Singer, Song, Shows

On the first day of this year, walking off the drunk and towards the truck I'd convienently parked at an elementary school, I found a note tucked beneath my windshield wiper. It read: "Fuck 2007. 2008 is going to be awesome! xo, Louise"

(Louise, it should be noted, is currently staging Othello at Balagan Theater. I'm a jerk and haven't made it out and probably won't be able to, but I'm sure YOU can.)

For all sorts of reasons, for me and others, 2007 was a tough year. I wanted 2008 to be better. Needed it to be. You could argue the reason Louise's note turned out so prophetic is because I fought to make it so; I prefer to believe that Louise has magical powers--strange, mystical forces she cannot necessarily control, only summon. Either way, I know better than to touch her magic wand.

Whatever the reason, though, things got good this year: steady and successful employment, rewarding friend and relation ships (with reinforced timber hulls and everything), more writing, better health (and related choices), crates upon crates of music, and the re-emergence of The End Times.

On the 18th of this month, at local fave The Blue Moon, we'll play live for the first time since March, and for the first time ever with our new singer Abigail.



After that, you can catch us at the Skylark Cafe on December 23rd at 9p.m., and at Tacoma's Java Jive on January 30th. We'll also be hopping back into the studio to record some new tracks (some of which you can already hear on our MySpace).

Not only that, but our EP These Are The End Times is up for consideration on KEXP's Top 90.3 of 2008. If you like our style, you can vote for us (and nine others; may I suggest Hey Marseilles and The Moondoggies?) by clicking here.

Of course, for all the triumph, I was sailing in the eye. Many others had the dubious pleasure of testing their resolve, health, and security under unfavorable conditions. I'm proud and relieved to report many made it. And for those who are still in the midst of a tough year, I'll tell you this: Fuck 2008. 2009 is gonna be awesome!

xot

I probably would have cried

Neutral Milk Hotel - Engine - 10/18/2008 Brillobox, Pittsburgh PA from Engine on Vimeo.

Reduction

Historically, making the jump from print to tv requires a complete abdication of tone, humor, and intent. Especially cartoons. For every Charles Schultz, you get ten Scott Adams. It's the law. So imagine my surprise at the above. Sure, it's pointed and mean and accurate, but so is the originating strip; in fact, since they wisely decided to keep the episodes under 2 minutes* instead of dragging the joke behind a truck for 22, the strip feels like the secondary creation, not a cash-in really (as I'd be surprised if there's a lot of money in political cartooning) but the spin-off.

And now that we probably won't see Sarah Palin answer any questions, ever, for anything, I don't even mind the meanness.

*All comedy scenes should be under two minutes. Anything more and you've done one of two things: 1) missed the point, messed up the logic, or fallen in love with your own voice; or 2) hit the joke and then hit the joke again, for laughing at you.

the necessary notes

In the house next door, the one with the missing shutter, the old woman had begun dancing again. Adi could feel it, the woman’s feet shuffling across the floor, along the run of his back. A thousand steps in an old softshoe shoving him further into the sheets as he lay in bed, waiting for her to stop, flip the record, again begin. Sometimes it felt like there was no end to her dance; she went on for hours, playing god knows what as her toes walked the valley of his ribs.

This was Thursday.

Friday, Adi awoke to an odd hambone in his lungs. It was a step- a stomp, rather, he corrected himself, that kept knocking about in his chest. He coughed twice, involuntarily. Twice more, voluntarily, hoping to dislodge it, but the stomp, which had now transitioned into a stately promenade, didn’t waver. His breaths, when they came, fluttered rhythmically; his abdomen felt full of shoes.

For one brief moment, Adi considered telephoning the old woman who was dancing inside him at her residence on his left, but decided against it. Once, some months ago, when the dancing had continued for hours, eventually reaching a tempo that made Adi too nauseated to stand, he had called her. It took minutes longer than he would have liked; information was hesitant to release her number based solely on her address and although Adi hadn’t her name or the wish to argue, he also could no longer stand the leading steps that slid into his throat.

When she answered, the dancing stopped. Adi nearly cried.

“Yes?” she had asked. Her tone was reedy, featherlight and flexible. “Hello?”

He hadn’t considered what he’d say to her, this woman whose legs kicked at his heart. The unanswered query hung between them on a breaking thread; his answer, his request unspeakable. She hung up. Muttering, he followed suit and began to wait for her to begin.

Today, Friday, he looked at her number hanging on his wall where he had pinned it above the phone and called in instead to work.

“No. I’m sorry. Terrible cough. I can’t,” said Adi to his supervisor once she had been fully apprised and picked up the phone. It was as little a lie as he could possibly tell. Soon, possibly tomorrow, they would fire him for his absences. He could hear it in her voice, the “Feel better, Adi” closing the call.

Around nine, after almost an hour of quiet, he could feel her stretching, preparing for another go with her infernal music, the counterpoint he never heard. The dance came quickly, a rough tarantella that softened up his kidneys with pointed execution. He felt vomitous and quickly dashed to the bathroom to make space for her.

For two hours it went, the steps a mixture of slows and quicks, a sketch of the dance’s line wound between his organs and through his bones. Adi lay completely still on his bed, dressed in clothes of two days ago, his bare feet straight, and his eyes open. He tried to picture her, this practicing coryphée.

She was beautiful, her face only slightly weathered with age, wrinkles of concentration and laughter; her arms and legs strong from a thousand days danced beneath the ceiling of his skin; her body clothed in a dress of simple cut that emphasized her length.

On his bed, the mattress sponging sweat, Adi closed his eyes and gave himself the escape of the vision.

Before him now, beneath red draperies and beside the tall unmarked columns, she stood, a model of poise and grace. He could see her in his head, standing motionless and ready. Ever deaf to what moved her, he could tell when the music began only by the fragmentary smile that broke through the wall of her face and the flutter, the involuntary seize, of his diaphragm.

Then she moved. Fluid, strong steps that took her away and then back to him as he watched. She hopped nimbly across the floor, flinging her hands up over her head, her dress billowing softly. Sometimes she moved out of the light into the darkness at the edges of the floor; he could only feel her then, moving in spectral precision, but he waited patiently for her return. And there she was, in front of him again, her hands on his. This dance was for him, if he wanted it.

Adi escorted her to the center of the floor and waited for the music to begin.

Definitions: Sunflustered

Sunflustered (V): To receive a burn, primarily from the sun, of an insignificant degree. Martin was sunflustered, like an unprepped undergrad flummoxed by an instructor's question.

Definitions: Guilty

Guilty (gill tea) adj.

1. To be so bad that you've objectively been judged so by peers. Cred. Didja hear? Jasper put two in Kerry after he mucked on the docks. That's some seriously guilty shit.

2. Doing time to earn one's due. Respect. Seattle, WA--The newly resolute John "Jasper" Phillips pled 'Guilty', officially ending the State's chances of implicating alleged crime boss Alex Boskevitch in the recent wave of break-ins at popular chain electronic stores. Trevor Abilglass, lead counsel for the State, has implied, but been unable to prove, that Phillips is taking the fall for Boskevitch.

3. Hip. Look at this ink I got to commemorate my brother Jas! It's guilty.

I was shaving the other day around the latest outcropping of acne on my chin, cursing my life's good luck to get my mom's bad skin, when a phrase popped in my head like an aggrieved blood vessel. This is not unusual. Things bubble up all the time. My brain will cobble together some words into a phrase fraught with emotional resonance and, often, an abundance of assonance before lobbing it at the world like a spaghetti plate at a wall. This is what teachers call brainstorming.

From there, I try to concoct a vignette that might properly frame those words, imbuing them with the feelings and tensions I had in saying them. Some angst, some pain, and a month later, it's a first draft so ugly you consider keeping it in a burlap sack until you can find a bat or a stick or something with which to beat it to death. On the plus side, if you're lucky, it's an honest little thing, with no refinement or pretension to trip up its blaring declaration of THE TRUTH.

And then you must revise THE TRUTH, pushing it forever up until you abandon it or it crushes you, hopefully somewhere near where you started. This is where I often get stuck, sitting at mountain bottom on top of my boulder thinking how godawfully hard it'll be to begin. To get rid of all the parts that don't work and replace them with other things that are marginally better, intelligent design in metered lines, evolution in essay form.

For me, the problem is affect, that need to be bigger than the moment and say a little something to everyone; my symptom: sarcasm, a knowing eye roll of the tongue. The funny thing is observing how that same wrench gets in everywhere. The man who dances around his stiff spine like a church-approved maypole, biting at his lip as hardens his elbows into crooks? Afraid to simply shake his shit. The woman who tries to sing Houston when she should just loosen up and belt out some Jett? Scared of her own inherent power. You gotta let the audience find you, not the reverse, and I've a glut of projects that I need to clear out of my barn.