meadows of the sun

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!