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Tim O’Gara writes songs like secrets. They live in fragments and flashes, tucked away inside, like the ghosts in an old cigar box – first grade valentine, fake ID, broken necklace, foreign coins – the things you keep. They are poetry. Gone away images hung on fragile frames that bend and sway and play in and out of time with an underlying frailty and a tender valor. They are tales of nights on Henry Ridge, of demented elves and pink lemonade skies, of papyrus stuffed crocodiles, of rye whiskey and falling mountains. They remind us that life is magically slow and still when we listen closely. To share Tim’s music with another is an intimate exchange that, like the best of secrets, requires a partner with a sincere ear and an open heart. They are the sounds of love and trust. So watch yourself … these songs swim with nothing on. Consider this a warning. A secret. From one friend to another.

***

so tim calls me a few weeks back. a friend is starting a zine and some kind of production company and wanted me to write something about his music for her.

‘sure,’ i said. ‘when you need it by?’

‘oh,’ says tim – still on topanga time – ‘you know. a few, weeks, you know … a little while. you got awhile.’

‘cool man. got it. i’ll get right on it.’

completely forgot about it.

two nights ago, i get a text from tim.

‘did you ever write that thing?’

fuck.

‘no timmy, i’m an asshole and i forgot. i’m good for it, though. when you need it?’

‘oh, well, you know. tomorrow would be good,’ he says.

***

we are in a full blown drought down here. strange that the river is about to burst through the levees while the land around it turns to dust. we are also breaking heat records, which doesn’t seem like it would be possible, but, who knows?

anyway, i’m turning to tim to conjure up some rain for us. i know he can do it.

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***

here’s tim and sean and renne and amelia playing scarlet mccreary under the lovely grey topanga canyon fall skies. god that looks nice. i used to get to play drums with these folks. science needs to figure out this whole you-can-only-be-in-one-place-at-one-time hindrance. it’s a real drag sometimes.

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white asked me yesterday if i had any pictures of the great christopher sine when he was in town for jazz fest.

white likes to keep tabs on christopher sine.

i think he’s interested in how much hair chris is retaining.

but i could be wrong.

anyway, shots from the jazz fest visit (weeks late).

***

here’s some photos that ryan gibbs took of us at jazz fest.

here’s ryan gibbs. he knows his way around a camera.

here’s me talking to a mardi gras indian. take a good look at this fucking photograph.

this guy told me, ‘watch your shit. just cause these people work here, they steal.’

i like this one.

fender.

clyde’s violin.

rocks off.

Tags:   flatbed honeymoon · jazz fest2 Comments

had one of those rogue drunks last night that sneak up behind you and kick you in the soft stuff.

i blame a dinner of brown rice and thai basil eggplant that i made. it was tasty, and i ate a lot, but the longer this life goes on, the more you realize that a night of drinking requires a dinner like you’d get on the farm. hearty and strong. something able to go toe to toe with those beers for many rounds.

schmitty came over and we had a few on the couch and watched the end of the bulls game. they were up 12 with just under four to play.

‘i’d say it’s looking pretty good for the bulls,’ schmitty said.

‘lotta time left,’ i said.

four minutes later the bulls’ season was over.

not that i really have an emotional connection to that team, but, you know, chicago and all. hooch and todd were into it, which was fun as they usually don’t get too into the nba, and i lack people to really talk sports with.

thank god for christian on this front. sometimes when we talk, we immediately get into the warriors or the giants and talk until one of us has to go and we never get to anything else.

funny how two people can connect over things.

anyway, schmitty and i went up to chelsea’s and had some more beer (only beer last night, too, and nothing heavy or fancy. budweiser all night. sneaky, that shit sometimes.) and watched this girl named jody james play. she was something. kind of a sweet little southern redhead who came across as very young but humble and sincere. turned out she was actually 32. i love it when that happens.

her set had a few moments that really got through to me. i remember one line, something about i’m not a beauty queen, but i’ve got soul, and i’ve got rock and roll.

amen, sister.

at one point, schmitty turned to me and said, like he’s really just figured something out, ‘man, you oughta try and get with her.’

‘funny, i was just thinking the same thing,’ i said.

chicks, man.

there’s always something going down with them. this one thinks she’s really fat and brings it up all the time when she’s really fucking beautiful and dynamic and vibrant. another one can’t decide what it is she wants to believe in. another one’s drunk, and that’s it. it’s all a big cluster fuck. or so it seems …

the most popular dance that we do these days, though, is to act like we don’t need each other. that’s the flavor of this historical moment. gotta stir up interest by not talking, not returning communication, blowing off engagements. but it’s the oldest game in the book, i guess. and i play it without even thinking about it, mostly. it used to be exciting. maybe even a little romantic at times. but it’s so fucking boring at this point. really. and sad.

i guess the fact is that the players in these dances don’t really want what the other has to offer, but you want to, you know, seem connected to something, to feel like you’re involved. and there’s the things that we all need now and again to get through. from someone.

you get to the point, though, when you’re hung over some days and it’s hot and you think about those times when it’s easy and there’s no games and the channels are just opened between two lonely creatures in a world that doesn’t care and it’s just inspiration. not even love or romance or passion, necessarily, but just a heightened feeling that you want to live a little bet bigger, deeper, braver at those moments. want to be better because of that person. and then you remember, ‘fuck. most of this is just fucking the fuck around waiting for a bus that might never come.’

it’s 8 pm and i still can’t shake this fucking hangover.

***

***

i did get a new camera.

olympus e-p1.

spent a few hours today trying to figure out how to use the damn thing. how to customize its settings. mostly, i found myself turning features off. these god damn things do too much, too much, too much.

but it’s cool. built like a fucking tank. gonna be fun to have a nice camera again.

get ready for lots of shots of our kid lefty.

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the summer is here.

hot.

could be a good one.

interesting, at the very least.

lots of music on the books.

played in lake charles last night.

lake charles … the enigma of east louisiana.

‘it ain’t cajun,’ says schmitty,’ but it’s not texas, either.’

this is a festival crowd.

this hot tub is ice fucking cold.

this is hospitality.

this is a band called something like fresh nectar. i know …

this is late night nuggets.

this is … what is this?

***

anyway, summer.

lots of friends changing positions. going away. maybe not coming back. moving on in different ways … always kinda sad.

or weird.

three years down here, though. that’s a lifetime in a college town.

you notice things like completely new cycles of waitresses. that’s when you know you’re a veteran.

but when you’re someone with a history of needing a regular scenery change, and lots of friends and neighbors change positions, it’s kinda like changing scenery from the comfort of your own home.

and i guess it’s good.

Tags:   flatbed honeymoon2 Comments

i was talking to schmitty earlier, and told him that i always thought he’d be the one to take out bin laden. he said, ‘well, kev, i just never got a clean shot …’

on a personal note, i don’t know what i’m going to do with all this looming free time. on top of the school commitments, the band, adhering to a strict regimen of drugs and alcohol, and walking lefty, my jihad was taking up a shitload of time. the calendar has really opened up overnight.

seriously, though, can we end this fucking ‘war on terror’ already? right? we got the ass hole. hurray. everyone agrees this is a good thing. job (finally) done. time to bring ‘em home, big o. $2 billion a week. tens (hundreds?) of thousands dead. enough already with these fucking ridicules wars. tell the boys and girls to start packing their shit, big o. stat.

***

the record release last night was a smashing success:

polly pry was lovely, as always.

kristin foster’s got that something.

schmitty and denise.

jimmy and chris, the proprietor of the red dragon. guy is a fucking legend. one of the most generous people i’ve ever met. he loooooves music and puts his money and time where his mouth is.

we had a great turnout, people bought up the discounted swag, we all caught a pretty good buzz and talked a lotta shit and had a few laughs.

hawg, a regular at the red dragon, greeted me before our first set with, ‘i’m so fucking psyched right now, dude,’ and greeted me after the second set with a, ‘i am so fucking destroyed right now, dude.’ he then went out and fell asleep in his truck for a few hours.

anna byers, polly pry’s guitar player, was feeling under the weather with some stomach problems. i went up and gave her a little hug and asked her if she was pregnant. she said, ‘yeah right, dude. i’d have to get a new belt buckle.’ a pretty killer one-liner, considering her belt buckle reads, ‘LES.’ much later, in the parking lot, anna, wasted, walked up and punched me pretty much as hard as she could in the shoulder, told me she loved me, and staggered to her car.

in addition to anna’s feeling a little off, kristin was having some shoulder problems and carpal tunnel and was in pain. we had a good laugh that polly pry’s women folk are falling apart …

can’t wait for jazz fest and for everyone to come down to the dirty south. it’s gonna go so damn fast. i can’t wait to see y’all and share a lost weekend for the ages!

***

lefty did a funny thing today. we took a walk around 1 pm behind the school across the street. lefty fell well behind and i called him to catch up. he took his time getting up and running to me, as is his way, but as he started running, i noticed he was limping a bit. he sat down and started licking his front paw. i walked up to him and checked it out. couldn’t see anything, so i let him lick for a bit longer and then we continued walking. he kept limping and i could tell it was bothering him, whatever it was, so i picked him up with the intent of carrying him home.

now, lefty is kind of a chunk. he’s 26 pounds of dead weight. awkwardly shaped. hot. furry. i carried him about three hundred yards and started to get tired, so i set him down. (and btw, how to people do this shit with kids? you’re still carrying kids around when they’re 25 pounds, aren’t you? then why are so many parents such flabby fat asses? maybe they never pick up their kids …) anyway, i set him down and told him to walk again. this time … and i know he was faking it a little bit … he starts limping dramatically, walks about three feet, sits down, looks over his shoulder at me, and lifts his paw up in the air. he just held it in the air for about ten seconds and kept looking right at me. fucking hilarious. i picked his sorry ass up and carried him home. once home, he walked with little discomfort to his food bowl.

Tags:   flatbed honeymoonNo Comments.

making these flatbed posters has inspired a bit of a recent obsession in graphic design that has rivaled similar recent obsessions in hip hop and vegetarian food.

these things tend to come in threes …

this zest for design (i have no idea what i’m doing) inspired a font download party the other night during which i installed over 8,400 fonts on my computer. all of them. at one time.

bad idea.

this morning the computer took about 20 minuted to boot. this coming a week after i installed a new hard drive and did the requisite transference of all my shit, etc. thought i fucked up royally, but i just moved the font folder to the desktop and rebooted. voila.

probably could stand to learn to, you know, ease into things one of these days. i’m a deep ender. as a kid, it was headfirst dives into a cold pool rather than easing in thorough the shallow end. just get it over with already. cut the bull shit.

i think this tendency is getting worse across the board with age.

but, hell …

time’s a wasting.

Tags:   flatbed honeymoon · jazz fest3 Comments

our young lefty is four today.

time flies …

some favorite lefty memories:

at two months old, he fell about fifteen feet into a dry river bed. when i found him he was standing, still as a stone, staring straight ahead. he didn’t move a muscle until i could get down to the bottom and pick him up.

at three months, he jumped off a small bridge into a pond, minutes after someone told me, ‘dachshunds don’t like water.’

at four months, he stood on the platform of an amtrak station, five feet from a passing train that was hauling ass, barking his fucking head off.

the first time he saw the ocean, he stood on the shore facing it, barking his fucking head off.

at about six months, he threw himself down a flight of stairs at christian’s house as i stood helplessly at the bottom. he looked just like one of those dog slinky toys.

last summer, he jumped into an alligator infested river minutes after leaving the shore in will burke’s canoe. he was under for a few seconds before he popped up and chicago mel rescued him. later that same day, he found and chased a rooster around a church.

and recently, i found him about ten feet up a tree in the back yard.

the best lefty memories, though, are all the regular old tuesday afternoons. sitting on the couch, writing, with lefty laying next to you chewing on a pizzle. or sitting behind the drums practicing with lefty laying on your hi-hat foot. or coming home from the bar late at night and seeing lefty standing by the door with a toy in his mouth. or opening your eyes first thing in the morning and seeing nothing but nose and eyes looking at you.

it’s amazing how attached you can get to short, long, furry things.

it’s good to have them around.

off to the dog park …

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what a lovely long lovely soft spring we are experiencing in the dirty, dirty, dirty south.

i think it’s officially over as of tomorrow. ‘posed to be 90+

… {sigh} …

but there has been a string of days and nights and days that have been the most brilliant bike riding pilsner drinking late afternoon nine holes french quarter strolling porch sitting paperback days i can remember in a long time.

i feel good.

better than this, even.

but not quite this good …

bobby and the original rougeboys and his cherry yellow chevy. mercy. big pimpin’. guy’s living off the land, giving away kumquat trees, relocating snapping turtles, building fences that keep away the boys running’ from the po-lice. mercy. big pimpin’ …

here’s the parkway surf and turf po’boy …

that’s a traditional new orleans roast beef po’boy on perfect french bread + fresh fried shrimp. that’s good shit. wash it down with a root beer. mercy. big pimpin’ … where bobby at?

i’m relaxed for the first time in quite some time.

over this spring break, i’m reading a novel.

a novel!

i have an iphone app that lets me listen to all the sf giants games on the radio. only cost $15 for the whole year. mercy. so i rode my bike round the lake tonight listening to jon miller call the giants-rockies game. stopped in the chelsea’s bar. split a rogue soba and a jagermeister with robin belle and listened to an endless torrent of restaurant gossip that made me (almost) miss working at a restaurant.

almost …

playing georgia on my mind made me cry the other night.

relaxing is good for everything.

seeing the blossoms bloom. the day should still be longer still.

we need to lift our home off the ground.

all this time we’ve been alone.

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had a conversation the other night that made me seek this out.

i feel like john holmes right now.

mercy.

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sit down by the window and watch the tornado …

i thought a tornado just blew down my street. trees whipping around like they did during the hurricane. intense … i thought me and lefty were leaving kansas. going behind the purple curtain. but so far, we’re still here.

but we are under a watch. or is it a warning? whatever it is, these weather service announcements keep interrupting my rare, precious time with wolf blitzer. radioactive water pouring into the ocean. libyan power transfers. violence in the ivory coast. yemen. bahrain. jesus, this show is a fucking parade of misery … now i remember why i used to get drunk and scream, ‘fuck wolf blitzer!’ at anyone within earshot. i do remember doing this … sadly.

***

here’s my girl lucinda to make it all better:

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in hustle & flow, terrench howard’s character d-jay calls his down home ole lady a ‘bottom bitch’:

‘that’s a bottom bitch for you. i mean, we got everything we need right here.’

i love that line so much. but i always felt weird saying ‘bottom bitch.’ sounds kinda … objectionable. but he loves her so much in the movie. needs her, in fact. she teaches him who he is. shit like that. throwing bottom bitch around as a term of endearment is all good in the hood, evidently.

so when i hear something so … good. and true. particularly coming from a down home ole lady …

that’s a bottom bitch for you.

***

thankfully, i got all my yard work done prior to the weather reckoning.

that’s twenty bags of leaves, friends and neighbors.

and some other stuff, too. brush. debris. sticks. branches. vines. weeds. detritus.

but fucking leaves, man.

i hate fucking raking leaves. but what i really hate is fucking bagging leaves. oh jesus … fuck me two times and tell me you love me before you send me out to bag some fucking leaves.

back in illinois, you had to rake leaves, sure, but then you could build a big ass fire and burn them. still sucked raking them, but once the big ass fire was going it kind of made it all worthwhile. just stand back and admire your big ass fire.

cause every thing’s better with a big ass fire. right? sitting in traffic, home depot, the dentist, grading papers, fighting with your ole lady … you name it. anything is better with a big ass fire.

shit, i knew a guy once, lived up in the mountains, used to build a fire before he made love. called it his, ‘fucking fire!’ no shit … a ‘fucking fire!’ said it brought him closer to god and his lover. or some bull shit like that. i always thought the brother mighta had a thing for firemen, myself, and was trying to tempt fate to see if a couple of ‘em would show up whilst he was otherwise indisposed.

myself, i’ve never started a fire while making love. literally or figuratively. maybe once or twice, their might have been some light smoldering … left the oven on or a cigarette fell onto the carpet … something like that. i do remember once standing up in bed with a hard on waving a pillow at a wailing fire alarm, but that time we did have to evacuate the building. i remember, because i had to put on socks.

anyway, down here … it sucks. you can’t rake leaves and then build a big ass fire. i suppose that’s a good idea, since there are so many trees and so many leaves that the town would fill with dickensian soot were everyone to burn all their leaves at once.

still … bagging leaves, man. some people have tools. they have these stands that you put a bag in and it holds the bag while you fill the bag with leaves. that helps, i imagine. i don’t have one of those. tried to borrow one from two different neighbors today. no dice.

so i’m down on all fours, holding the bag open with one hand trying to fist a few leaves into the fucking thing and failing miserably. the wind’s blowing my bag closed just as i get to it with my leaves. i’m itchy, mosquitos are biting my ass, the dog keeps throwing his bone right into the pile of leaves that i’m working with.

fucking bagging leaves, man.

***

in other news, the flatbed CDs should be in very soon. jazz fest is coming together. we got some new videos from zach (in which we look like a morose lot if i’ve ever seen one … just a bad day to be filmed. i almost killed everyone in the room that day until i started drinking and the film crew from brooklyn showed up and things got lovely as lovely could be) and some other swag coming soon. t-shirts are looking good, too. we need summer festival gigs. i have no work lined up. and don’t want any.

speaking of zach, the louisiana premiere of ‘lord byron’ was a hoot on friday night. after-party spilled to the rooftop bar, the hilton bar, the (new) indigo bar. some pretty cosmo shit for a friday night in the b.r. … nice clothes. mostly decent behavior. saw some folks i ain’t seen in a long while. good stuff.

the night ended with myself and mr. award winning filmmaker sitting under an umbrella on 3rd street at 3 am eating chili cheese hot dogs and going over the big lebowski line by line, shot by shot like a couple of fucking idiots.

good guy, that zach.

check out his website. check out the trailer.

Tags:   flatbed honeymoon · jazz fest · lord byron · lucinda · zach godshallNo Comments.