let’s get awesome

A kind friend gently reminded me that I’ve been neglecting this site. Oh right. I didn’t know I had readers. What to say? Well, on my birthday I played a show with my friends Marshall and Nona from Minneapolis. In the course of preparing for that show I got completely sucked into the band and have fallen in love with them and the music that we’re playing– and left town to play shows from Philly to Minneapolis. I think that’s a fair enough excuse for neglecting a blog.

I just got back from Minneapolis where we played a fun show with the Blackthorns (hell yeah), Dreamland Faces (swoon!) and Ice Cream Social Anxiety. Then I packed my bass in a plastic hardshell case the size of a large studio apartment in Manhattan, heaved it onto the baggage counter at the Minneapolis airport (it cost more than my ticket to get that thing back to New York) and flew home. I’m here for two weeks and then I’m inflicting a bunch of uneccessary pain on myself by taking a slow bus (literally) to Los Angeles. Eventually I’ll make my way up to SF and meet up with the rest of Dark Dark Dark and play some shows on the way up to Seattle. From there I’ll proceed to torture myself some more by taking another Greyhound back across the country to New York. After that, I go to Costa Rica for two weeks to housesit, lay on the beach, take care of my friends’ dogs and write (that’s where the torture ends).

I’m doing all of this Greyhound riding because I’m fascinated by the bus and the strange intersections of people and the temporary intimacy of it all and how utterly American it is in a non-Patriot Act, non-flag-waving kind of way. It’s on the bus that I’ve met Vietnam vets and fresh faced recruits en route to basic training, retired bureaucrats, English teachers, and folks just out of prison. It’s on the bus that I’ve divulged secrets about myself that almost no one else knows– and it’s on the bus that I’ve listened to the most intimate confessions of strangers whom I’ll never meet again.

So, I’m taking these 3000 mile bus rides to collect stories, or rather to find the story of a film that I want to make, about a cross-country bus ride. It’s a research trip, in a way. Of course, I know it’s not all romantic and gushy like I’ve just described. It’s uncomfortable and stinky and boring and people are annoying and loud and the only food available is Arby’s and McDonalds…and sometimes you just don’t want to talk to your neighbor or they don’t want to talk to you, so you both just watch the homogenized landscape of the interstate roll by or stand awkwardly under the florescent lights of a rest stop stop in Elk City , Oklahoma smoking cigarettes at 3:00 A.M.. But I think that’s part of it too.

So, yeah. That’s where I’ve disappeared to.

33 is a bad year for blogging. But it’s a good year for following dreams.

current soundtrack to dreams:

Dark Dark Dark:

 New York Song: Play Now
 Who By Fire (Leonard Cohen): Play Now