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.

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.

playing with wilco and lucinda williams. hope she plays lake charles. hope they play impossible germany.

gonna be a blast!

check out the flatbed site for specifics.

anyway, jazz fest. lagniappe stage. may 5th. don’t know the time yet. probably early in the day, i’d imagine. i still have to fill out a rider listing our backstage demands. i’m not good at making backstage demands. geiser, if your plate wasn’t already full mixing the record, i’d have you take a stab at it. you always got mopweed treated like kings at the delta sig house back at isu … ‘we need our own keg. and a quarter of grass. and sorority access.’

sorted.

in other flatbed news, i’m working on a flatbed honeymoon blog and have a kickstarter project that we’re almost ready to launch. kickstarter is this groovy thing these kids in brooklyn put together where you can raise money for a creative project. they’ve been written up in the times and on npr and what not. it’s a great idea, particularly for broke as a joke musicians who just need to get the ball rolling. for us, it’s more of a way to pre-sell some records to folks who live far away and also give away some cool shit. and also get people involved in the making of the vinyl and cd. plus, it makes us print up some t-shirts and stickers and shit like that. merch. gotta have merch.

me and schmitty are meeting with jeremiah tonight to look at some of the images he’s pulled for the album artwork. i just gave him rough mixes of the record without telling him a thing about it all (that it’s called the traveler, that it’s very loosely conceptual, that it’s about getting from here to there, being somewhere else, motion, longing, all that). so he sends me an email and says that he’s listened to it a bunch, digs the songs, and sees ‘planes, trains, and automobiles.’ he’s considering an image that implies ‘motion/distance/longing.’

sorted.

alright. i still have prep for a class starting next week i’ve never taught before. this i’m not looking forward to …

he’s one of those people who checks the weather forecasts. i am not. therefore, i get caught walking across parking lots in deluges often in a t-shirt and jeans. there are things i could tighten up around here.

but, alas. i was storm sensitive, yet unafraid. one of the best memories of my life was a day i spent at six flags in st. louis as a kid in a complete downpour riding the jet scream and the screaming eagle over and over and over again (no lines!). and, you know, a little rain never hurt no one.

the second thing i remember hearing was the sound of squirrel falling out of a tree. lefty and i were walking when right behind us i heard a tree limb snap followed by some leaves rustling and then a sound like a ziplock bag full of jelly being thrown against a brick wall. i looked back and this squirrel was lying next to a branch on the street, twitching, looking pretty rough. my first though was, ‘i should help this squirrel,’ but then – very quickly – i came around to, ‘jesus, man, it’s an unconscious squirrel. you’re holding a dachshund on a leash in one hand and a bag of shit in the other. it’s the squirrel’s time.’ i felt bad, though, and thought it might be an omen of sorts. we walked a while longer, and when we doubled back, the squirrel was gone. must have just had his bell rung a little. i felt better. and come to think of it, squirrels must fall out of trees all the fucking time …

next it was robin and fred and benji and gary and sweet howard (‘i just want someone to wrap me up in a blanket and hold me like a baby … i like being crippled inside’) and no artie talking to my girl sarah silverman about the time when she ran up to a friend of hers and gave him a kiss on the mouth and then instantly became disoriented for a second before having a realization that made her ask him, ‘were you just eating pussy?’ and him responding – ‘with a look on his face like i was a magician and just guessed his card,’ – ‘oh, my god! you’re right! i was!’

next was archdiocese of new orleans mass gospel choir singing about wanting the spirit to fall down, right down, down on me.

the next sound was mud.

i ate pheasant, quail, and andouille gumbo (for neil) and drank a strawberry lemonade (for noel) and talked to a father and his twenty-something daughter from half moon bay, just south of s.f. i told them how much i used to love to stop in that town on my way to and from santa cruz, and we talked a little about the giants and their great pitching and and questionable hitting, and all the while this girl’s right breast – nipple, the whole nine – was fully exposed. completely out of her hippie chick kinda sun top thing, just – bam! – breast, right there. the whole damn time. lagniappe, they call it down here …

the first cry came during the treme brass band set. they destroyed a rag and then a slow blues dedicated to all the musicians that passed this year (clarinet solo damn near killed me), but what really got me was when they brought up the kids that they work with all year, the next generation of the treme brass band. early high school aged kids come up, dressed just like the band, and they rip into ‘bourbon street parade’ and the lead trumpet player takes the vocal lead (‘yes i will take you! i will parade you! down bourbon street!’) in this high, right on the cusp of puberty voice that just killed me. so fucking sincere. so transparent, too, the circle of musical life, taking place right before your eyes. i turned to this girl standing next to me and said, ‘this place is amazing!’ and she just smiled and kinda raised her eyebrows. back at jazz fest.

the creole wild west mardi gras indians …

i like to think that a great champion, a horse named tenacious is buried here, but i have no facts to prove it …

some well intentioned middle aged women in obama t-shirts were trying to herd these geese back through a chain link fence to a pond. i left just before it seemed like the elder geese were about to attack. remember the squirrel …

the most amazing sound i heard all day was terrence blanchard in the jazz tent. one of those moments when you really can see the levels of musicianship that can be found on our planet. piano (havanah, cuba), tenor sax (tucson ‘the epicenter of jazz music,’ arizona), upright bass (nigeria by way of london by way of nigeria. he now lives in new york), drums (houston, tx), and trumpet (nola). bebop vibe, but very free at times, extremely dynamic. violent. raging. they flew in spoken word clips by dr. cornell west. all post-katrina material. tight as hip could be. breathtaking fucking music.

i think if you choose to pound beer, this becomes your jazz fest experience … stick to lemonade. then buy two buds from a guy on the street after it’s all over and drink them while walking back to your car. and reflect. (the old guy in the foreground of this photo turns to me and says, ‘you gotta pick lines with guys. guys go faster. unless they have to poop.’ i say, ‘yeah, well how do you know if they have to poop?’ he says, ‘you ask.’

simon and garfunkle was something.

they came on stage behind a brass band and then ripped into hazy shade of winter (full band) and i am a rock. it was weird, i couldn’t hear art. when you heard him he sounded fine, but you couldn’t hear him. there was a little feedback at times and shit just seemed a little uptight for the first few songs. the sound wasn’t really happening. before ‘keep the customer satisfied,’ art says, ‘no, they don’t need to turn up my voice, the problem is i have no voice.’ he was sick or something.

bummer, right? simon and a fifth of garfunkle. they played a few more tunes and then art left the stage so paul can do a few solo tunes. the energy of the place went through the roof. diamonds on the soles of her shoes. boy in the bubble. that was your mother. the only living boy in new york. !!!

art comes back on stage. i gotta admit, i was kinda feeling like art was a bit of a boat anchor on the set at this point and wished paul would just keep playing by himself and chalk it up to, you know, one of those things (once during the solo set, paul even said, ‘yeah, probably no bridge over troubled water today’). but you really never know what you’re going to get. art walks up looking a little sad, and paul says into the mic, ‘you gonna make it?’ he then leans back and presumably says the same thing in art’s ear. he then gets back on the mic, laughing, and says, ‘i asked him, ‘are you gonna make it?’ and he says, ‘i don’t know!’ they then kick into my little town and bridge over troubled water.

this bridge over troubled water performance might have been the most punk rock thing i have ever seen in my life. yes, i said it, and i meant it. art is clearly running on fumes. the whole audience knows he is and they’re rooting for him. cheering him on. the tune starts. art takes a verse. again, he’s spot on pitch, there’s just a faint whisper of his voice. paul does a verse. they come back and sing a verse together. as they started the line, ‘i’m on your side, when times get rough (i’m tearing up again as i write this), i’ll take your part, when darkness is all around’ paul puts his hand on art’s shoulder, gives him a loving little rub, and holds it there through the whole verse. fucking brilliant. they get to the big finale, when paul steps away and art is just supposed to soar, and paul looks at him like, ‘well, here we go,’ and he steps back, and fucking art garfunkle just lays into it, goes for every note, even the ridiculous high one at the end, scratchy, soulful, right on key, with nothing but heart and fucking balls, and paul is peeking around at the band like, ‘are you hearing this?’ and the song ends and those two erupt like ten year old little kids. laughing and giggling and hugging each other and whispering to each other and everyone in the audience is crying and going fucking crazy and … i don’t know, man. it was just one of those things. sometimes, even music, you know? just a real vulnerable human moment framed by a gloriously beautiful song on a gloriously muddy day (it never rained, btw). i felt lucky to see it. they closed with cecilia, and bookended the set with a little brass band solo (lead by terrence blanchard) over the coda (‘jubilation, she loves me again!’)

back at jazz fest.

‘where’s the gospel tent?’

jim duffy recorded an ep on four track once called ‘starts on a d, ends on a d.’ it was a poem to shamsi rue (who still gives me the chills when i hear ‘evangeline’ on the rough mix cd i have to remember that great band ‘one.) all the songs were in the key of d ’cause jim was a drummer playing guitar and you can’t write love songs on the drums (unless you’re portuguese). beautiful record. i think i still have a copy of it somewhere. one for the digitizing project that one of you are in charge of in the event of my untimely death.

anyway, i always thought jim should start all his records in one key and end them in the same key. like bookends. make it a tradition. like pete the meat’s from culver city’s annual christmas cd (which i didn’t get this year ’cause evidently pete don’t ship). bring that beet back. traditions are what it’s about. they give you another reason to live another year. i started a jazz fest tradition yesterday: start in the gospel tent, and end in the gospel tent.

when you start your day and end your day in god’s tent, you hear things. musical and otherwise. i heard tonia scott & the anointed voices drag a woman on stage (the sister of the late reverend) who literally.could.not.walk. she looked 100 years old. she was 70 pounds soaking wet. she had dark black glasses on. leaning on a cane. then she started singing ‘jesus on the mainline’ and i fell over. she was fine, and i’m laying on my side in the gospel tent crying like a baby.

i heard new orleans jazz ramblers do a cover of ‘what a wonderful world?’ while women feathered in pink and purple swayed in the breeze we could only hope for.

i heard jon cleary & the absolute monster gentlemen (guitar player must have weighed 450 pounds) at the gentilly stage and d.l. menard & the louisiana aces speak in the thickest cajun dialect you have ever heard at the fais do do (where this angel walked out of a little booth beside the stage wearing a california-country sun dress circa 1973, knee-hign leather boots, and headphones. she smiled to someone in the crowd, pointed to her ears, and whispered ‘live recording!’)

i heard cedric burnside and lightenin’ malcolm ask the faithful in the blues tent if they’d ‘mind if we rock out for a bit.’ i heard them do a junior kimbrough cover that made a clean (like a broke dick dog), prim (like belle of the sunday school ball), and old (like in-her-70s old) white woman sitting in the second row scream out ‘cedric! cedric! ceedriiiick!’

i heard neil young. i heard neil young standing in a field filled with all the human beings a field could hold in the heat of the day. i had to wait thirty extra minutes to hold my spot. it was rough. but i heard neil young play ‘everybody knows this is nowhere’ as grey clouds formed overhead and dropped the temperature twenty degrees. i heard a cover of ‘a day in the life’ that made sonic youth look like dave mathews and made me feel like it was the best thing i ever heard (and i was stone.cold.sober.)

then it rained … i had my first and only beer.

during the rain delay a woman from san jose that i kept thinking was kathy bat (but probably wasn’t) got me (and a coupla coon asses) extremely high …

… then i wandered back over to the fais do do stage and heard guy clark do two songs, but i couldn’t find eric and lindsey even though they were there.

i heard an old black man pass an old white man and say, ‘i’ll see you further on down the road!’ i liked that.

i saw big chief bo dollis & the wild magnolias walking around, but i didn’t hear them do anything except stand there looking beautiful.

i heard buddy guy from way outside the blues tent where i attempted to eat a pork and shrimp spring roll. i don’t know. it sounded like a good idea. i was high. buddy guy sounds like confidence wrapped in a grizzly bear on cocaine. i heard a real white trash lady listening to buddy guy say, ‘this sounds dirty,’ to her real white trash man, who responded, ‘i know i feel dirty just listening to it.’

and of course i heard another group at the gospel tent, but i forgot what they were called.

i guess that’s about all i heard.

[Show as slideshow]