had a hoot playing with denton down at the chelsea’s bar on saturday.

met some nice folks from nashville who happened to stumble into our sweaty little corner for the night.

that’s the best thing about the stumble … it’s unexpected. bergson calls it an example of the human tendency toward ‘mechanical inelasticity.’ the living giving the appearance of being a machine. he feels this is a bad thing, and laughing at such stumbling is society’s way of reducing mechanical inelasticity in its members. the potential for being laughed at shames us into watching our steps …

yeah, well … bergson never spent a summer in baton rouge.

stumbling around here is different. it’s potential. it’s social chance in action. a highly sought after, rare, and pretty fucking satisfying experience when it happens.

nothing like a good stumble.

fuck bergson.

***

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

***

i was having a horrible day the day zach came by to film us.

i was sick of mixing the record.

sick of writing my exams.

sick of everyone.

sick of everything.

***

i got over it.

but … it’s in the track if you look closely.

we tried to get some of that mojo to rub off on us yesterday by having our buddy zach shoot some web-worthy video content for us. he, along with the great seamstress work of catherine grandbouche, succeeded in making us look, actually, pretty darn good. stay tuned …

***

the night took a turn for the fabulous, however, when zach called up a group of friends he met at sundance who were passing through baton rouge on a film tour. the gist is this: the filmmaker, alex karpovsky …

… made a film that was shown at sundance, and he’s on a tour promoting it now. while he is on the tour, however, he is making a curb your enthusiasm-style fake documentary that features some of the same people involved in the film (zach played himself in one bit). so at about 10 o’clock, their guerilla film crew shows up at schmitty’s to shoot a few scenes.

we were plastered, and in full party mode (they arrived right as the slam dunk contest was in full swing, a beautiful coincidence for this hoops fan who feels that javale mcgee lost a popularity contest to blake griffin last night, even though that dunk over the car was pretty sick), so the night became part of the backdrop for the scenes they were shooting.

party scene:

jenny and robin:

caroline at craft services:

robin: ‘yeah, i don’t know if him fucking me from behind is going to work. alex, can you block it out so i can get a sense of what it’s going to look like?’

***

all in all, an unexpected night of chaos and creativity, something that i often complain is lacking in baton rouge. so it was lovely. good fun. lots of laughter.

we even got a riley martin phone call in, as jenny and caroline showed an interest in stories of the supernatural and alien encounters. i called riley, got them all in a room, put in on speaker, and said, ‘riley, tell us something.’ he responded with a two minute monologue about 10,000 life giving planets in our solar system alone. i wish … i recorded it. brilliant. i hope jenny makes that documentary. i’m hustlin’ for you, friend martin.

this is the end of the night. it felt wrong seeing it in person. it felt wrong photographing it. and it feels wrong posting it on this blog.

***

lagniappe …

unknown:

the nameless one:

internal adjustment:

***

the weekend was sublime. work, and lots of it … but the best kind.

there was downtown chicago. the jayhawks in all their glory. the matchbox bar. the root cellar, where i had some kind of rabbit pate and cheese and fermented cherries and pickled fennel and brown mustard and wine at 1 am. chad and eva and hooch and denise and mary ann and todd.

***

three solid days of intense mixing with chad, finding squeaks and spikes and thunks and adjusting things up and up and up a little more and then down some and then back up and then deleting them entirely. notch filters. single-band compressors. surgical gain tweaks.

but we got it. cornered it. crept up on it. shot it in the fucking head. it’s the best musical project i’ve ever been a part of.

chad geiser is a fucking animal. he’s got a motor that will not quit. he’s got cage balls and bat ears and eagle eyes and a golden heart. he’s a champion. we couldn’t have done this project without him, and he’s a huge, huge part of it now. the guy’s fookin’ mega, mate.

mega.

***

it’s funny … mixing ‘the traveler’ reminded me that, to quote schmitty, i’m a traveler who can’t find a home. towns get small, people disappoint, days get stale. but put me on a trailways bus at dusk and i’m in my element. i’ll go anywhere. i’ve got rainclouds.

***

but i’m back down south with exam questions looming and a stack of bills to pay and it ain’t home. but this year is off to a great start. and there’s magic in the air off in the distance. lightening. or a car fire on the spillway, perhaps. but whatever it is, it’s slowing me down. turning my outside in.

and i’m so glad we made it here …