August 2005 Archives

Hello from tour.

Hello from the City of the Salted Lake.

Hello from a dusk, the sun is buttering pink the mountain tops. I am very irritable. I closed my eyes and breathed deep to prevent my teen temper from tantrum. I lost my favorite sweater. Should I just give it up, as carpet in the rearview, or should I make calls to Phoenix?

I thrifted a Kraftwerk 7 inch today and shoplifted a scorpion cameo brooch. I found a T shirt in the “Child Camo” section. I also found a record that somebody recorded in a booth in 1957, entitled “Polio Speech.”

In Phoenix, we stayed at a household full of 18 year olds with a collection of hookahs and a terribly scared pit bull, recently recovered from an abusive owner. It was relaxed there at that house until a bleached blonde shirtless roommate came home and bucked and shouted---it was his first evening getting drunk with his new fraternity. It was so late, our eyes were sleepy, have mercy, this man used such vocal volume and was so smiley. I whispered to Pete and Gabe, “I will calm this man!” The man was flexing his nipples and I said, “Hey, let’s smoke weed!” and he brought out the gravity bong. A couple minutes later he was knee to knee with me, waxing lovingly about My Chemical Romance. Minutes after that, he tried to stand up and the damage was apparent; he was muted, he was too stoned, he needed to go to sleep. Goodnight, score one for the witch! I went outsite to smoke a cigarette, without my contacts or glasses. The heat in Phoenix was just remarkable. Even at 2 am, the crunchy grass front yard felt like a meadow of the sun and was even more baffling with my jellied vision. I heard a rustling in the bushes and suddenly a small black animal emerged and galloped away---I was so scared, I couldn’t identify it because of my blindness. I went inside and asked one of the boys to escort me outside to the porch, where we had a nice talk about desert homesteads. The next morning we had breakfast at The Pita Jungle with Caralee and Jamie and David and I wore my eyelet dress and almost barfed and cried because the heat was cruel surgery.

On Saturday night we played the Troubador and the bathroom flood migrated toward our T-shirts and the crowd just purred for Xiu Xiu, not even a lip was licked for the audience was so silent and rapt. We had Indian food down the street before the show, very expensive, endorsed by Lucy Liu and N Sync and Leonardo Di Capricorn. We walked back to the Troubador and Ariel was there and we were twins all night. We walked one block in order to smoke weed in Beverly Hills, we admired the trees which were permitted to live in the orderly park, which had an Aaron Spelling-style fountain with a Burger King bag floating in it. Ariel told me Hollywood secrets. Ariel protected me from being arrested by BH pigs for jaywalking. I called Meghan in front of the Italian joint where Robert Blake’s wife was slashed by thugs in her Oldsmobile. Ariel made me a tape of special new songs. I really can’t describe how much I treasure them, but let me say these few ounces of tape are equal to 10 pounds of pink diamonds to me, at least.
Let me say, Xiu Xiu is amazing. Caralee and Jamie are musical scapels, making careful incisions and just rearranging hormones and chemicals. They can telegraph the glands. The music incites very powerful reactions. I only heard a little of the recorded stuff before I left, and I was very unsure about it because I hadn’t seen the band live before. I admired the sincerity of the music, it is undeniably daring and difficult and deserves admiration, but it made me uncomfortable. But the live show is a different story. It is manipulative; even at the merch table in a different room I find myself overwhelmed by emotion and these feelings are not trite or flimsy. Xiu Xiu can unite pulses and unite a crowd in a complex emotion that is defined differently by every one but still results in the same pressure of feeling. They are really skillfull musicians and very busy while playing but still their personal characters come through in their musicianship. They are both a treat to watch. And the crowds are so devoted, bare and available. It’s really beautiful to see teenage couples embrace at the opening bars of their songs. But the moments boil too. In San Deigo some girl on ecstacy was disturbing everybody with her boneless dancing and wild eyes. In Visalia, I joined a group of teenage boys in their seizure dances and they immediately surrounded me and started kind of breathing in my face and touching me. I guess I probably suprised them, jumping into their drunk circle dance barefoot. We all got weird and wild until I was tired and took off, went outside for a while and then hid behind a PA speaker and watched the band. The boys started shouting, “There she is! Why are you hiding? Come out!” and then started harassing Nedelle, who is the other opening act, a really wonderful woman. I ran outside when they were shouting and I heard later that they screamed mean heckles at Xiu Xiu and then smeared their windows with Ranch dressing. Caralee said she wanted to puncture their skulls with her percussion. Those boys were trouble. I danced with a couple of polite ravers earlier in the night, I should have stuck with them!

Last night we spent the night in Evanston, Wyoming, a couple of hours outside of Salt. We arrived at 2 am, we drove after the show. We got settled into the room, which we shared with Nedelle and her touring partner Nick. I took a shower and decided to step out the motel’s side door and smoke a little weed in the parking lot. I was sitting on a stoop outside the door when I heard someone in the motel step out of their room into the hallway. I put my stuff away, kind of paranoid, and stood up and looked into the hallway. There was a little boy, about 10 and towheaded, standing there, with his room door ajar. I couldn’t see his face, he had his forehead pressed into the wall of the hallway just outside the door. I watched him for a second and then approached him.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
He turned his face toward me, his eyes sleepy and his lips puffed.
“Yeah,” he said unsteadily.
He looked away from me and continued to stare into the wallpaper. He then started lightly knocking on the wall.
“Are you sleepwalking?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m looking for my mom.” He knocked more on the wall, confused.
“Hey, you should go back to your room,” I said. He looked at me puzzled and tranced. “Go ahead, it’s right there. Go back into room. It’s OK.” He recognized the door then and
gently closed it behind him.

I returned to the parking lot, shivering in the mountain air, feeling very strange about entering a dream. Sitting the stoop again, a glitzed pickup truck rolled by slowly, with blackened opaque windows, creeping by. If you can love it, the surreal world of the tour is so sweet and mysterious, it is the electricity of coincidences and syncronicities, it is the gamble of the unpredictable. This part of the tour is especially enchanted because we are still in the West, with the blondish rock formations and palm valleys jeweled with decaying stone cottages. The other night, past midnight, driving from Phoenix to a motel in Utah, we were on a remote route, with no gas stations for 50 miles at least. Then we crept through a national park at 25 mph, where we stopped and smelled sage and felt the mountain lion and saw a star die. A bat swooped near our windshield, it was unimaginably huge. That was surreal in a charmed way. The route between San Diego and Phoenix is not charmed. It is a parched snake at the lip of Mexico, where there are military-style checkpoints randomly on the freeways, where they ask your nationality. Helicopters stalk the border and I am sad to think of the people in that desert, thirsty walking toward my country and its reapers in finery and chests full of gunmetal. Also so difficult are the signs of tragic beef, all the filthy cattle concentration camps on rural roads and the reprehensible smells wafting from invisible animal gulags.

I am feeling very nice right now, watching the visible winds of Wyoming. This tour is very healthy, good food, even catering sometimes and little drinking because many of the shows are at all-ages spaces with no tolerance. That’s fine, it feels nice not to spend so much spirit at nighttime. I feel calm and sustainable, and the only things I really don’t like are traffic jams and being woken up, though it’s better to be woken by friends than the vulture chirp of the alarm clock.

I miss friends, I miss cats, I miss hot mate and oatmeal in the morning, exercise and the noon sunshine.

I am now in Denver. I wrote this over the past few days. This has been my first chance to post. If you know Shana or Andy Cigarettes and you can contact them in Missouri, please tell them to come to the Columbia show tomorrow!

early in the morning
at noon
the dirt began to breathe
in reddish sneezes
over tissues
where radishes
spin a helix knit
into a bouquet of teeth

then the grandparents
for cakes of egg
at the cafe
and there was hundreds
of basketball players around there
and we talked
of the aunt who makes
lace
we will meet her

then the sun
had its surgery
I cursed soileil
i told its butter and oil
to go away

with a whisker tounge
on my left arm
suctioned like a slug
stealing all of my
shine and sheene
for the milk of the green bean
to keep the radish growing

how many piano keys
scuttered by
like a thread
keeping a line
One million?

many hitchikers
one town
waited for shakespeare
but got a bus of pucks
waiting for dumpsters
to fill up
but all there was:
planters of bald
wheat grass
I looked

Pretty old California
pink sleeping rock sasquatch
aluminum boats
so stupid
they stare like cows
the opossum
peers out of a quilt
of soybeans
to shine peeled-grape eyes
and put one claw
to the shoulder
I notice

If nobody minds
I am going to eat
chrysanthemum flowers
and make a pillow out of petals
and disappear into the folds of Oakland
and make a tea
out of every bee's attention for me
because as far as I know,
I hold no pollen
I will make a Jacuzzi out of every day,
my whistle may sound exactly like a harpsichord
I will not jump out of a car
because of sun fever
on the Interstate 5 to Los Angeles
instead I will pogo into a creek
and drink bubonic
courtesy of Du Pont.
Please after you read this, send me a telepathic message. I will be totally available tomorrow for wireless communication.

Time to leave. One week more and then it’s suitcases and seatbelts again. Making chapels out of newspapers and teacups, making comfort rituals out of the quiet moments, making cathedrals out of bathrooms. Whistling. Iambs. Prayers against viruses. Tears for kale. I get very difficult periods on the road, with torturous preludes and even wretched suffixes. I mope and cry tears when I don’t get my nutrition. I am astonished at the men on tour who can spend three days eating ramen. I can’t do it. I will put my hand to a driver’s throat if he insists there is no time to get radishes. I am starting to plan a suitcase for the next couple of months, and it is a big job to pack. Can I bring my eyelet dress for walking on lonely roads in Kentucky in August? Will I have lonely moments? I hope so! Shall I bring my ponchos, my boots, my wedding-cake baby dresses, my Mexican tunic. Every time I have toured United States before, I have worn one single T-shirt and jeans almost exclusively. With Yellow Swans, it was Get Hustle shirt that Chris tailored for me the day before I left. With Alarmist, it was our own T-shirt. “You change people, why change clothes?” is how I put it. But on second thought, it’s also nice to have the option of looking like an Indian bride, right, when you are feeling kind of bland from lack of iron. I am going to a farm after the tour, I have to consider that too. Certainly I will need a down jacket for the autumn in Northern California, won’t I need a metallic headdress and warm waffly cottons.

One thing I will not have but will certainly need is a bicycle. A skateboard would be easier. I tried to learn how to skateboard in December of 2002, when I lived at 50th and Hawthorne with Carrie. Towhead Josh put together a skateboard for me and I would practice on 50th after 2 am but then I found our front-yard tree was more fun to climb and lost interest in skateboarding in the rain and skinning my knees. At that time, I was so fixated on skateboarding, because it was a rehabiliation exercise for ending a 5-year relationship. I was determined to work up a boyish energy in myself after spending years defining my femininity so subserviently. I was very broke at that time, I was used to living in a two-income family, so Josh generously patched my board together. I skated only a few months and then gave it to Eric Crespo.

I want to have a party on Friday to say goodnight. I am leaving with Pete on Sunday. I don’t want to be at Oakland ever again, but I will for a couple of days next week and I will see good friends and record with Karl. I hope an SUV does not piourette off a bridge and hit me on the head.

My sister and I were at PDX Pop Fest on Friday night, getting on our bikes. She rode a bike very courageously, in a miniskirt that was less than a diaper. Suddenly these two men came out of nowhere with very expensive cameras and started snapping us like paparazzi. I said, "We were just talking about how much we hate our photos taken!" but Lauren loves it, she can show pretty teeth it's easy. I covered my face with my hair. This kind of attention does nothing for me, it's like a tempt with smell when I'm hungry. It makes me feel more wicked than cherished. I am no wicked Jezebel, though there are agents in this province who would like to translate my vibe muscle that way.

Can't wake up in the morning, dreams are heavy on me. Just dreamed I was riding on an airplane to the frozen custard shack down the street from my childhood home. Yesterday, I was spilling happy energy out of my pores, I perspired it, it came and came, I laughed for no reason on my bike. I went to the ink house and had the first coffee in a while, I decided this attitude could stand to be louder! After talking with Joel and then writing, I started to feel very very thirsty and in danger of my own energy. I went home and read, I watched the pirate landlord arrow and bow, but still I had this feeling: LL SSSS DDDDDD. I was so excited and I wanted something much more. Finally, I decided to take a ride up old Sulfur Mountain. I put air in my bike tires and at the gas station, and a teenager made an intimate comment about my body, thinking I wasn't listening. I gave him a very nasty look and to my great amazement, he said, "Oh, I didn't mean to offend you. I'm really sorry." I saw him again up the Sulfur and he apologized again, he seemed very sorry, this is a huge departure from Oakland. I could barely enjoy the pink quartz at the mountaintop, still so restless. I rode down the mountain then at dusk and saw the sliver of the new moon, and then I knew. In the forest, the new moon is so exciting, because then you can see at least the outline of your palm in front of your nose. When the moon is out, I want to walk around all night, find little nooks to hide in, say hello to all cats. Instead, I went with Meghan to Nature's for chocolate and then came home and mysteriously puked, from either sheer excitement or the faux pregnancy flu that is stalking around. This flu is awful, it gives nausea and breast tenderness to even the celibate. But I ate my porridge today with no problems, let the acupuncturist challenge it.

The animals are insane today too. Oranjy is trying to climb my torso like I am made of bark and he is puncturing my skin with his nail. A bird is fluttering and making plumes of pollen, this bird even tried to fly in this house!

This city, what a happy home.
We have a wedding at dusk each day,
when the dark marries the light
in a splendid kiss
like when the ocean puts its fingers
on the forehead of the shore.
Bless the roses when their mouths become teacups and the rain washes their yellow away.
Bless the people in a urine of gasoline, they will be banished from this kingdom and even the children will drink the blood, which will be as red as a policeman's and an exception from our usual vegan nipple.
Bless all the steel and metal which will wilt into graves and puddles, for all construction will be abandoned and the cars will frown until they are just one single solitary sad old calorie.
10,000 kittens meow at once in a tender frail opera
All the women link arms and create a protein which makes the sun shudder and cower but we laugh and call it back

"To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute." (Vladimir Nabokov)

I love you strong breeze on baked-in-a-cake hot days.
I love you alley of webs and spider kites and green growth more vibrant in the shade.
I love you landlord who wanks on bad guitar in the afternoon and then practices with a bow and arrow while I fix dinner.
I love you fevered girl who makes meow all night.
I love you Orangey, even when we hug and you make me dirty.
I love you summer, even in August when you start shaving away a minute of light every day until we must light our lamps at 4 pm.
I love you sister in sunglasses, I know behind your lens your eye is brown and happy.
I love you Grandma, you named your cat Happy.
I love you other Grandma, I'm sorry you ran out of money, you bought a Jet Ski!
I love you schizophrenic on the bus, I am glad you were rambling about Mickey Mouse and comedy and not your pooped pants or something.
I love you yellow stucco, I'm leaning on you now.
Thank you spider for not biting me.
Thank you for last night's dreams: one was about sex, one was about singing.
My sister saw Worms and The Planet The last night after she flew here and she said, "The people in these bands are always acting like their orgasming."
I am playing tonight at Holocene at 11:30 pm. I am desperate for gifts!

Last night reminded me of Detroit July, when it is so hot that even the parents are restless past midnight. Minutes slime by with palsy. I remember being 12 years old and spending summer nights on my trundle bed staring into my cat’s face. My dad threw baseballs at beehives. My sisters galloped with boys in fields of Queens Anne’s lace and made games with forklifts and avalanches with sytrofoam insulation. Our backyard was the yard for my dad’s construction business and it was a delight boys paradise. We had pyramids of brick, forklifts, big trucks, an Army dumptruck.
I remembered the other day the first time I rode a bike. As I gained speed I lost control and nosed into a tree, pedaling into the trunk, yelling, “I can’t stop!”

My first car accident was kind of like that, but it also involved a drunk driver who climbed into the backseat and took me and my boyfriend hostage. The other driver was a 40-year-old construction guy. He bullied me into fleeing the scene and driving him to his parents’ house. He was very drunk and locked us out of the house. I rang the doorbell and his mother answered. We called the police together. The police came and laughed at me in my ripped tights and my boyfriend, who had a mohawk so exuberant that he could not drive a car because his hair penetrated the foam ceiling.

I went to the river yesterday and sunned on the silverest rock, in a bowl of fierce water. A duo of high school boys were riding the rapids over and over. I dipped into the water and got stuck in the quick and fought a strength, gripping onto slick rocks to avoid being washed away. One of the boys came down the rapids and got stuck too and I said, “You are so crazy, you will do anything!” because those boys were just not afraid of skull disruption or any kind of lung oppression when springing into this fierce water. The boy had “Amanda” tattooed right above his nipple in a tender cursive.

Nick helped me mix side B of Inca Ore. It is 18 minute vocals. I was so pleased with it that I clapped. Nick fell asleep, which is the highest compliment, like he said. While we listened, I had a memory of when I was 18, working as a newspaper reporter. It was damp and hot, August. I visited a woman in a suburb for future chemotherapy recipients. She was an advocate for disabled children. Her child was very disabled, in a way I can’t remember. I visited her in her antiseptic kitchen, in an enviornment so bland that there was not even a climate surprise. She was locked in with children at noon, in rooms dead with cheap newness. Where I grew up, all of the houses were brand new, the schools filled and then overfilled with new people in new houses, living in barren settlements with chem grasses and infant trees. I grew up in an old neighborhood, surrounded by little blueberry U-pick places and apple orchards, in an old house my dad sculpted into a strange palace over the years. (He would say, “Hmmm, maybe we should extend the house right here.” And the next day, men would wake us at dawn, chipping away at the brick.)

There were many little forests and rickety farms, where my grandparents were raised, but they were all shaved. The roads were blood-stained from all of the creatures kicking the bucket on the asphalt. The skeletal barns were collapsed and all character was swept and subdivisions sprouted. There were no more sheep, but many more friends, who lived in those permanently windy settlements that smelled like paint. These houses had no ghosts or ancestors. These kids were nihilists who dug their own graves on acid.

So, mixing my music and having this chill of memory, of this very unhappy woman toiling in the dwellings that my home region is now paved with, was a reward, and a remembrance of why I am so far away from every one of all of them. In this perspective, ahhh, I have made the right decisions. But the daily prayers continue: please no bicycle accident, please no future root canals, please no theives, please let me have a tourniquet for when the vampires open the blood vessels.

The new Boredoms album is amazing, it’s like back scratching.

I am playing a couple of shows this week:
Tuesday 1 pm at Anthem Records 828 SE 34th (free)
with Fursaxa and Traveling Bell
Tuesday evening at Holocene in a collaboration with World, also with Daniel Menche, Jean Paul, Reno, GOD, GEESE
Wednesday night at Dunes, as a duo with Eric Crespo’s guitar sounds, also with Tunnels, Malamute and Sisprum Vish (free)
Friday at Holocene with Mark Evan Burden, DJ ASSCLAPP, Sex With Girls, Pocket Parade, Redbird (free)
Friday will be very special because my 21-year-old sister Lauren will be in town and my favorites from Oakland will be visiting: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon and Rob Enbom. Jackie is the keeper of my favorite cat, Gregory. I am only here for two more weeks before I depart for Oakland and then go on tour with Yellow Swans and Xiu Xiu and Nedelle.