The School of Rembrandt (actually)

The last I checked, the river still rose.

It is transition season in the heart of it all
and thunderheads are waging a suicide front.
Lightning always aims for the tallest target
which is us, a mile a minute
on a paid-mile road.

I clutch gray like the last raft to the mainland.
I snap photographs into dusk,
toward a city that juts
quick from an interruption
of land’s original phase.
The angularity of a tired decade.
There is verdance again.

Patron, my portfolio
is inscribed in your friends.
You trade thin slices of these hands
in your accustomed manner:
glorified barter.
I negotiate the canal I captured
for hire in a craft of your leasing,
and so here we are.
You are a particle and I am a waveform.
In the intersecting moment forever is made.

I have entered the life of a griot,
a keeper of stories,
which I haltingly live.
There is an elegance
in his precision and loss,
and in this, unfamiliar
to both, a tension persists.
Potential. Kinetic. It can happen here.
There are organ grinders everywhere.
But I can, joined at jurisdictions
riverfront down,
give the slip, headlong striking,
and make processes of nouns.

Observe the man of the body percussive;
witness through another
horrors that beg for reason;
how quickly we forget,
how plasticene the record.
Observe the man with a string of names for wonder,
the ancient musics whose confluence
consist the spirit of the land
these have adopted,
or stolen, or inherited,
or something beyond:
become.

Patron, move two paces to the right,
so that you and the sun bracket the center.
This is not your dint.
This is the library, cordoned space.
Things can dry, crack, wither, fade here.
But you know as well as I
it is the product that requires preservation.
If you wish me to fulfill this task
and complete the contract,
you must comply. I must reduce
and reproduce all angles and lines.
Patron, you have such sad
and accented eyes.

This city is nothing, they say.
This city is nothing if not
a seething chessboard,
a pissing match among irreconcilable accidents
or a thousand years of habit.
There are childhood castoffs constituted as art,
refuse in the streets, an averted attack
as the bellhop summons a limousine,
cast glances over conventioneer shoulders,
a back-off-and-away congress in the last
inner-city neighborhood,
jail and Proctor-Gamble competing for gravity.
The river is still rising as I walk into Kentucky.

“I don’t eat foods I don’t like,” says the woman
as I hunch over dead cow. “I don’t like
to eat spinach. If I want vitamins,
I’ll get them from somewhere else.”
We are rendered in matte by a midsummer rush hour.
Our shoes bear the scent of liquor and strip joints.
I slam back the alleged coffee and light up my third;
thank God for state laws.

I bend to the convex of the rising and blind.

Patron, hold still.

A flurry of days:
hours;
I am at table with a keeper
of theory, form and God’s breath.
I am sitting in a cloud of cats
with a man of rough kin and a story
for everything. Something brutal
is happening outside,
change falls in a predatory moment,
nothing slides through these senses.
That man in my life is in fits with us all,
a common commitment that breaks with addiction.
I am a roving audience for a panel of griots.
Hunger. A day reduced to diesel fumes.
Tomorrow this news will be reduced to
statistics. My job begins there.
One need not sit at the master’s feet
to grow into example,
to go reckoning on.

Patron, I give you
the sobriety of light in a terminal age,
solid slate in the lowlands,
oak and stone from petroleum.
That you give me sustenance is a fair enough trade,
at least in a world that acknowledges both.
You are one line on my resumé.
—not to demean you—
for you and these hands, intertwined, shall be solid.
There is a market you never imagined.
Its exchange lives through time and adores all its atoms.

It is the last night and the tribe is afire.
Someone bursts through the door with a Jericho horn.
We are towering in the world of the demitasse and shot glass.
The water begins to leak into the streets.
I am climbing the walls, making
cones of the paintings, announcing
that someone has come for the city.
So hold.
Observe, all you keepers with your wax-papered beauty,
how the huff of your forfeitures vibrate in choirs,
how by the good acts you have gone beyond purchase,
how you tear through the limits of living
old lies: you are all still alive.

(Ken Hunt, 1997) Rest in peace.

The School of Rembrandt

or maybe the problem is that I simply don't know how to have fun, at all, ever. SXSW is like paradise to some people, and I for sure will cop to--let's call it "an issue surrounding"--self-involvement, but jesus christ, I'm not the only performer whose parents didn't love him enough or correctly who goes down to Austin every year or two. I do, however, seem to be the only one who has the worst time of his life and comes away feeling like a grain of salt in the dead sea (if not the dead c). i wish i liked people enough to just love hanging out and talking shit about musicians. i wish i enjoyed the trivialization/reduction of the pursuits I love down to their crassest most cynical elements. i wish i wish i wish.

there are two happy SXSW memories I can muster. the first is from 2003, when the Barsuk showcase became a complete love fest between the LWs, Nada Surf, and DCFC. There was some question about how the NS boys would fit into the family (if you can really call it one), and to be sure, there was a fair amount of teeth-baring and tail-fluffing among the more competitive elements of certain bands. But by the time the night was over, everyone, even JV, had played the best set I'd ever seen them play *(and I have seen all those bands way more times than any of you). The NS had been arrested the night before and spent the night in west texas jail, so we didn't know if they'd make the show, but they did, just in time to see the banner i'd had made that day at the copy shop across the street. it read: "FREE NADA SURF." Nick Harmer ended the DCFC show by swinging from the scaffolding and landing with a crash at the end of "prove my hypotheses" (i think). it was clear that night that the cab had turned the corner and would soon be riding around in solid gold limos and buying houses made out of $100 dollar bills, and now they are, and good for them for reals. i got nothing but love.

the main thing was that the show was a culmination of a two-year process that had begun on the DISASTROUS 2001 DCFC-Little Champions-This Busy Monster Tour, and the ass-out Barsuk SXSW showcase at the end of it. The intervening years had seen everyone get real about making their bands and their label world class enterprises (everyone but me, of course, but let's leave that for another blog, shall we? yes, lets); the LWs were breech-born but mutated into a suitable showcase for JR's genius (literal actual genius, I say)--"when i pretend to fall" hadn't even come out that night, but everyone there was all the way on its jock; NS was the left-field modernist rock band that no one suspected of harboring true brilliance, professionalism, and the prettiest voice in America; JV had a greatband together; et al et al et al. The place was PACKED and everyone was together and no one could deny that our little label could. The fact that I was in the full throes of suicidal despair, broke, lonely, and lost in life, couldn't even get me down that night. i felt superconnected.

but you know i couldn't last.

my second happy memory is tainted by the incredibly sad news I received late last night.

in 1997, harvey danger played its first SXSW, having no idea what we were doing, fully expecting that our mere inclusion in the fest would get us discovered or some such folly. the crucial thing was that in our quest for legitimacy, the outside world had offered scant few breadcrumbs, and this felt like a big one. we played at the ritz lounge with House of Large Sizes (yay!). No one came (boo!). Well, a couple of people. Among them were Phil West and Ken Hunt, or old Seattle cronies who had moved to Austin to make it big as... poets. or so it is said. Phil and Ken were central to the lore of HD, not least because they got us our first show, opening for their band, Self-Help Seminar (which aaron used to play bass in). Ken was even the HD drummer for a while, before evan and I were in the band. There was always a deep sadness about Ken, the kind that you could only get growing up gay, intellectual, alcoholic, and fiercely punk in Aberdeen, WA. Ken wrote songs that could break your heart, though his band played them with chainsaws and rat pedals, and he seldom had the confidence to sing them so you could hear them. We covered his "Heroine With an E" on our first demo tape after Evan and I had stayed up, stoned, all night once at Eastern House, listening to the SHS 7-inch of it again and again and again. "I can pierce a room with my gaze and my arch-backed posture..."

anyway, we played the show and nothing changed in anybody's life, so we went back to ken's house, where E&I were staying, and proceded to eat an ounce of mushrooms. (I may have skipped a day or something, but I don't remember seeing too much music that year; i'm sure I did, though. i used to love going to see bands... mainly I just remember making everybody sit through an excruciating evening of spoken word because I had the hots for a female "poet" in vinyl pants who had absolutely no time for me whatsoever. i recently googled her. she's still foxy, but i don't like her writing. that seems like a pyrrhic victory. lo, i digress.) At that time, Ken was living with a guy named Richard Loranger, and the two of them wrote and read poetry, smoked cigarettes, drank beer, and generally lived a bohemian intellectual underground life that seemed to me (and evan) like the absolute height of '90s-era ambition, right down to the self-published chapbooks. Ah, the '90s. Let us (not even) go there, you and I... As the dose was coming on (as they say in fiction), Richard was suddenly declaiming, in character, all these amazing monologues, and shorter poems, and, Evan and I looked at one another, and it was ON. we basically invited them to poetize until the sun came up, eager as we were to imbibe in all the creative energy that was surrounding us, eager above all to appreciate their work, their gesture, the whole idea that they had committed to the lives of gay slacker poets in Texas. A little bit Rimbaud and Verlaine, a little bit Laverne and Shirley. Totally amazing.

Richard (whom I've not seen since) was the more flamboyant and entertaining of the two with monologues clearly written to be performed (he probably did the lollapalooza spoken word tent or something) and, consequently, his work wore thin first--though it also provided the most uproarious highs. Ken was the real star, though. I never knew him well, but he was obviously a very smart, very sensitive, very funny, and utterly tortured soul. he had droll poems and abstruse poems and site specific slammy poems. But then he had "The School of Rembrandt," which was an epic poem, on a par, i genuinely feel, even after the drugs have long since worn off, with Robert Lowell and John Ashbery. It was the first piece of genuinely brilliant work I'd ever seen from a peer, after a lot of good-to-really-good-to-bad work from all of us. i'm pretty sure I cried, but I know i shook with reverence for both the poem and the poet. the sun was rising. we were outside, smoking. it was cold. ken was beautiful in the blue-gray light, displaced as a Northwesterner in Texas, doing the only thing he was built to do, for an audience of three, at least two of whom were blasted beyond recognition.

"last time I checked, the river still rose," it began. I'll type the rest tomorrow. ken hunt died saturday, the same night we were playing at SXSW. he was found under the El train in Chicago.

Good Evening, Mister President.

It has officially reached the point where I can now identify the season and even the portion of the season before the "previously on The West Wing" segment is over. Sure, there are hints (why did they ever hire Moira Kelly in the first place?), but you really have to be committed to get to my level. I'm not bragging; I'm confessing. I am not a TV person. I have never loved the way I love The West Wing. It touches me in places most people don't even know they have places. God bless you, Bravo, everyone.

In other news, Jeff proposed a truly radical plan for the new HD record last night. I think it is terrifying and brilliant. Though not as brilliant as Aaron Sorkin, who should be given some kind of title, and a Congressional medal, to say nothing of a garland to wear atop his brow. Serious.

SXSW was, as predicted, demoralizing. I played three shows: one as ex-officio Long Winters (incredibly fun, as most Roderick & Nelsonfunkel performances are), one as special guest harmony singer with the great Robyn Hitchcock ("Alright, Yeah," "Viva Sea-Tac," "Queen Elvis," "If You Know Time") with whom I spent some great time that evening, along with his lovely companionne, and in the dressing room shadow of Spoon (genial but awkward interactions with Britt and Jim, as always; it's funny, sort of, that the low point in their musical careers occurred while on tour with HD--hey, me, too!--and that they're still sort of embarrassed by their bullshit behavior in Atlanta... as well they should be...) and John Cale (whom I almost knocked over; he's not a large man--he is, however, p.h.p, i.m.h.o.), and of course, the HD show. Of these, the HD was the only one that made me actively sad afterwards. Not because we didn't play well. I mean, we've been better, but we have CERTAINLY been much worse; we weren't a disgrace. But somehow, I let myself forget that SXSW isn't a "showcase," and it isn't a "festival." It's a place where music business bottom-feeders-on-up centralize so no one can get mad at them for talking through shows. I had to leave as soon as we were done becuase I couldn't endure one more fake-ass, looking-over-my-shoulder-for-someone-more-famous (not hard, but still...) conversation with one more half-friend. Or real friend. The Barsuk showcase was full of good friends of mine. But I'm not up for SXSW. It's clear. Not as a has-been, up-and-comer. No. I'm not going back till I can enter the city on a team of white stallions. Jeff's radical plan may be the best antidote to my biz frustration that I've ever heard. It's bold and karmically righteous. It's also effing loco, and beset with as many press landmines as there are potential benefits. But at least there's a good early-middle period R.E.M. song we can use as a theme song.

(That's a hint to the two of you who might be reading this.)

My schedule last weekend was a perfect encapsulation of my life as a busybody:
Thursday
8pm-12am Iron Composer (write a song while drinking five shots of tequila, and people are throwing shit at you and girls you may or may not have benign crushes on give you lap dances wearing strap-on dildos coated with K-Y, some of which ends up in your mouth. not for nothing, but I won, handily, and left, drunkenly.)

Friday
12:30am-2am Pack, fret, watch West Wing.

2-4am Sleep

6am-2pm (CST) Flight to Denver, thence to Austin, both in middle seats on crowded flights, neither of them sitting with A-train. Too tired to sleep much, but also can't read, and can't reach iPod. Nice.

2-3:30 Taxi to hotel, check-in, throw luggage on floor, same taxi (waiting, with meter running) to BBQ joint for Barsuk/Merge party for Long Winters set. Arrive at BBQ place, where of the 200 people present, I know 100 personally and at least 30 more by reputation. frantic hellos to good friends and bad ones, jump on stage, sing for half hour.

4-6: From stage, rush to MTV (.com, but still...) interview across town. Fun, actually. It's nice to feel purposeful. Then go to register. Ready to collapse. Find coffee. sit. doze. Taxi back to BBQ place.

and onward... i just realized this is boring even for me. Suffice it: by 10:30, when RH took the stage at La Zona Rosa, I still hadn't stopped for a nap and both A and I were super cranky. Drinks after the show to cement the fatigue, and then, back to the hotel for very sound sleep. The next day was slightly less frantic, but only slightly. Several semi-famous sightings (a nice chat with Ben Kweller at the airport ice cream stand), and many queasy shoulder rubbings with fourth-tier pseudo-impressarios. Ah, well. It was nice to see the Nada Surf boys, as always. And JV. And Menomena is a fucking great band; never let it be said that I'm not all about the 'chunes.

More anon.

My real name is Methuselah

The thing is that I have tried and tried. I even bought that shit on vinyl. But I'm really just not that super blown away by the Arcade Fire record. I mean, it's obviously good, and the design is amazing. But I prefer it when singers have pleasing voices. I feel moderately redeemed by my affection for the M.I.A. record, despite its obvious distance from my aesthetic comfort zone, though let's be honest: I still hear it through the filter of that New Yorker piece from a few months back, which I saved because it was so good (and because the photo of Maya Arulpragasam is a stunner). That guy Sasha Frere-Jones is obviously the best music critic around at this point. And, let's be even honester: It's not like, even if M.I.A. was able to enter this country to do her live show--scheduled for Seattle last Tuesday 3/15 and cancelled--it's not like I could ever dance in public. On stage is fine, but in a crowd, I just feel conspicuous and awful. It's embarrassing, yo, but let's not get too personal. Other than that, let's see: Razrez was amazingly good live in the KEXP studio with me, and their four-song demo (produced by my friend Ryan Hadlock is really promising), the new Decemberists is my favorite, and I also enjoy that LCD Soundsystem song. Other than that, my listening tastes are pointedly 30s-ish, honky, rock-centric, and "totes" unfashionable. As opposed to anti-fashionable, which is what I wanted to be this time last deacade. I have no hope of keeping up. I don't even know the difference between These Arms Are Snakes. Or between The Popular Shapes and The Impossible Shapes. Or whatever. I turn on the MTV and everybody looks like extras from the damn Class of 1984 or Tuff Turf or something. I get that youth culture is energetic and important, and certainly moreso now than a few years back, but the older I get, the more I can't help feeling relieved that my advancing age is carrying me further away from the point where I'm expected to know what's happening. And anyway, this fetishization of the young and their slang and their favored fashion by people my age and older (I guess I'm thinking mainly of music people, artists and journalists alike): am i the only one who remembers feeling utterly left behind by that shit even and especially when i was young and it actually hurt to be a complete outsider? Shouldn't one relish the freedom to not know what's going on? I do like "totes" though. Totes is good.

The music that is giving me the most pleasure of late is/are Robyn Hitchcock, Teenage Fanclub (Bandwagonesque, no less), Todd Rundgren, Elastica, Smog, half of the newest Graham Coxon, Sparks, Sly, and, weirdly, that new-ish Fiona Apple record that the label rejected. 2004 was all about Echo & The Bunnymen (a short lived immersion, and a major bummer of a live show, but two new all-time fave LPs: Ocean Rain and Heaven Up Here) and the '70s period Kinks, which I may have started listening to with an ear toward the narrative angle (http://www.thestranger.com/2004-11-18/music5.html), but kept on listening to, beyond the dreams of critical defense. I just love those concept records. Then, in Thailand, I stumbled back down the rabbit hole of Britpop, courtesy of that fantastic book by whoever it was, and remembered that even though my embrace of a few of those bands had as much to do with their stories as their songs--British people really do make the best pop stars, and singles culture really does make for bad records--there were some real gems to be re-mined. So February was for Pulp and Blur and Suede and Elastica and such. I even entertained Oasis for a brief moment, but they are just indefensible, no matter how you slice it. SINGLES! BETTER THAN LPS! FACT! "Galang" > Arular. Et cetera. I have no idea where this is going, or where it came from. I do know, however, that Iron Composer is tonight, and I have to drink 5 shots in 45 minutes on stage while writing a song, then my flight to Austin is at 6AM, then I have a Long Winters show (original recipe: Roderick and Nelsonfunkel-style) at 3:30, and an on-camera interview at 4:30 somewheres else. I'm hoping for a moveable feast, but SXSW has been cruel before. Kind, too. The guaranteed good part is that it always makes coming home much sweeter. Seattle rejoices.

Five Phrases I Would Genuinely Like To See Eliminated From The English Language

(Or, failing that, for anyone who uses them to be instant objects of ridicule. I'm not saying that there need to be thought police, but I mean, I remember a time when the idea of someone calling a city a "market" would be enough to ruin everyone's day, and now all kinds of touring indie rockers say it without a second thought. I'm just saying...)

Count them down:

5) "Put it this way:"/ "...put it that way"
4) "For me (personally)"
3) "To be (completely) honest (with you)"/ "Honestly" / "In all honesty"
2) "At the end of the day"
1) "It is what it is"

In my experience as a citizen of the world, it would totally not be unusual for me to hear every single one of those phrases spoken in a single conversation with any of a dozen people I can think of without even trying. Most of them are also (ab)used by contestants on reality TV shows, which I usually avoid, but certain people I could mention really loved Project Runway, and, you know, sometimes you have to watch something while you wait for the West Wing Monday Marathon to happen. Anyway, I have been accused once or twice of being a judgmentalist, and I really try not to be, because I have only recently stopped hating myself, and I'm no linguist... BUT BUT BUT deployment of the above always sounds to me like a declaration of tin-earedness and hatred of language.

To every last one of my zero readers:

I have been doing a lot of thinking about blogs lately, mainly on account of work stuff (coming soon: a www.thestranger.com that isn't a total embarrassment, even to a net-illiterate such as my damn self), but also because I stumbled onto a veritable trove of journals by a lot of music journalists whose names I know-—and some of whom I really admire, and some of whom I don't--published daily and intricately linked to one another, complete with cross-collateralized commentary (one pauses to think about how Ellroy would have spelled that last clause in American Tabloid or Cold Six Thousand, to say nothing of how the bastards at Pye Records between '64 and '69 might have botched the job) and the kind of voice(s) that simultaneously indicate intimate acquaintance AND a large, entertained readership. I am impressed. And becoming kind of addicted. Never mind that I barely know maybe two of them.

Anyway, I really like the idea of publishing here more regularly and pretending that I am addressing a constituency of peers and strangers who admire and keep up with my musings about this and that. I suppose that's the only purpose of this medium (is it a medium yet, or is it still just a form?), so silly me for needing to "realize" it.

Now watch as I don't post for seven weeks.