Pretty Alright photoblog
updated Mon, 22 Feb 2010
sitting on steps of notre dame basilica with jon bricker, ryan allen, and
mark eaton. mr. bricker is holding a space for one paul wells of the
national post. he informs me that one jane shulman of the concordia Link
is effectively
christie blatchford.
last night i had the second dream in two nights in which i swear. tour dates for the fiesel tour are up, though hardly useful. i’m really looking forward to seeing all my friends who live in these cities. if you live in these cities please come see fiesel. i won’t be performing at every show, but i will be there at least, and fiesel way rocks (as you know from the audio issue of interview with a frankenstein). i will be away from the computer for these days, obviously, but i’ve developed an ingenious way to still post. basically, nick is going to channel me.
i have located
and midi
files and
lyrics for
the transylvanian national anthem (székely himnusz). also i
found a pretty good
of the modern hungarians-in-romania conflict, which reveals that, in romania (where transylvania is), the playing of this anthem carries with it a possible year in jail (or did in 1995). this explains my dream-grammy’s fear. see also this great page on modern transylvania.
i had two big dreams last night. one was a war dream in which flying saucers suddenly appeared (but we weren’t fighting them, they were just there freaking everyone out). it was like plan 9- the saucers were really really simple and flew in a kind of rickety fashion. also, the newspapers said “flying saucers over hollywood”. as we enter into this amourphous 1984ish war, i can’t help but think about being watched by disappointed saucermen in satin costumes. the other dream- i’m in my old room and i find a double 12 inch of the transylvanian national anthem. my grandmother was born and raised in transylvania (in my dream) and because of some socio-political disaster, was afraid tell anyone, or to play the record, or let anyone know she had it. this made me so mad, and as i played the record, i was surprised to learn that i could sing along, and as i sang along, i started to cry a little, and wave my fist in the air. it was an intrumental, and side a (remember, this is a double 12, so 4 sides) was beautiful and bombastic and stirring like rite of spring with all the quiet parts cut out. this is only the first 5 minutes of the song! after side a ended, the coeds (?) who were listening to the record for a class (still in my room) got up to leave and asked me if we would listen to the rest of it next week. i was like, “fuck you this ain’t no class, i’m playing the whole damn thing!”. they were a little confused, a combination of ‘why do you care about this song?’ and ‘why do you want to stay after class (you nerd)? i can’t wait to leave.’.
timbro- i agree with you that skirt-over-pants is a dicey maneuver, but i maintain that it can be done succesfully. even with the polarfleece dreadbag. or maybe i’m just going insane. woob woob woob woob! no, it’s dicey but do-able. or i’m going insane.
b92.net has a great interview with noam chompsky. “The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that.”
i’ve got something else to kick about now. you don’t mind, do you? well, what i want to know is this: why under high heaven can’t an american woman watch a “show” without needing about twenty-five cents’ worth of chewing gum to help her to enjoy it? i dropped in to see oswald williams at the “american” the other night, and, honest, the chewing gum business nearly put me down and out. behind me were two young women whose jaws were working like machines. every time they said “oh!” a wave of that odorous concoction known as “spearmint” was wafted my way. having been accustomed to pure air, i didn’t enjoy myself quite as much as i possibly should have done. and, strange to say, kicker though i have always considered myself, i am not the only one who has a “grouch” over this thing. i saw an article this morning in one of the theatrical papers where the writer had experienced just about the same as myself, and my kick is mild compared to his. but hang it all, when “woman lovely woman” is concerned, we must not be too harsh. i reckon some of you fellows who are reading this would have taken the girls, spearmint and all. they sure were fine lookers. let’s see! where was? oh! i remember.
last night mbp, fl[ora]m, s[e]x[y]m[ike] and myself played mash (which is still fun). and saturday i was involved in that game where you drip wax into a glass of water to see what your life partner’s occupation will be. the wax told me my LP would be from japan (or possibly a conqueror thereof), peugot matt coe’s a racecar driver, mandrew’s a pretty sitter (possibly a yogi), peter’s a circus ringleader. as far as last night’s mash game, those divinations hold less weight, as they didn’t involve candles.
they fly by, the weeks. friday i hung out with my mom and scored for my
new house 18 pounds of chocolate chip cookie dough, which my mom saved
from the st. luke’s trash can. back at said house we ate cookie dough, put
on wigs and took pictures. saturday i hung out at the craft center with
mandrew and made more art. our attempts to barter crafts for cafeteria
food failed when ben schechter gave us a mess of food outright, then that
girl he was sitting with didn’t want the earrings i made anyway. bought
beer (golden anniversary) for mike chud, which was, at first, not so well
appreciated. “any party where golden anniversary isn’t welcome, i am not
welcome” and i split. went to a party on castle street then back to clark
to watch rocky horror picture show. the movie, for many, took a back seat
to dressing up in fishnets and getting way wasted, and i know it’s not
about watching the movie as much it’s about “experiencing” the
“experience” but i still enjoyed the film more (although i would’ve much
rather have been watching the movies mentioned in the
song). also, there was this great dynamic where people were getting
mad at us
for being the loud jerks in the back (where the movie^H^H^H^H^Hexperience
is supposedly all about talking back) and screaming “the wrong
things” like “heeeeey, fuck you lady!” (crass, but given the context,
hilarious). the projector broke and everyone was getting pissy. i was
proud of myself for yelling “here’s your fabled spontaneous rewrite of the
movie!”. but everyone had fun. matt got to make the rarely acceptable
comment “this movie’s wicked gay”. we got some pizza and i found abandoned
face paint; beautiful jenny got a panda nose, terrible mike a blackened
tooth, handsome matt the
seconds baseball makeup, and myself a green lou ferigno hand. sunday i
finally went home. why gone so long? because i was riding my new
stupidmobile with a really small chainring and i didn’t want to make the
return ride. live and learn. made some din din, cooked up some cookies,
then rode back to clark to see “
space” with secretly
jess. it’s funny, all the cheap things that go on in the movie (the
replacement of bela lugosi by a chiropractor, the cardboard tombstones,
the pie pan / fishing wire flying saucers), but i also just really enjoy
it. i like how it only takes place at dawn or midnight. i like the
actors and the
just like the movie ok? and why is it ok in
music to be more passionate than you are skilled, but not in
film? afterwards i went back to polyamourous chud’s, played some
refrigerator magnet pig, goofed off, and was pleased
to note the quickness with which they warmed up to my golden adversary.
the show went well but i got fussy and ended it kind of early. perhaps this is an odd thing to say but i started feeling ineffectual and nonurgent and nonemotive and uncomminicative; like a big joke. or, like everyone thought i was a big joke and i was unable to convince them otherwise. i was talking to nick about it afterwards. the indicator for how i feel about the jazz band, i decided, is the manifesto. that we have a manifesto, that’s a bit of a joke about jazz bands. the individual topics of the manifesto, and for that matter, all the writing in it, is a bit of a joke about manifestos. still i really and truly believe in everything i wrote. incidentally talking to kevin about manifestos after the movie thursday really geared me up to sit down and write, which i did, but it’s still not done. i listened to the tape of the show and it sounds better than last time (which was better than the time before and so on). i accidentally left my saxophone at the coffee house, whoops. poets got up afterwards and poeted, and did not ease my scepticism. in attendance were two (2) dads-of-babes-i-know, the blind guy with the raspy voice from pickle barrel, a guy i recognized as a person who makes me uneasy (regarding whom i could not recall any more information), others, some of my rowdies. even though i got an estimated 12 hours of sleep the night before (including a nap), i went to bed early, eschewing a chopper cruise down to a hedge-diving party at little andrew’s at 11pm.
two work related peeves: nurses that are very obese and have trouble breathing (physician, heal thyself already!), people who have a question and say “question:” followed by a question.
the movie was good, and i was surprised and delighted to see much nick reville camera-time (he’s in background shots of perhaps 2 total minutes of the 70 minute movie). also i saw fellow diarist kevin driscoll who told me of his temporary autonomous band “bears and giraffes”. they took a week to write songs, two weeks to practice, a week to record and a week to tour. awesome. we also talked about manifestos (we’re each writing one). i told him i’d loan him my copy of “T.A.Z.“, but i’ve been reading it online and now i don’t know what i think about it anymore. rainbow bird of peace is slated to play tonight at cool beans on green street worcester at, say, 9 o’clock. damn, we need to start getting some paying gigs.