My friend Ashley recently gave me a video she recorded in April 2007 when I played a short acoustic show in the parking lot of Chain Reaction in Anaheim for a handful of people that missed our set. I put a couple songs online.
While running errands and getting settled yesterday, I finally remembered to buy a cord to connect my video camera with my computer so I can post some videos from the studio (fingers crossed that I have the camera running when anything interesting is happening).
When I got home, I started digging through a couple tapes of old tour footage. There is a lot of moving highway, fields and trains and bridges and buildings drifting by through dirty windows, but I managed to find a few gems. I figure I'll post those over the next few days.
Here is comedian/rapper MC Chris sharing his feelings on STN:
(from our tour with him, and Piebald, March 2007)
I woke up in the city this morning and walked out through the streets, all still trashed from the night before, from all the people blown in by the heat wave, flooding the sidewalks, yelling and laughing and stumbling, still in their beds as I woke, dangling on the last few threads of sleep before the alarm came slashing through....
I have to write one more song for this record. I have declared several times that I am finished writing it, but the problem with taking a year make an album (for so many reasons I had not expected), is that you change so much in the course of a year. Everything from my taste to my outlook on life has changed a bit each day, and I want to say it all! And right now I know that I have one more song to write, and that is a happy song.
I found myself at Town Hall one night last week seeing a few authors read - in fact, nearly every day I managed to see a reading or discussion thanks to the PEN World Voices Festival - but my favorite moment had to have been that night, when Ian McEwan read what he called a piece of "pre-fiction," about living in the Arctic as part of the Cape Farewell project.
Taking advantage of the free wi-fi at the Brooklyn Public Library while I'm waiting for an event to start, I figure I should do a blog post.
Sorry for the lack of posts. The things I've been thinking through in the last few weeks have been a little too personal, I guess, a little too, "what does it all mean?," even for me (I know!), to post, or if they are band related, they would ruin a surprise I have dreamed up for later this year, or next year, or 2010 if all goes well.
I thought about this today while driving.
Life is sort of like looking for parking. You circle around and around again until you can find a spot for yourself. Sometimes you get a great spot, sometimes you aren't exactly where you would have liked to be. Sometimes you have a few choices and you have to weigh the options. Sometimes you have to move at a certain time and sometimes you have to pay, but it is never permanent and a bad parking space can only haunt you for so long.
Wherever you park, you are running a risk, and if you're in a bad neighborhood you know that the likelihood of putting yourself in a bad place is higher, maybe your car will get broken into, but maybe that is where you need or have to be. Other times seemingly safe spots go bad. My friend recently had his stereo jacked from his car while it sat overnight in the parking garage in his building. You never know when you're headed for a breakdown, when life is going to ask more from you than you'd like to give. You have to learn from experience and put yourself in places that seem good for you.
Sometimes you worry about your parking space, and other times you forget where you parked. In the end the worry is useless. If you got a ticket, its already sitting there on the windshield.
And sometimes you park somewhere you've parked many times before. Sometimes you park somewhere you never expected to be again. Sometimes there is a great purpose, and other times you are just pulling over to stretch your legs. Sometimes there is a great distance between spaces and sometimes you're just pulling around the bend.
I've parked so many places in my life, for so many reasons, and in the end, I always end up starting the engine again and driving off to the next spot.
Some friends of STN, Brilliant Red Lights, just unveiled their new website. It features something like 60 recordings you can download for free. That is everything the band has ever recorded, including demos, promos, their last full length, and a brand new EP mixed by Matt Radosevich (who produced, engineered, mixed, and played most of the instruments I couldn't play- which is most of the instruments - on Charmingly Awkward).
I'm reading The Sun Also Rises. I've read it before, in high school, and I hated it. I tried it again a couple years ago and I lost interest pretty quick. This time around I am loving it.
Somehow I quoted this verse in two separate conversations today (er... yesterday):
It has been a while since I've posted. Sorry about that. I just needed a break from everything. I'm back in the Bay Area with the month of April off and I'm decompressing. Things have been intense for me for a little while and this last week has just been a big sigh of relief.
...were kind enough to drop by and record some background vocals on their way home after the final show of their tour. They looked great and were in high spirits for just having spent a month on the road.
Nearly everyone I know in Los Angeles is at SXSW this week. It's pretty strange to be in a city that is essentially a second home, where I've always taken for granted the multitude of friends and acquaintances and things to do and places to go, and to suddenly find myself a loner. I guess it has been a blessing in disguise. though. I've had no distractions, and have been able to focus more than ever on pre-production, which is going really well. The songs are starting to really pop. I've also devoured a novel and a half in the last four days at sunny tables outside various coffee shops. That's always a good feeling.
Last night, around ten or eleven, I got an itch to go out. I texted a friend and asked for a recommendation, something in the midst of the splashing lights and rattling conversation of Hollywood that I could do by myself on a Friday night. Something that wouldn't be lonely. She suggested I go and read at a dark coffee shop a little ways out from the belly of the beast, and I took her up on the suggestion. After parking my car though, and gaping upwards at Scientology's Celebrity Center, after walking past a block full of carousers pouring out in to the street from various restaurants and bars, after walking in and finding the place calm and empty save for a scattering, I turned around in the doorway and marched back to my car, throwing my book on the passenger seat and driving back to the apartment I'm staying at.
Going to the bar alone always seems like a dreary prospect. I thought about it, picturing myself perched on a stool leaning quietly over the bar, all spattered in liquor, stabbing my drink with a straw, and it seemed pretty damn depressing. But sitting there in the empty apartment, alone in the sprawling city, I thought to myself, what's the harm in seeing what happens. I was in the mood for a drink, and felt like having a conversation or two, about anything, with anyone. I said, "fuck it," and walked a few blocks to the nearest and least intimidating place, and stood in line to get in.
Two hours later, as I stumbled home after last call, I laughed and laughed to myself. I hadn't realized how perceptive people are to another's solitude, and in an alcohol soaked room, one of the few places people feel fine approaching strangers, I got effortlessly invited to join two separate groups of people, the first of which brought me in before the bouncer had even checked my ID. When they asked if I was there alone, I didn't have to explain much at all before I had been introduced around, bought shots, made to feel more welcome than I was comfortable being. Certainly I can't remember much of consequence that was discussed, but it was really the mere act of talking of clinking glasses that I was looking for. When I felt I had overstayed my welcome with the first group, I wandered off to write a drunken text message, only to be pulled immediately in with another gathering.
People surprise me sometimes.
I'm back in LA. Driving down last night, I asked Ashley where we should meet. I'm staying at her place while she is off at SXSW this week. She asked me to meet her over in Santa Monica, at the Universal building, where she was still busy at work though it was nearing 8pm.
Its been a while since I've been on that side of town, especially arriving from up north. I tend to take the 101 off of the 405 and wind up in Hollywood where the Capitol Records building rises up and evokes all sorts of emotions, but this time I kept down the 405 and passed beneath The Getty Museum, shining up on the hill across the freeway from Bel Air.
A stream of memories came to me as I sped down that stretch. First it was a clip from sometime in my earlier childhood. I was stuffed deep in my parent's station wagon with my brother and bags and bags of clothes and toys and gifts, and we were headed down to my Grandparent's house for Thanksgiving. There was an accident there under The Getty, and traffic was stopped for miles. In the dark I remember vividly the splash of light from the headlights of the wrecked car in the third lane, the metal all bent back, and the glass all shattered across the pavement as we drove around it.
Then I thought about visiting the Museum with my grandparents a few years later. They are both now deceased and buried on the other side of Hollywood. It was a big deal to the family to see it, and to see it together. I cant remember much of the art. I want to say that I saw a few Van Goghs but I don't know. I just remember talking with my father as we walked along the concrete courtyards between the buildings. I remember a feeling of importance to the night.
I tried to visit another time, during that quick moment that I attended UCLA. My girlfriend was an art student and we planned to make a day of it, only to get in my car and up to the parking lot, to find it closed. We ended up driving around aimlessly through Bel Air and Beverly Hills looking at the huge houses and shiny cars, and I remember what she was wearing on that day and that she was more beautiful than on any other.
I've passed it a few times since, but it's been a long time. Even when I stopped going to school over there I would stay with friends in that area while we recorded Charmingly Awkward, and I remember the frustration, the nights where I just couldn't get to sleep on the couch, where I kept tossing around with ideas and concerns and excitement.
And right now it's just like that, only on a different side of town, on a different couch, and with a different set of songs and their own set of concerns. It still feels like life or death. It's funny how everything can change and it will all still feel the same.
