thanks.

Lucas disappeared with a spunky rapper named Saucy Yoda we met at a bar at last call.
I recommend giving her a listen @ myspace.com/saucyyoda as she has a sailor's mouth, is completely batshit, and busts a rhyme like nobody's business.

we are a weird band.

2009-01-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

Only in the most recent days of rehearsal (coming to fruition at last nights' GoBar show), it has become remarkably clear to me that the Visitations have an unusual sound.

Simple parts, delicate arrangements and a subtle weaving of passing and present tones that the listener would have a hard time picking out other than the, "Damn, this sounds interesting..." sensation. The computer aspect of this setup includes pre-recorded samples, samples of us playing over ourselves (including members who may or may not be present on stage), and, essentially, every component used when making the hard copy of the album. The studio is the stage is the band is the venue, etc. The music, in this case, becomes secondary to the experience, which becomes an entity in itself. Just imagine watching a giant jellyfish glow blue and float in mid-air before you and think what sort of opinion you would have of that.

Speaking of Audience, there is another aspect of live performance with the Visitations that I only caught onto last night: while many groups will play their set as the Audience watches (as one would watch a television program) and takes in and judges the available stimuli and determines whether or not they like the sounds that the band is making, whether they would like to listen to more or less of that sound, the Visitations, especially when the freaky flag flies, almost possesses television's (to extend the metaphor) circular argument, that is:
we will form your opinion of us.

Make sense? Perhaps this David Foster Wallace quote will help.
Please excuse the brutally extended TV metaphor. It is a cheap trick.

"[Criticism] has become deeply irrelevant ... television used to point beyond itself. Those of us born in, say, the '60s were trained by television to look where it pointed, usually at versions of 'real life' made prettier, sweeter, livelier by succumbing to a product or temptation. Today's mega-Audience is way better trained, and TV has discarded what's not needed. A dog, when you point at something, will look only at your finger."

(DFW, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, p. 33)

This is in no way saying that you, our beloved audience,
are distractable animals.
You rock most of all.

Jackass and furthermore.

2009-01-18T10:37:00.000-08:00

I think Lucas's most endearing trait is that he is, on occasion, a complete jackass.
A good example would be last night when he told me to get lost so he could go home with 3 Dudeskies and a Medusa-like woman whom he was apparently trying to slip the Swedish fish to.
A Dudeski, by the way, is:

A) Not a frat boy, although they will sometimes be found wearing fitted baseball hats,
B) Not a complete idiot, as they often have some unique personality trait- most commonly being the ability to play guitar and a formidable knowledge of pop music,
C) Not a necessarily a bad conversationalist or bad person in general, but lacking in some grand, unspeakable way.

To define something by what it is not is generally the technique used for young or cutting edge terminology, which the Dudeski is, also, not. Dudeskies have lived in our presence for quite some time, and I think the best way to define one would be to say that he is friendly, talkative, and genuinely intelligent, yet holds no opinion or personality of his own: as if he were born into the world without a mind and then, out of necessity, crafted one from the objects he found lying around: a rubber band and paper-clip ball of a soul whose only redeemable quality is that he is definitely not a jackass. While this is as honest an approach as any to living and getting by in the world, it does demonstrate an irresponsible lack of critical thinking skills. Identifying Dudeskies is much like the censorship associations definition of pornography, that is, you just have to know it when you see it.

Lucas, you have lost your title as the self-proclaimed enemy of Dudeskies.
Also, you're a jackass.

The Anti-Smoking Rooster and an Update.

2009-01-16T21:07:00.000-08:00

Do you know those stranger than fiction-type situations that you occasionally find yourself in?
I've recently found myself in one: while our current pre-tour rehearsal space is scenic and cozy (in the Winterville area), anyone caught stepping outside for a cigarette is immediately attacked by a beautifully crowned, horribly insane rooster named Demento.

A shovel handle and a rake are located directly next to the door, implements whose sole purpose is beaning Demento on the side of the head. Being of the persuasion to never, ever hit an animal I was amazed at how easy it was for me to wallop this charging rooster with a shovel handle so hard that it dipped, spun and passed out for somewhere around half an hour, after which time it sprang to its feet and lunged at Davy as he pulled up in his car.

Pummeling Demento has become a somewhat normal and, I must admit, fun part of my day lately. He doesn't even really seem to mind and it's more like some complex social dance we are engaging in. It occurred to me recently, however, that the sensation one gets when being attacked by an animal is unlike most other sensations. To pop the attacking animal with a shovel handle, therefore, is invigorating, liberating. Several battles/day against this rude little asshole has me primed and feeling good like I could stomp a mudhole in some fratboy should the need arise.

Apprehension before first leap.

2009-01-13T05:51:00.000-08:00

Stephen J. Gould is my favorite ethnobiologist.
This is not only because he is a good talker, but that his theory of punctuated equilibrium, a theory that suggests evolution, whether biological or transcendental, is not the long, steady change-over-time process that it is so often characterized as, but a series of short jumps (i.e. punctuated), applies directly to almost everything I notice about the world.

For example, and this lies wholly within the realm of personal theory, whenever I have an engagement such as a trip or something to do/present, I cannot sleep to save my life, but lie up in bed with my head churning like a movie reel with the strips being out-of-order and randomly selected. I've done this since I was a kid, the most memorable example being when I was 10 and so excited about going to SeaWorld with my 5th grade class the next morning that I stayed up all night, passed out on the bus the next morning, and had the neighborhood bully, Clayton Ross, spray my shorts with his Shamu squirt gun so that it looked like I pissed my pants and started my field trip experience off with the uncomfortable sensation that everybody was calling me pissboy. Point in case, to this day I still can't sleep the day before an important event. One would think that you grow numb eventually, however, it seems this is a punctuation I haven't yet leapt past.

This situation is comparable to stage fright as a musician. While I've heard Ted Nugent say that stage fright is for pussies and he's never had a bout in his life, I beg to differ unless the human experience is really all that different from person-to-person or the Nug is a complete sociopath. Stage fright is much like the rush of adrenaline even an experienced skydiver will get when looking down from the bay door at the blue plains below. Not only is it a rush, but also a healthy dose of the addictive endorphins that are responsible for skydiving enthusiasts, heroin junkees, and Facebook enthusiasts, that is, it is the idea of rush that makes you want to do it in the first place and the ghost of the rush that keeps you coming back.
Having played music for live audiences since I was 14 years old, I feel I may honestly say that I still get some form of stage fright before each show, a nervous rush of energy (cheap, renewable energy) that I bottle up and release at the right time, on stage. This is a delicate trick that took years to master. When, however, did I master this? It wasn't so much a conscious effort as it was a "this nervousness is annoying, how do I get rid of these jitters" type of sensation. When I finally overcame it, it was a punctuated jump, a small evolution similar to that old mantra about how once you learn how to ride a bike you'll never forget. Isn't it funny, however, to look back at the image of a stressed out little kid wishing that (praise Jesus and Santa) if only he could ride a bike then he would be happy and not ask for anything else for the rest of his life?
Silly, right? But could you please explain in detail exactly how to ride a bike, or, better yet, how to learn how to ride a bike?

I was going somewhere with all of this. Ah yes, let's first recap: with every new small skill (riding a bike, learning to juggle, etc.) there is a punctuation, a jump in comprehension that is hard to devolve from. Biologically speaking, what is responsible for this leap in understanding are the openings of new neural pathways that weren't present before. People aren't, after all, born knowing how to ride on 2 wheels as a survival instinct, so that understanding must be built, constructed from experience and previous knowledge. Once those pathways are open, they're yours to keep. They may get rusty but they won't go away. Learning new skills are purposeful punctuations in your understanding and the earnest result of hard work.
What about, however, overcoming the tendencies that are native to your birth and unique upbringing such as, in my case, stage fright and insomnia before a big event? As mentioned previously, stage fright plagued me for some time but was eventually beaten, not by eliminating it, but by gradually learning how to filter those energies into the appropriate channels. Insomnia, however, is a tricky fucker, but I think I have a plan:
last night, while experiencing one of my favorite insomni-cinematical fantasies which is beating up a whole group of attackers (usually skinheads), the whole time making Batman-like quips and commentaries, it occurred to me that what I was doing wasn't healthy and that I should really get at least 3 hours of sleep before my pre-tour day-labor job pulled me out of bed at 7:30 in the morning. While it is not unusual for me to have thoughts such as this, last night I told my rational half to fuck off and continued day-dreaming (night-dreaming?) about the ways in which I would spin kick one guys head while strangling another.
The result: upon the arrival of 7:30, although I hadn't actually entered any recognizable mode of sleep for more than, say, 30 minutes, I felt as rested and vigorous as a young chickenhawk.

Is this a punctuation or simply the apprehension of a punctuation that's soon-to-be?
The other (although I hate to be so black and white about it) possibility is that I'm hooked on the rush of insomnia, and awake rested in the same emptied out, satisfied way you feel following a skydive or screaming orgasm.

1st Post, day before papering my parent's house with flyers.

2009-01-12T02:32:00.000-08:00

It's 5:30 in the morning. I've been training for road life by subsisting on a new and improved sleep schedule: 5 hours at night, and an hour or so tucked away during the day.
Lucas and I have also been running and egging each other on in a push-up competition (I'm up to 100 in 5 minutes) so as to raise our metabolisms and not suffer terribly from the lechery and alcoholism which will inevitably comprise a large portion of this experience.

In Athens, GA, there exists a record label known as Orange Twin. The label was developed by the Elephant 6 collective (Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, etc.), as a way to produce quality recordings of artists who might not normally get a chance to have people listen to their music (one of my favorite titles is, "100 Great Record Needle Pick-ups).

I was recently graduated, recently single and working a shit job, generally not enjoying things very much. Didn't I, after all, originally attend school to avoid such a situation? My plan was pretty simple: clean slate. I applied for several graduate programs, internships, residency programs and figured that if nothing worked out I could always go sparrow fart and join some international exchange or peace-keeping organization (peace is cool, right?). As luck might have it, another opportunity to tour the country fell into my lap.

It's odd how this happens to me. I spent several years jumping from circus to circus in 2003-2006 (seeing New Zealand and almost all of America) as a result of getting snowed in for 2 weeks and learning to juggle when I was 22. Now, after finding an accordion while cleaning out an attic, being intrigued by the dip and swell of the 120 buttons and practicing until I was decent enough to thump out a pretty tight polka, I'm signed to a band on a record label I've been a fan of for years and am, only 2 weeks after the clean slate-needing spiritual deflation and hearing the Visitations for the first time, going on a national tour playing accordion.
What the fuck? Like when my friends asked me how some bullshit skill (juggling) that I'm not even very good at led to my circus experience, "I have no idea, but am glad that the universe still has the ability to surprise me. Jump and the net will appear."