]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/07/wedding-day.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/07/wedding-day.html Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:09:00 -0800 The silhouettes are blurring and it's now evening. The city is illuminated in the distance. No matter the turmoil, there is always a beautiful pudding on the horizon at sunset here, now it is a simmered bruise in the past going into the future. As the sun set, I was dancing in front of my windows to the Secret Museum of the Air's Bali program. Now I have a thimble of wine from Chile and I put on a dress to be by myself. I have a new home and it's a celebration, there are 9 windows here and my quilt is on the wall. It warmed me from Norway to Michoacan this year. It's tattered and delicate. It makes me remember. I wrapped in it and walked into a corner store in Brussels, a little more than a year ago. I was arrested in Norway a year ago. I was in jail a whole day. I did not have my blanket and it was so cold and rainy. One jailer offered me a blanket and I indignantly refused, and I shivered and shivered until I asked for another. The mean lady cop said, "This is not a hotel!" and gave me a styrofoam container of canned corn and milk. A pregnant cop squatted in my cell and made me sign something I did not understand, and it gave me hours more of trouble. They said I would go to prison camp and then flown home and banned from Europe. Finally after a flood of tears and fear, a man I never met before negotiated my release, and Karl's too. Strangers drove me to the venue, and Karl was released and there, and we were on stage in minutes. I have made music recently. It sounds like a whisper from far away, under a shell in the ocean, picked up by the ear of an insect and then through a brass bell speaker and amplified through the cracks of Mount Kinness and pushed into the roots of a special mountaintop flower that calls for the lost bees with the mouth in its bud, that's where Inca Ore is coming from. I have let the spirit that makes my music exist a little farther from me lately. I am cultivating it always, and it is like a fruit tree, it is heavy from my nuturing and the roots bother my feet and the branches nudge at my inner ears, the fruits threaten to fall off and rot. I begin to harvest them and make music and arrange these letters into words. Sometimes it takes a whole day just to juice the fruit a little, sometimes I have to have my oats and run in the streets and search for treasures and then read and then eat again and then stretch and then dance and then admire the darkening sky with my cultivated sensitivity, and then finally I can create. I was away for days. I went into a car and drove to the Palm Desert. Along the way I met the gentlest policewoman, and I saw dolphins jump at Carpenteria, and the men and women picking the strawberries, and finally I was there, at Coachella, to serve 60,000 people beer. I worked 15 hour days and slept in a tent in the desert. There were no bathrooms near the employee camping and we pissed near the site next to a bizarre desert lagoon. We were camped in between the VIP sushi staff and the security guards and police. One night at dawn I woke and had to piss, and I made my way to the lagoon, darting coma-drunk security guards lurking in between cars. One had a tattoo on his belly that said FUCK A BITCH. I got so mad about baring my ass at that imprivate morning moment that I threw my period pad on the ground. Then I felt guilty for a day thinking of the Mexican man or woman who would have to pick it up. I got to use the VIP bathrooms while I worked. Bathrooms were very important at this event, because they were shared by so many drunk people, and the many hours of work and sweat made the need more urgent. Bathrooms were the ultimate sign of status. I did not deal with the people very much as a bartender, instead I was assigned to count tips. My coworkers served thousands of beers with 30 other people. I was hunched over thousands and thousands of dollar bills and counting, hiding under a refrigerated semi truck until VIP sewage started to back up into the grass there. The VIP bathrooms were deluxe, air conditioned and with soap and long lines into the night. Everybody was on coke, grating their jaws and flaunting bulimia with wan eyes. Women turned their backs to me in the bathroom line when I said I was working there, opening their mouths to expose their drying teeth. I focused on the Mexican women in those moments, scurrying around and cleaning the bathrooms while the porn starlets and celebrity companions pouted and posed in the mirror. I had a moment's break when Bjork played and I felt such ecstacy, tears even. The festival was a carnival of castrated, impotent feminity, bullied and flattened into a pellet of dubious sexiness, and Bjork was so real. She shimmied and grunted and danced with no sexual innuendo. And Bjork is a mother too! And a communicator of new shapes of humanity, a believer in the imagination's future! A warm woman life raft who wants to float us away from the insincere schemes of deriviative and nostaligic music! A painted bird that has ornamental shields in her feathers that eternally deflect the kidney stones of haters! I don't like all of her music, but I like her so much that I like it, I have to like it. It was a beautiful rescue from that bleak crisis: am I a woman, am I a musician, by these definitions, I am not. In that VIP place, it seemed like Sex and the City was the most relevant feminine moment of our generation. It seemed like music was just a function of the sexiness stratas. I did not feel like a musician or a woman then, I felt like a drone in an alien land, a creature with a head like a broken sunflower who would be one of the few survivors when Bjork flooded the VIP with a tsunami of breast milk and made the women make the impossible suicidal decision between saving their own lives or the integrity of their handbags as the milk rose. The last day of the festival I saw Konono No. 1, and I ran through the crowd screaming until I was in the front row for Konono and then I just yelled YAY! over and over until my 15 minute break was up and I ran back screaming and laughing and began counting again. Now Coachella is all over, the fake grass is yellowed and flattened after the impact of 60,000 people. Again I imagine the Mexican people, doing the dirty work as usual, cleaning that abnormal and wicked desert oasis. Picking up 10 billion water bottles and my period pad and scrubbing the flooded awful bathrooms. I remembered seeing the Mexicans in the fields on the drive down to the Palm Desert. Every strawberry we eat is at one time in a Mexican man, woman or child's thumb and forefinger. I remembered the women cleaning the bathrooms, acting as the servants of the world's most unforgiving women, who are eternally starved, cranky and freakishly preoccupied with food. The morning after I arrived home from Coachella, I was thinking about the majesty of Mexico, and the people who leave Mexico to scrub the surfaces and wash the windows of unattainable structures. Then I heard people, lots of people, they were coming closer. I climbed onto my roof and watched a 2-mile long line of people marching on International Boulevard for May Day, and for amnesty for illegal immigrants. It made me so happy, the sun polished the entire hour, and I talked to my mother and father and my lover brought me strawberries and I laid on the floor and pondered the same old things: the perverse beauty of the climax of everything, the sour waiting breath of the dragons of tradgedy, the daily death and recuscitation of all things meaningful, my proud poverty, the inner fruit tree of my artistry growing, it needs a pruning, it's nudging my fingers to unlock and deliver the words. I am very grateful for what I have. I am so happy for the library! I have a purring copper heater in my room that is trusty! My houseplants are green and healthy! Meghan calls, and we talk and it makes me very happy! Michael's laughs a lot and goes under the bridge and plays drums! I dance all alone and am much less serious than when I was 8 years old! Maybe we will babysit Gregory! I will never be invited to play Coachella! The Norweigans let me out of jail! BLESS ME! Ginger tea, the BART train, pine incense, books and music, good friends, my pots and pans, my bathroom and bathtub, my yellow teeth and cavities! Bless me! http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/05/rutabegas-leeks-sugar-snap-pea.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/05/rutabegas-leeks-sugar-snap-pea.html Wed, 02 May 2007 20:39:11 -0800 Michael and I playing at ATP in December

Spain

Oaxaca]]> http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/03/composting.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/03/composting.html Fri, 30 Mar 2007 10:18:00 -0800 I am in Oakland, on the second floor. I have two new bedroom windows and one is over a pupuseria parking lot and the other is above a payphone. My room is over a barber shop and the carpet is red like wine stain. My things were in the car for a couple of months. My Line Six pedal cooked next to a peanut butter jar of Oaxacan chocolate and the amps sat and steamed while we drove our car through jungles and deserts. I drove all of my things over a thousand cement topes and my violin strings lost their tune. I am looking at all of things that came home with me. Pine sap incense and birds of paradise and a clay pot and illumina mi camino candles and a garlic braid from Pochutla and a hand-made cotton dress from Oaxaca. I wanted to buy a dress in Mexico and Oaxaca had the prettiest dresses. The market in Oaxaca City was a gallery of beautiful things you need, they had numchucks and copper pots and grasshoppers to eat in chocolate and hot-pink horchata and paper mache masks. I went to the dress section and found one dress I loved but it was a kid's dress and the lady would not let me try it on. She said it was not for me. All the dress ladies wanted to put me in drapes, but finally one lady at the Indian market outside of Oaxaca City let me try on a teenage dress. It has butterflies and little flowers embroidered and a sash to tie in the back. I wanted to have a dress like the little girls in Mexico, many have long hair and cotton dresses and prance and sing. I was eating pizza in Zipolite, at the dream beach, I was pinkish and hot from a very bad sunburn and in day 6 of a sun coma and I saw a group of girls singing and dancing a song and dance they all knew, even though some girls were 11 and some were toddling. One of the older girls would get excited and bump a little girl, who would fall and cry and interrupt the song, which was an insistent song and if I could have understood, I would know the story. I was entranced, it was the best music, and then at that moment, a group of boys butted in front of us and sang the Buena Vista Social Club song with bad and not charming skill and then asked us for money to support the musicians of Mexico. They tried to sell us bootlegs of the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack. For 10 days, the ocean always stood near me, whispering and breathing into my ear, announcing the huge waves with gasps. I sacrificed papayas to the sea, I sat on the porch of the shacky cabana and split them in half, scraping out all of the black seeds and saving a few for me, and eating the papaya with the juice of a lime and the company of bees. The new moon rose before me in a curl of champagne as I laid on the toasted sand. The sun gave me a licking with its most firey noon tongue and I suffered for two days, shivering and hallucinating in bed. The pain was such a journey that my imagination developed a more vivid idea of mortality. Those days at the beach were an envelope of sweet dream, so far away that it might be heaven. But then the mosquitos dine on your calf while you sleep. I woke up every night itching with dime sized mosquito bites. I would become so cross with annoyance when I woke up itching that I would curse that place, but then I would wake and eat papaya in the hammock. After a while, I had to meditate and realize that heaven is like nothing I know. Because I did become restless at the beach, and itchy. I have a lot to say about Mexico. I was lost in Mexico City and that whole story is desperate. I cried in a gas station and got caught in a parade of paper-mache bulls huffing firecrackers and buses; a motocycle cop pried us for $50 because I was so scared looking and he tried to talk to Michael about boxing; it started to rain and I almost slammed into a barrier to avoid a furious bus driver; I tried to drive around an undisclosed 10 foot ditch in the middle of the road as the electricity flickered and died; Michael asked 50 people how to get where we were going and we were still lost in the black lung out outer Mexico City. I was rescued by a cab driver during a police search in an extremely busy intersection, he saw faces reduced into our skulls by nervous uncertainty, and he guided us. We found a nice cheap motel. In Mexico, the nice cheap motels on the outside of the cities are pretty classy and they are for adulterers. A man behind a mirror takes your money, no speaking, and a number flashes. You find that room number and a boy with downcast eyes unlocks your door and closes a curtain so your parked car is invisible. We cooked rice and lentils in those rooms and made messes feasting on papayas, which are the nirvana of everything orange. We lived in one place for a while, Morelia, and made friends there. We played music with beer bottles and plastic water jugs and our feet and our harmonicas and we played on the radio, and before our phone in our apartment, and in Norma's mom's restaurant while the next day's mole began its first mingling. A week ago I crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo, and then Texas and New Mexico and Arizona and LA. I have no more of the Michoacan mangoes, I gave the last one to my grandma in Phoenix and it was pink and sappy and perfumed. Now I am in my new home in Oakland, beginning to record again. I will put all of Mexico into a little book and offer it on this page. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/03/the-valley-of-sherbert-cathedr.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2007/03/the-valley-of-sherbert-cathedr.html Sun, 18 Mar 2007 23:24:54 -0800 I flew in airplanes 11 times in the last month and now I am at rest, my feet are on the ground in Portland. I am so happy, I climbed up a mountain this afternoon in the rare winter sunshine, I gripped the roots and the fir branches and screamed and yelled. I am 27 years old tomorrow and I must confess that I am relieved that 26 is closing. I learned many lessons this year, and they were the hardest lessons. I am trying to write them down right now, because I do not want to have to learn them again. I fell in love a year ago, and the love is expanding, and budding, and this love is painting in new colors on my imagination. This love is creating a smaller world for me to live, where friends are the only faces, and there are not so many strangers. Emotions are important, and small talk is obsolete. In the last year, I gave my music to the world and I discovered that I was not ready to do that. That was a very painful lesson. I did not realize that it took extreme durability. I wanted to be free, and I wanted to be both refined and unrefined. I thought the purity of my intentions were obvious. I don't know why I was so simple, I think the ignorance made it possible for me to discover my most undiscovered and darkest heart. In six months I made an album, then toured the US, then toured Europe and pluckily tried to play some extremely intimidating gigs. I returned from that tour with a polluted mind. My music struggled under the gravity of the experience. My delighted suspension turned into confused rancor. I did not feel understood and I felt sometimes hopelessly impotent at improvising because my morale was so decimated by that experience. I spent months in a sour meditation, trying to understand. I still do not understand. I examine the diorama of the music world, and I can't decide if I can part the curtain and enter, or if I prefer to be nuzzling a tree on the extreme periphery. I am sensitive to sound and I hear all of the chatter, I hear all of the men chant "USA USA!" at the events that are supposed to be the gatherings of privledged minds. I spent the first months in the home I made with my man in a very troubled meditation. I was sensitive to the sudden nudity of the world I was becoming embedded in. Sensitivity is the centerpiece of my artistry. I was poisoned by the dismissive Internet lords, who evaporated the magic of my sound and determined it was nothing but the farts of a trollop. It is very difficult for me to write about this period because it was immature and disruptive and does not represent all of the joy and beauty that I exchange with the people who understand and enjoy my music. I am trying to describe my obstacle, and it was an obstacle of ego and obsession. It prevented me from appearing on this page for months because I could not stand the pressure of scrutiny. For many people in many periods of music, critical rejection is a source of pride, but I found many of these rejections much too stunning. I am not a trained musician, I have never been a rabid music collector, I have barely been a social person in my life. I began to play music a couple of years ago, and I had really no interest or knowledge about music before I began. When I was a teenager, I loved ballet. I grew up with very little exposure to the world that I engage now. I barely knew that it existed. My musicianship is a miracle to me for that reason. I was a very antisocial person for most of my life. I could barely speak without blushing. I can make a purposeful sound for an audience now. That is my miracle. I played All Tomorrow's Parties a couple of weeks ago, in a assembly of musicians that was so confused and demoralized by a tour that we did not even really have a name. We played in a huge room lined with slot machines. The Stooges played above us, eliminating our delicate sounds and their seismic bass crushed our attempts at somehow improvising a new music. We, the players, could barley communicate with each other. The audience seemed to hate us. I felt the collision of the music worlds there. Nostalgic music is trampling the new players who are trying to make truly new music, who believe that there is a future for music, that music now does not have to be a hybrid of ecclectic references but represents the minds and hearts of people who are dangling dangerously here, at the very end of what the earth represents. Sometimes this music is a tender failure. That reality was so present in that room, where we tried to summon some kind of live magic. I put a blanket over my head and condemned the British for being the first couriers of whitey, for their responsibility as the craftsmen of this reality, I told them to be forgiven for their empire. They yawned at me. "Save us from wailing women who know they are attractive!" the bloggers retorted. Michael and I sold merchandise after our show, we closed up the merch area. Michael and I laughed with people, and he sold his homemade CDs for a pound to drunk people. A French woman brought us some gummi bears and congratulated us on our performance. "I do not think music is good or bad," she explained when we told her that most people did not appreciate us. "It just makes me think of the artists and their decisions." The decisions I make are conscious! I am moving to Mexico to be away from self-conscious artists. I will be in the company of grandmas and babies. I am leaving in two weeks. I can't wait to tell you what happens. I am going to watercolor paint and the way I will kill the cockroaches is by dancing with rapid feet! The pollution and confusion I felt in this last year will evaporate behind me! Now is the time of year to talk about my favorite shows and records and stuff and this is my answer: My favorites were the amateurs and the scared and the nonbelievers and the forgotten and hidden and the babies and the grandmas, all making their sounds and beginning to believe, all transforming their brutish cores into lush jungles of magic, all making their farts into fluffy clouds! The pros are so common, the rare and beautiful are the failures! http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/12/triumph-of-failure.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/12/triumph-of-failure.html Thu, 28 Dec 2006 16:57:24 -0800 We sat on a rock next to a Loch Leven lake and then we had to walk away with our things because the haze was turning brown from smoke. There was a forest fire nearby. There were lizards on the rocks but no rattlesnakes. We went over the ridge, mostly downhill. I woke that morning very early, I was sleepless because of my usual psychedelic forest fear. It's a sour contradiction, the night before I had nightmares of both a mangy bear snarling and chasing me until I ran inside and slammed and locked everything and then a dream where Michael and I walked through the mall and over the loudspeaker a very strange voice: "Attention. Please listen to this very important annoucement. A nuclear bomb has hit Washington DC and the president has died." And then there were instructions. I woke immediately and that is mercy, I woke up Michael and I told him. We were sleeping in the guest bed at his Aunt Cappie's house outside of Sacramento. She is nearly 90 and she was a pilot in World War II and she stayed up late with us and showed us all of the pictures of Michael's grandma, as both a teenage wife of a coal miner and a 90 year old woman blowing out bithday candles and flower arranging. Aunt Cappie took us out for sushi, and we ate the decadence of the last life of the sea, and Aunt Cappie grew up in a cabin in West Virginia without running water. Could she have even imagined, even in a halucination fantasy, that she would be 90 one day, eating raw fish given a seat on an airplane after being napped from a cancered sea? She drove us to Sierra College Boulevard and we stood there for a while and witnessed teenagers on lunch and burned in the sun and then we were picked up by Bosnian construction workers who took us to Auburn. We then tried to hitch from there and stood there a while, next to a road sign with furious graffiti, "GERONIMO WAS HEER. BAD RAMP. 2ND DAY TO RENO." Then a tweaker couple in a Ford gave us a ride the length of a Poison song. Then we were picked up by a mother and daughter and her daughter's friend, on their way home from alternative high school. The mom and daughter shared cigarettes and the friend was kind of quiet. We dropped her off at home on our ride, she lived in an arthritic little A frame, covered in camoflauge and junk and in the middle of a just-developed rich subdivision. "I wish we were rich!" the girls shrieked and started talking about the lottery. The mom was on the phone with one of her home-care clients and the daughter put her arm out of the window and moaned, "That's my car!" when we passed a banana Corvette convertible. They dropped us off at a Starbucks in Colfax, 50 miles from the Joanna Newsom School for Gifted Children. Michael surgeried the sliver in my thumb until we got picked up by a business man in a rental car on his way to Reno. He would drive us to Loch Leven Lake. He started referring to us as beatniks and then told a sad story about his son who doesn't believe in anything and he became so angry that he went to jail. We arrived at our destination and it was about 5 pm. But we were at the wrong exit, we had one more to go actually, and a woman going home from her post office job drove us to the Rainbow exit and then the trailhead. We got woven into the manzanita but finally found our way over the ridge and we slept next to a lake. I barely slept. The next day was the day that there were forest fires and we were glad we didn't see them on our trail, or any rattlesnakes. An owl did pay tribute the night before. We walked back to the freeway exit, but were distracted by the Yuba River and jumped in and greeted fishermen, and we got kind of lost and ended up walking back to the first gas station the man with the son tradgedy dropped us of at the night before. We chatted with a policeman and then stood on the lip of the 80 until a woman from Sacramento picked us up. She was fighting with her girlfriend and on her way to get wasted in Reno. She lived in Reno for a while, on and off. She dropped out of school in 6th grade and hitchiked the United States at age 15 alone. She lived in Reno before and after that. She took us to a thrift store so we could buy nice clothes to wear in Reno. I bought a pink knit dress and Michael bought khaki pants and a T shirt that boasted "UNEMPLOYED" with a $19 dollar unemployment check on it signed by Ronald Reagan. She took us to a vegetarian restaurant and later, a Basque restaurant where all they had was walnut liquers and oxtails and all of this meat. I liked this meal anyway because of the old Basque man we ate with, his smile just polished the walls and he took his ice cream as a little island in a puddle of wine. We stayed in a very fancy hotel at a bargain rate, arranged by our ride and we even had a sauna and swam in a warm pool as the new moon rose over the blushing desert sky. All of these men were in the hot tub talking about hookers. I lost money on gambling, Michael won a good amount. We could see the watted sad clown at Circus Circus from our hotel room, he seemed to grimace from holding so much money. There were loud fights all night, we could hear them even from our sealed hotel room. We got back to Sacramento so easily and picked up my violin and Aunt Cappie made us dinner and we watched the hummingbirds have their dinner and then Cousin Dave drove us to the airport. He needed to make some kind of clandestine stop at McDonald's and we missed our train so we waited by the tracks for the last one, playing violin and harmonica. The train would be so much nicer if they could just turn down the lights. We annoyed the snack-counter man and I think he may have been drunk. And today my achivement is adding the A string to my under-stringed violin. We played for a while before dinner. Tomorrow I will serve beer to the Tom Petty concertgoers. Tomorrow I will get a couple of the summer's last gifts. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/09/last-gift.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/09/last-gift.html Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:38:47 -0800 I went to the temple yesterday and I was given two wands of incense and I bowed my head and prayed at the altar and asked a couple of questions. The woman then gave me a cup of sticks and I picked one stick for my fortune and she said: "Oh, this is very bad, it's not very good. Many people have fished you out of the sea and you are in a tank that is too small, you are a big fish, and now you are in danger but it is not too late." We went to the hot springs in Oregon and I used the carriage of my ribs to bloom in the pools, I made my arms a basket aimed at catching the beams of the moon, and it was a full moon, cushioned in the sky by the fingertips of branches and the curlicues of fern fronds. As all my petals really ruffled, every cricket applauded and rewarded the sensitivity of my ears. With concentration, my hearing was invited to a new dimension of sound, where the textures were gentle. I heard a train in the distance, an ambient smear with layers of strokes and knocks, and my spine stored the sounds that my ears drank. I am making a little hope chest in the center of me, a library of moments I can retreat to. Sometimes a swift sewage enters my musical world, and it freezes my hands for playing, and it binds my substances and I have no emotions for singing. Being in the car, all day, every day, pulsating livers cradled in seat buckets while the sunshine and salt air nudges at the car windows. Having a sound ritual and being answered with drunk hiccups and blank eyes. Roping the arcs of joy and sanctity of living, those mustangs hoofing in your lungs, and then the PA can barely burp it out. Sometimes playing live music, with confidence and steadiness, pushes the whole craft to another awesome stratum, sometimes it seems like a betrayal of what's private and cherished, and it makes me want to pluck my zither in my herb garden and keep my fingerprints off of the rest of the world. We looked around Oregon for a place to plant our permanent garden. We jumped in the river and I cut off all my hair, Galen made me a doe. The rest of the West Coast is basking in the final dapples of summer, and the Bay Area is squatting in whipped fog, the tomatoes are struggling to redden. We played a show for our friends in a basement in Portland, I think we may have abused them, but our intentions were very good. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/09/fishbowl.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/09/fishbowl.html Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:05:48 -0800 We drove to Los Angeles on Friday, and we did get jammed in traffic in thistly hills. We did see the soft rolls of California, cloaked in teddy bear skin. We did see the the truckloads of egg-shaped tomatoes and once we were showered with the parchments of garlic. We went into a church on Wilshire and played the nice piano in the sunny room while the bride dressed in the bahtroom. We smelled every bum bladder. We had champurrado and mole for breakfast, and hot-pink horchata with freckles of walnut and cactus sugar and orange melon. We meditated at the Zen Center and watched all the clear-eyed people eat tomato flesh and herbs in the wooden room. Michael and Meredith were raised there, and sometimes the people would not speak for two weeks and walk in small circles for hours. Cats are not allowed in the meditation room because they are too curious. Michael and I meditated in that room for ten minutes at 1 pm, the blessed sunshine offering its supreme bath, and I was so pleased, you know I love the heat. We met our own curious cat, a strange angel named Roy, while we drank Popov and Ocean Spray and Regia and Charles Shaw on the roof at Wilshire and Normandie. Roy's teeth were very straight and white and he was on cocaine. He drew a sap out of all of us, and relaxed the security guard, and managed to molest a couple of hours with such a sinister and funny spell. Bless all the facilitators, even the dragons. I dreamed that I was in my childhood home with my sisters and I saw a big greasy tiger in our yard. It began to antagonize us and I raced to lock all of the doors. The tiger pushed at the doors and scratched me but could not break the glass. We called 911 but the operators did not care. I remember once reading the story of a man in NYC who somehow got a kitten tiger and raised it in his little apartment. The tiger began to get bigger and hungrier, and the man had to move out and he did not know what to do. He would throw hamburgers from the doorway to feed the cat. Society eventually found out about the tiger, but it took a lot longer than you might think. The neighbors thought the growls and purrs were a movie. When the tiger was rescued, they took black-and-white photos of him, dwarfing a white couch, with shit-smears painted on the walls around him. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/thistle-sting.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/thistle-sting.html Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:02:08 -0800 I remembered just now, the day I left Europe. I was in Brussels. We were at Julie and Ignantz's house. We drove there the night before from Bordeaux and arrived very late and lost. We had to speak on the phone for at least an hour, off and on, to get there. James has a brilliant memory for landmarks, we would have slept on a statue unless. We arrived in Brussels at about 4 am and we drank Duvel and Chimay and I took a shower and slept. I woke up at noon and bought an almond croissant and a baguette and went to a small market to buy cheese and tomatoes and olives because I was about to camp at the airport. There was trouble and I had to demand to go home with a doctor's note. We went to the airport and I acted ill and insistent and my wish was granted. "You will leave tomorrow at 7 am," the man said, and I like that kind of traveling. Everything was arranged and now I did not have to camp at the airport to show my demands, so I could then play solo at Paul LeBreq's house. We all got into the car, too many of us for the rental, and drove to Paul LeBreq's house when the sun was getting milkiest. His housemates made pots of aromatic food for us to eat before we played and gave us organic beer with butterflied labels. Everyone played very nice and before we played we closed the red velvet stage curtain and smoked and hugged and started laughing. I played one of the best sets I played, and I had to leave for the airplane hours after that. In those hours I drank the butterfly beer and then the Stella and talked long in the garden and then it was so late but I had to stay awake. All the boys puzzled into the small clean area to sleep, the house was sticky from beer and the people were very fluid too. One man liked us so much that he wanted to sleep under his leather jacket on our amps instead of going home. But we were so quiet, and we had to sleep on our amps, or in the car, because there was nowhere to sleep. Karl slept in the car, but the rest of us put our elbows into stiff couches and floors and they all fell asleep but I had to stay awake to leave for the airport at dawn. Before I left, I sat with a couple of girls and ate half-stale croissants with Nutella and drank tropical fruit juices as the sun came up. 15 hours later, I was wheeling my gear suitcase down 10th Avenue, where our garden in Oakland is, and I saw the leaves growing cheeks. We planted that garden the day I left for Scotland. Now that garden is giving us tomatoes every day, and we need a couple of menstruating girls to mediate over the plants because August Oakland does not offer any sun with temperature and these tomatoes need some heat. Tomorrow, the album I made with Michael, "The Birds in the Bushes" is coming out. We are having a party at Thee Parkside in San Francisco. If you want to buy an album from me, I'll send a present too. Today I was in bed at 4 pm with the sun shining on my feet. The men welded downstairs, making Starbucks furniture, and I think I got brain softening. Time lately feels like a fabic and I am on its fringes, and we are clawing at cymbals and putting our teeth into pianos at the edge of the textile. Because it is 55 degrees on Christmas day, there is no heat in August in Oakland, it is simple and mild, no coquet thunderstorms or anesthetized strokes from pure heat. I like the real heat, and I'll go to Sacramento to get it if I have to. I had a dream that I watched Marilyn Monroe get baptized in the rivers of Yosemite in black and white and Spencer and James decorated my room with Queen Anne's Lace. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/i-remembered-just-now-the.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/i-remembered-just-now-the.html Tue, 22 Aug 2006 00:28:29 -0800 I did get a violin, and I have been plucking its little tendons for a couple of days, while Michael brushes the cymbal's teeth and gives the sax a massage. I like the tweeker neighbors, they don't give a fuck about noise and they sure do make it. "BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS!" the one lady screamed while she was obsessively sweeping the concrete. She said that because another lady asked her if she wanted any leftover dinner. These misfits beat their little kitty with a broom, and that is just a crisis. "I TOLD YOU AND YOU DIDN'T LISTEN TO ME!" the lady screamed at her cat. I am trying to steal their cat. There's a lot of women living in that little shack, and they all seem to be kind of indentured servant/addicts to this guy Earl, who is in a wheelchair and has his legs tied together with a rope. "GO ASK YES-MAN EARL!" screamed the lady last night. We sit at the windows and ring our little Indian bells when they get violent, peeking over the sill to watch them huff and puff. Michael is making me breakfast because last night I made the dinner. I am sitting next to my porcelain Marie Antoinette. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/porcelain-marie-antoinette.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/08/porcelain-marie-antoinette.html Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:04:56 -0800 My Oakland pot dealers roll cocaine blunts at 10 am on Thursdays. I would never want to offend Wendie Ann, but her glass bubbler is my hostage and I have a pill flask of medicinal for these next days. We crammed Emily Strange leopard printed legwarmers into her mailbox after being canned from the warehouse the other day. We were kissing and being too pleasant, so there was no more work for us. We did scream and scare all the movers. So we went to Wendie's house on Martin Luther King BLVD and I stood in the front-yard dirt square on Anton's lowrider bike while Michael pushed the garments into the mailbox on her front portch. These two dudes were standing on the sidewalk, one guy said, "They put tubes in me and I fell asleep and when I woke up, I didn't have a grill." He smiled all gums. I woke up this morning and had breakfast at the fish taco truck on International next to Sianola. I did realize how the lips are much more tender in the morning and the jalapeno is too spicy. I saw one man put a quarter-bottle of ketchup into a styrofoam ceviche. I saw some behaved children, some wicked ones. The behaved ones were kind of homely. People are racing drag on 10th Avenue, I'm here at 755, it's past 10 pm, and the fireworks sound like budding. I saw the very old Asian lady who collects plastic bottles, I saw her at the swap meet today and then I happened to follow her later, down 9th Street, I think. She stopped at the corner of 6th Avenue and left her cart and then walked into a sandy flowerbed, right next to the busy street, and peed discreetly, showing her butt but covering her front with her straw hat. I wish you really could swap at the Laney College swap meet, then I would drop off that ugly greenish Spanish-made 1970s sundress in a trade for a candy bowl or a ring for Meghan on her birthday. I could just give her the dress, but that dress is not so great, not even worth shoplifting. I was with Shana in Brooklyn when I bought that dress. I am here at 755 East 10th street and there is nobody else home and it's all dark. I played clarinet in the darkness earlier and then I offended the sax with my practice. I am drinking cocoa and coco juice and rum and it's all quiet here and I know that in order to be all alone in this house, everybody else has to be playing shows so I am missing all the shows to hear the house settle. More fireworks outside but I am listening to Ralph and Florian so I just see the squeezes. I miss Farah, she was once my best friend and now I can't find her, even the Internet is no help. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/07/farah-dharshi-via-india-africa.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/07/farah-dharshi-via-india-africa.html Sun, 02 Jul 2006 22:01:49 -0800 I am here in Oakland, the braided girls have rainbow head colors and smoke cigarettes on their bicycles and I was running through the parking lot with two Boxer dogs, a father and a daughter. In Oakland, where kittens play in broken glass in the middle of the street and the Mexican grandmas and grandpas give powdered sugar kisses. I have been playing clarinet on the roof, I have been having cactus for breakfast. I came back, for a while I was spiraling in a universe of my own creation. I existed in a very strange membrane! I have a lot of stories to tell, but if I begin now, it's a big mouthful and we haven't even said hello in so long. It was a very nice time, I can remember the details and the very good baguettes and bottles of wine and putting my hands into the lavender in Provence and avoiding the beestings and smoking a spliff barefoot in tights in the club in Rotterdam while Boris played. I’ll tell you soon about getting arrested. The memories are a little muddy. I am trying to recover every artifact from the clay of my memory, brushing off the dirt and running my fingers over the embroidery. I must remember February, outside of Denver, melting into the motel carpet late at night with a sleeping bag over my head under the cheap old desk, talking to Michael. Calling Michael from a late-night house party in Scotland, singing at 5 am. Calling Meghan from a fourth-floor office in Paris, as the sun set, after a catastrophic Sunday performance. I can remember lots of things, waking up in Bordeaux and I can remember the blonde shade of the morning sun on my face, and I can remember the face of the Turkish man who sold me raisins and almonds that morning. I can remember the blonde shade of the carafe of olive oil on the rooftop table when we had a midnight pasta dinner in Treviso. My tongue can recall every blonde shade of the beers of both Norway and Portugal, and I have a few stories about my desperate attempts to score hash in Germany and Spain. It’s all coming back, excuse me, the funny and then sinister boys in Rome who found us smoking pot between a car bumper and stone wall, the man who drooled in Ravenna, “You are a soft cheese” over and over until I made Karl deal with him, holding Dylan and Karen’s dear baby on the beach of pearls in England. Since August, I have toured the US three times, Europe once and the West Coast once. I must confess: I saw the alps in Switzerland, France and Italy, I made music in cathedral rooms with painted ceilings and golden accents, I saw the earth textiles quilted across the continent’s most fertile breasts, I had white asparagus and vin blanc in the French countryside in the shadow of castles but still, every morning I had to put my two hands together and pray for mine own sanity, still I had to strong my arms to support the avalanche of stories and songs and sights, still I had a heart that bled redder and redder as I fed it with beauty and then juiced out that beauty into movements of music, still I had to cry tears into the telephone receiver. Sometimes I had to taste a tear on my lip because it is so alien to be a traveler, it is an existence that our ancestors could not have even imagined, it is a sweetness that your friends will want on their own thumbs, it is a bitterness that you can understand if you cherish belonging, if you want to belong somewhere and to some time. I live here now in Oakland, I have an address. I have no money or food stamps, but I am at work right now. I have a neighborhood and a bed and blankets and a herb garden. Last night for hours we played music, moving from pianos to cymbals and ukeleles and clarinets and voices and there was no audience. I wish somebody would give me a violn. http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/06/violin.html http://www.urbanhonking.com/incaore/2006/06/violin.html Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:21:01 -0800