I'm so glad you're glad

Top moments, my year:
Drinking poppy tea on the roof of the Philadelphia Anthaeneum after Gang Wizard played there. Nate brewed it for me and we drank it together. He gave me “Hand of Glory” by Royal Trux too. We drank the tea out of a big stainless steel bowl.

Playing in Gang Wizard, opening for Animal Collective and Ariel Pink in Amherst in April. I played drums, bass and sang. After we played, I bit my fingernails and spit them into kids’ hands for souveniers. Ariel and I smoked weed and watched AC from the front seat of his van. The Doctor Sample player with the spiky hair was so drunk, he was furniture.

Crying tears into a glass of J & B in a hotel casino in Las Vegas, after a public confrontation with my dad in a Wolfgang Puck restaurant. I slammed my fist on the table and said “My mission is to prove you wrong!” and stormed to the bar. I cried the tears and of course a man offered a shirt sleeve to wipe my nose on---the only other women alone at the bar were prostitues. The man ended up being a composer---a writer of soap opera music. He took me to a secret party in the penthouse, there were many security clearances. I saw a Bush twin in the bathroom (“Jenna!” I said. “Didn’t we meet in New York?” She blanched, “No.” There were a couple of Secret Service men there and I delicately quizzed them. “Why does this club have so much security, why do you even have fancy earpieces?” But then I feared them---dangerous curiosity!) I sat at the bar and watched the drooling rich drop $20 bills while tipping on $1000 tabs. In a Lynch moment, a handsome Irish man began to flatter me while I waited for a drink, but I just stared and was quiet and demure until he became desperate and emotional and began to cry because, “I’ll never see you again!” His friends had to escort him out of the bar by picking him up by the arms. Was the moon full that night? I stood on the penthouse balcony, listening to British producers talk about the Grammys, and I put my fist to my cheek, Las Vegas, that poor sad old sea bed.

The best show of my life was in New York City at Tonic, a couple of days before Halloween. I played with Tom, Nick and Danny in Jackie O Motherfucker; Marissa Nadler and the Flaherty/Corsano Duo played with us. I tap danced and filled the room with my white skirt while Paul and Chris played, so happy and buoyant. Nick and Danny and I had just had dal and naan near Tonic, in a basement restaurant with a sitar and tabla player. Chris’ mom thanked me for dancing, I said, why didn’t you take my arm and dance with me? I can barely describe our performance that night, it must have been about an hour long. Paul screamed in appreciation and broke a wine glass. After we played, I think the whole audience hugged us immediately, I leaned on the piano and whispered to myself, “This is dangerous.” I broke my ribcage with sound, my cardiac muscle leaped from its well in a silver trout flash, I peeled nude, it is dangerous! I closed my eyes for one hour and offered. When I feel most fluid as a singer, I could compare it to the surrender of orgasm, but I hate the cheeky or naughty implications of that. It’s more pure, one sweet arc, an energetic offering, it’s a climax wrapped in both a rainbow and every texture of darkness. It is also completely exhausting, tearfully exhausting. When I first started to really harnass the power as a performer, when I really felt the scary purity, I was playing with Malibu Falcon in Seattle. Stef and Nick and I took the soundman by the hand and stood in a circle, syncronizing our breath. We took the stage and I just liquefied and poured and when we ended I immediately broke into tears and cried into Chris’ armpit until he needed to go to the store, where I hid my face and nosed back into his armpit when nobody was looking.

But I must be getting better because after that Tonic show, I did not cry, I managed the daze okay, I took the train to Brooklyn with my sleeping bag tied around my neck. That Tonic show will become a record on Ecstatic Peace in the fall, I hope that’s not a secret.

This year I did one East Coast tour, two West Coast, two national tours, lived at a commune and worked at a pot farm. And lived in Oakland and worked as a personal assistant. I was the kind of little girl that could not even go to sleepover parties because I was so bashful and unable of adjust to unpredictable conditions---I was like that even until about 18. I have learned a lot about flexibility, simplicity and social contortions since then. I learned how to cope this year. I think dancing and movement are most important to my sanity and also my resevoirs of creative jubilance. Also, it is impossible to stay angry or moddy while singing or whistling. I cannot read reviews or music press. Recently, I became so jealous that I trembled, I shook with the feeling, I AM SORRY! I cannot spend too much time with people who music-gossip or endlessly record fetish or snicker about how bad some bands are. When I’m exposed to those atittudes, I start to have very depressed feelings that this music thing is a make-believe world studded with spiky and mean characters who pretend to be holy and somehow make holy sounds but they are strange actors really.

Thank you parsley tea, raspberry leaf, damiana, mugwort, instant miso, instant oatmeal, chamomile, Throat Coat, yerba mate, Romulan.

I am writing this on the I-5 from Long Beach to Oakland. We just stopped at a gas station and I found a junk shop, which I had gallop through a parking lot to get to. I bought a Hawaiian kimono for $6, I considered buying a Pakistani knife, but I don’t need that!

Let me remember and enjoy every summer moment in Portland at Meghan’s house: sunning in the afternoons, riding my bike up the mountain, checking my email in the herb garden filled with cats next to the restaurant and the chef would bring me a little cake he baked for me, drinking wine in the hot dusk on Meghan’s porch and hearing records and smoking joints with her.

The first show I ever played as Inca Ore, in early July. I was so nervous, and wearing a very uncomfortable dress, and Johnny brought pastel balloons and I sat on the floor, watching my bare knees and singing. The B side of “Brute Nature Versus Wild Magic,” which just came out on vinyl, is a recording of one of the songs I made the afternoon before the show.If you have read this far, maybe you’d like an LP. You should write me.

296 miles to San Francisco. We just crossed the big mountain, now we see the orange groves.

See my June writing if you want to know more about my time at the commune, but I’ll tell you some highlights: running barefoot in a towel at dusk to the sauna and running back to the wood-stove heated cabin naked and warmed in the dark, picking strawberries at 5 pm after an afternoon in the pond and eating them in the cool hand-built cabin and reading. The wedding at the commune was a dedcadent disaster: a member of the Austrian royal family called me “booze bag,” by the campfire, I was admonished for puking up a just-flown-in oyster in front of the wedding party, after a couple of weeks of beans and brown rice I was so happy to see Jagermeister and guacamole at midnight, when the wedding party rave had just begun.

Remember when me and Jackie and Nate climbed into the intestines of the labryinth built into Lobot and talked with our elbows while Sunn 0)))) bended nails with voume?

Remember when Rob and I saw Cass and got backstage at a Modest Mouse show in Berkeley in the spring, and the dressing room for Love as Laughter started on fire and we watched Modest Mouse churn out the ungrateful loathing from the wings of the stage with firefighters? I asked Isaac Brock backstage after the show, “What is it like to make music when you become so popular, don’t you feel like a servant to people’s expectations?” He made his rat face and said, “Listen, I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t give a fuck. I go to the bank, that’s music for me now, I go to the bank.” During one of their encores, I ran into the crowd and started hugging and loving all these girls who were just bonkers for that dick Isaac, just for the fun of it, but then the security would not let me backstage again and all of my stuff and Rob was back there. So I began to climb the massive PA speakers until this one girl said she knew me and prevented the bouncers from killing me. Bless me!

I did get beat up by bouncers a couple of weeks later, at the Coachwhip’s “last” show, when thug security fuckers picked me up by the waistband of my jeans and carried me out of the show space because I tried to be a human shield when they were about to beat up my pal Rob.

Rob and I spent the early morning of Jan. 1 2005 together. We had been at a party together in East Oakland, but I went back to Grandma’s House a little after midnight and went to the rave in our warehouse building. I was in somebody’s bedroom at the rave and somebody said, “I work at Google, anybody want a free ecstacy?” I said, “Yeah, what the hell,” and found myself in a whirl of mysterious montage for the first few hours of this year. I remember standing in the darkned kitchen of the space and talking to a stranger, who I could not see. We had a long conversation, very embroidered and intense and he asked me to marry him and ride a motorcycle through Marin County with him. Then I went to another room, where there was a platform of grass growing in the windowless room, and crawled like kittens with a bunch of raver girls, who took an interest in me and played with my hair and asked me to try on their dresses. I loved those rave parties when I lived in Oakland, I would go alone and melt into the weirdo porridge and dance like a happy lunatic. After the rave on New Year’s, I went back to Grandma’s House and Rob was there, very drunk. We talked for a couple of hours and tried to make sense of Oakland, which is an avalanche of scars.

I can’t forget the sunrise on July 5. Getting detained at the Quebec border and turned away with Gang Wizard, getting detained with Yellow Swans while they sniffed my herbs at Quebec, taking a walk with some girl through the park and smoking a joint in Montreal, haunting around Grass Valley with teenage Zach and listening to Democracy Now while painting picnic tables under the hummingbird feeder, sleeping on floors and couches and under stairs and leaving stray hairs in other people’s beds and showers from Knoxville to Toronto, stricken with illness aided by coedine in Grandma’s House, sleeping in a rickety treehouse on a matress with quilts at the pot farm, varnishing the treehouse at the commune and decorating the wedding cake, decorating the fountains of Beverly Hills with Ariel and he will sing “Ghosts,” making half-rotten vegetables for Meghan greasy faced with olive oil, riding around Boston in the Dreamhouse bus and in Chris Repucci’s Chevy Celebrity. i recorded my album on the concrete floor at Grandma’s House, next to the stereo cabinet, which once housed a 10-pound rat. Tonight I played a set wtih Adam and Honey, the last show of our tour, the last show of my very long adventure. I stood in the very exact spot in the warehouse where I timidly recorded for the first time. We played the best, at the end Honey and I looked each other in the face and started to laugh and scream, we screamed really ecstatically, we were so happy!

These were my favorite shows:
Growing, Lichens, Badgerlore in October, San Francisco
Xiu Xiu, Yellow Swans with Inca Ore, Frog Eyes in September, Toronto
Hustler White, Battleship, Mikaela’s Fiend at the Creamery in Oakland, April
Gang Wizard with Animal Collective and Ariel Pink in Amherst, April
JOMF with Flaherty/Corsano and Marissa Nadler, NYC, October
No Neck Blues Band at Bottom of the Hill, SF, December
Japanther, KIT, Foot Village, Battleship at the Purple House, Oakland, spring?
Animal Collective with Octis, Great American SF, November
Afrirampo, Scout Niblett, Get Hustle, Berbatis Portland, June
Double Leopards, Skaters/Axolotl at Ptomaine Temple, Oakland, spring
Skaters/Axolotl with Sightings in Oakland, spring

Hi Ariel