Author (#23)December 2005 Archives

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

Last night I slept on a blue couch with a Siamese named Thurston puddling into the upholstry’s shoulder, watching over me.

He is part Calico too

Last night I saw the sea accepting the moon’s butters on its surface, I heard it coo with every unfurl.

When I am on tour, I like to stay awake when everyone has already fallen asleep, I like to find the last lightswitch to darken the room and I like to use my fingertips to find my way through the blackened house. I like to smile into the darkness, at the utter pleasure of “Where am I?” in this era of global positioning systems and street lamps. I start to sleep, cradled for one half hour by the pleasure of surrender in this foreign place, this strange home. I fall deeper into sleeping and I lose all perception of the space, I am in a stranger’s home, in a hammock of their sensations, the purr of their dishwasher, the scent of their garbage can and kitchen cleansers, under the watch of their cat.
In Seattle, we drank beer from Belgium in an acorn hut and I walked to our sleeping spot alone. I climbed a hill and peered into every alley. Adventures. I am surprised what I see in the dark corners. I remember, early in my liberation, going to a very fancy party and painting my cheek with cork and climbing into a rich man’s closet in order to kiss, we were nude in a cocoon of wool suits. I was liberated at age 23. Before that, I did have many adventures, even in the halls of governments in Brussels and in Mexican buses, but the real adventures started at 23, when I started darting into dark places alone, climbing into backyards to pluck flowers, with no partner and no witnesses.

I'm in Oakland and drinking scotch and ginger tea in the unheated Huffin, smoking California outdoor grown in kiddie pool pots in Mendocino County. Gregory is eating coco puffs and galloping after invisibles. When I came back to this house there was a picture of Sarah Hill and Michael Finnegan dancing on Halloween tacked near the kitchen door. In the photo Michael is costumed as a "grown man" and Sarah is Courtney Love dark hair zombie. I met Sarah twice and the last time I saw her was in Portland in the basement of RIP after this disasterous party I threw. We had alphabet soup, you know, we were really unleashed on something Sasha Shulgin made and we really scared the other kids at the party. I even shoved many of them, but playfully. Most of the night we were in my bedroom and I had a tounge of truth suddenly and made a couple important conclusions and was clarvoyantly succinct though I was laughing almost painfully. After all, we screamed and laughed and tore through the party and ended up in Stef's room in the basement. We mewled and growled and laughed on tape for about 10 minutes before Beverly Palmer fell through the basement window, grin-first. She screamed and the tape became much louder because we all screamed and Sarah and I were clutching each other in permanent grins. I thought she was in Florida, but she was here in Oakland on Halloween, dressed as a dark hair Victorian zombie.

I was in Boston at a Chinese restaurant seeing Majick Markers on Halloween. Our show at the Middle East was cancelled because the band we were to play with were in Greece on Halloween and didn't even know the story. On that day too we went to this distribution warehouse in Boston, I can't remember the name, and there was an indoor basketball court and maybe 20 Merzbow boxed sets and even boxes of tea like kava kava and roobios. Tom was telling people on tour that I considered shoplifting the boxed sets, but really I do know when to shoplift.

I'm nostalgic for snow, though I never liked it for the 21 years I lived in Michigan except for the times when I was not in Detroit or Lansing. My parents had a cottage near West Branch, Michigan, a mildewy A-frame on Lake Ogemaw in the poorest county in Michigan, and I ice skated there sometimes for 10 years. I sometimes liked the snow but never in conjunction with snow mobiles. I liked taking walks with this boy I saw there on weekends, whose dad was a cop that burned catfish alive in fire pits.

On the weekends Up North there was usually a group of kids and we would paddle boat or hunt turtles or lay in bed and read Little House books or somehow laugh so hard that pants were peed. In the summer we would get on the pontoon boats and jet skis with the adults. We would dock in a deep part of the lake and the kids would swim until exhausted, and then eat of bunch of Cheezits and then swim more, then Combos, then Triscuits, all fuel for swimming in a sand bar too. By the time it was campfire time the adults would become really bombed out on moombas; the kids would go crazy and then one of the rowdy boys would run nuts-first into a flagpole and have to go to the emergency room and then the night would wind down.

I went to some amazing carnivals and county fairs and biker rallies up there in the summers. You could hear biker parties miles and miles away.

The only time I visited a psychic was at a community-center fair at Lake Ogemaw when I was 10. The community center had pancake breakfasts and little events and the psychic was at the summer fair. The fair was very exciting for the kids and we would be crazy on Nerds and Laffy Taffy. I visited the psychic very seriously. I had decieded that I wanted to go to junior high instead of finish elementary school, so I asked the psychic advice on skipping 6th grade. I don't remember what the psychic said but I did do it and it was a weird process. I petitioned them a week before school started and they said yes. I worked in the counselor's office in junior high and saw my permanent record. I snuck a look in the filing cabinets and it was full of strange observations about me and included all school portraits, including my 2nd grade school photo, I am wearing a Girl Scout uniform, missing two front teeth.

Now that I think of it: RIP Joey.

We stopped to pick sage in Wyoming at about 4 pm, making careful steps in the blowing sweet grass, surprised to find garbage bleached by the sun hidden in the hairs.

We were hungry, it was urgent, but there was only an IGA sitting ugly and meek next to the panting train tracks, on an Indian reservation. All of the workers there were white, their eyes were painting the linoleum, they never looked up. All of the customers were Indian and there were two beautiful women in the frozen foods section, very tall women with very long hair. They had a toddler boy with them, the boy ran up to Tom and dug his fists into Tom's shins.

On this same trip, a couple of weeks ago, they threw a snowball at me in Montana, a glittering morning. I wore my wool slippers into the snow, I would not put on my shoes. The night before, we wandered into a blizzard, a big piece of weather with semi-trucks tunnelling in and out.

At the rest stops the old people are stretching. They drive and drive, looking out the window and saying nothing.

We stopped at a road house somehow in beautiful Wyoming, a aluminum sided rectangle with a bar and tvs and convenience and bathrooms. The lady was web chatting with someone in the war. I think I fought Nick for exercise. The men came back from their hunt and started drinking beer and studying us. They did not really give a fuck, they laughed with me when I got very excited from being rowdy and fake boxing Nick, and I jumped around the parking lot in pretend flight. I complain about driving, I say it is dangerous and I complain about puddling into the seat for 8 hours a day, I will tell you a lot about how the food is just toxic and the lonely people and children are very sad at motels and truck stops. But I do experience a euphoria while travelilng, especially in the part between the west coast and the midwest. I like to be the driver, I'll drive through the most beautiful parts, I will listen to my favorite music and AM trucker emo oldies and drink in the ranges, bridges and oil refineries, I like to not speak at all in daylight, just drive and think and work up a fever thinking in premonitions and feel my eyes turn in my sockets, just very still and thinking.

Noticing the bracelet of sun on my wrist and looking into strangers' eyes for a long time. Buying a pint of whiskey from the bar attached to the gas station and drinking it in a motel. The television is always on in a motel room but I want to turn it off, the little room is a temple of relaxation. Nick and I always seemed to be falling asleep as "Roseanne" came on in every motel room we ever stayed in on the Jackie O tour.

i have been on the road since June 1, when I left for the first farm. I have been at two farms, went on two tours of USA and Canada and long-term visited Portland and Oakland. Now I am in Oakland and I am going on a West Coast tour next week and then going to Detroit for Christmas. My birthday 26 is December 29 and I will give myself the gift of a calm station existence for three months. All I want for my birthday is my food stamps reinstated and a cabin with a wood burning stove in a snowy area, also snow boots and a lot of chopped wood. I think I could lay on the floor and look at the ceiling and think things through for about two weeks.

Traveling can be very alienating. Your close friends (family) become kind of strangers when you become seperated by a blur of details. It's hard to be present with their lives while you're gone. I don't even have a phone, so nobody can even call me without calling somebody else to get to me. I like to write notes, but there is no time. And I just become psychedically afflicted with the density of traveling life. When I come back from tour, I feel kind of shaky and I act like a zombie, even stutter from exhaustion. I have cried spontaneously lately, just so overwhelmed. I want to share and shed some of the psychic weight of the richness of all of this, but it's hard to even begin. I am available to every detail so the immensity of the experience can't even be translated. Though it felt monumenta and it changed mel, it's somehow not that interesting or too long a story at first when I try to explain.

Now I am in Oakland, listening to Kellari Juniversemi and drinking a little scotch in Jackie's bedroom. I am at Huffin. Michael was hitchhiking for a week, so I slept in his room and then Jackie left for NYC so I have been sleeping in her room. She is returning tonight. I can't stop sleeping, every dream is so blunt, smears of embroidery that I can't inspect very closely. Bless Jackie and Michael, having a room to myself for the past 10 days has helped me. I needed that privacy.

I have been sleeping, wearing my hat and coat or a blanket, acting like a step-mother to Gregory because that cat is such a step-child when Jackie's not around! i have been listening to Earth and Terry Riley. I keep accidentally eating unripe persimmons; have you done that, it is something like "very sour" feeling in your mouth, but somehow with an adhesive instead of a sour.