BY WAY OF INSPIRING JEALOUSY
Just figured I'd show you what great beauty lies just outside my window this morning. I've had a pretty good night writing, my housemate and his gal are soon to awaken and we'll trudge off through this glorious slop to grab some brunch, and um, tonight I finally broke down and downloaded all the Napster stuff. I get the feeling I'm the last person on Earth to actually buy into the whole file sharing thing, but what the hell.

The very first file I downloaded?

Gladys Knight and the Pips - I've Really Got To Use My Imagination.

I own the record, but it's been in storage in Toronto for over a year, and I miss it to hell. And Gladys Knight is the most beautiful female voice I have ever heard, period. Keep your Aretha and your Billie Holiday, and Janis and Dusty (and even Kirsty MacColl - *sigh*) can step back. They're great, sure, I dig them whenever I can. But Gladys and her burgundy done-me-wrong voice reeks of class, and it moves me in ways that mere mortals just don't.

THE EAST VILLAGE PEOPLE
I had no idea until I moved here how touchy the East Villagers were vs. the West Villagers, at least in the songwriting community. I mean, really. People get, like, insulted and stuff. Isn't that weird?

The East Village People see the West (a/k/a Greenwich) Villagers as out-of-touch wackos humping Phil Ochs' ghost and generally being snobbish about any form of music that didn't originate (or at least achieve national prominence) on Bleecker Street in the '60s. Granted, this covers a lot of ground, all things considered, but still.

Places like the Lion's Den, Kenny's Castaways, the Back Fence, the Red Lion and the Baggott Inn are considered musty folk museums dedicated to the past and increasingly out of touch with the hip hot sounds of today. Which is a little bit true.

The westerners, on the other hand, I think, see the eastern folk (the line is drawn at about the Bowery, about where CBGB's is, if you're looking on a map) as self-absorbed chip-shouldered punks who are not only defiling and ignoring all the history that's been created already, but are making fundamental mistakes that will cost them in the long run.

They see holes-in-the-wall like the Raven, the Sidewalk, Brownies, the Pyramid and Manitoba's as cretin-clogged dives with no atmosphere or class. (They too have a point.)

I am generalizing slightly, and it ain't quite Tupac vs. Biggie, but any folkie (or neofolkie or certainly antifolkie or popsmith or acoustic hardcorer or whatever) act who plays, say, both the C-Note and the Bitter End seems to be looked at a little... sideways by both factions.

It's merely at the level of a rivalry (no bloodshed, which is good, oh and territory is merely noted and not enforced or anything silly like that - besides, we songwriters are all too wussy to actually do anything that could actually cause harm), but it turns out this scene isn't so big that this kind of provincialism doesn't happen.

Personally, I think it's cute.

NOW I KNOW YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE
Someone sent me this e-joke, and I'm only posting it because it was the very first joke I ever told that ever got a (genuine, I think, my grandma was never the jolly type) laugh. I was, like, 6 at the time.

One evening, in a busy lounge in the deep South, a reindeer walked in the door, bellied up to the bar and ordered a martini. Without batting an eye, the bartender mixed and poured the drink, set it in front of the reindeer, and accepted the twenty-dollar bill from the reindeer's hoof. As he handed the reindeer some coins in change, he said, "You know, I think you're the first reindeer I've ever seen in here."

The reindeer looked hard at the hoofful of change and said, "Hmmmpf. I'll tell you something, buddy. At nineteen bucks for a freaking martini, you're not likely to get many more."

Well I thought it was cute.

THE DAY I LEFT THE HOUSE
So blinkingly back into the light I step, after what, over a week of --
Hm.
Sorry I'm late - where were we? --
uh... nope.
So, uh, how was everyone's holiday?

Damn, that doesn't work neither. Anyway, something just came over me there for a while.

See, here's the problem. Clayton's been arrested a couple of times, once for drugs and once for falling under a horse at a peace demo, and he doesn't know if his probation's run out yet, turns out his wife was a monomaniacal workaholic, and June? Well, she just finished reading On The Road and is looking for some kicks.

See, the book is back in the foreground. I've been running off little background bits and snippets of dialogue pretty much continuously for the last week, to the point where I was kind of pissed to have to go back and spend some time with my family. I mean sure, they're nice and all, but being unemployed, I had no presents (save my presence) for any of them, and not knowing if I was going to make it (well, I've lived too far away in the past to make my attendance a sure thing), they didn't get me much either. Sweater, bathrobe, gloves, all very welcome in this cold snap here.

Damn it to murgatroyd it's cold in this town. This apartment has more drafts than, than, than Dennis Miller's first published article. (I'm out of practice with the snippy rejoinders. Everything's been so... protracted of late, every chapter topping out at between 1000 and 2500 words, just all on their own, that seems to be the pace, anyway they're all like this.)

I missed not doing being here for a week and a half. I can't guarantee regularity just yet, but I'm sure as hell not done here. Take that news how you like.

So tonight the fever hasn't broke yet. But I tried, really I did. Went out to see Lunchin at the Sidewalk, and Chris Barron and I sat in the back and he Canuck-baited me all night. I got to dis his band back at him a bit, though, so it worked out okay far as I care.

I figured I have to start taking breaks from writing the damned thing at some point, even just to go out for food. But nope, I came back and I started on Clayton's car. Well okay, not his, but where he got it.

I can no longer guarantee the arbitrary benchmark of anything I write actually making sense, not to my friends, not to this weblog, not to anyone. But just like dogs and broken pipes, that problem too can be fixed.

TO ROCK OR NOT TO ROCK - THAT IS THE QUESTION. (NO, REALLY.)
So I spilled my guts out to Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend last night after going to some theater preview (actually, it was for a show my housemate's trying to put on some time in the new year), about maybe not going back to work and starving until I can develop the career thing. (I like to call it the career thing - it makes it sound so... fake, eh?)

"If I were you," he blurted out while I was in mid-kvetch, "I'd be on tour all the damn time. You're afraid, is all," he said. "When you first moved to New York, you hid behind getting a job doing sound, and then you hid behind getting into acting, and then you hid behind starting in with the zine, and none of these things are what you came down here to do."

"But the zine is depended on by the scene, and --"

"And nothing. You do it voluntarily. The scene doesn't owe you, you don't owe them, you've been doing a service to the scene that is not in the list of things you moved here to do. You're getting sidetracked. It's because you're scared of something. I know. I'm scared of something too. You just have to be aware of it. And get over it."

Sometimes I have to listen to myself to figure out what the hell it is I'm actually saying.

(An aside: we were at the Fort during this conversation, and at a certain point in this conversation, Howard Stern walks right past us. Really. And neither of us look up. This was pretty late last night, so if he sounded tired this morning, I can vouch for where he was.)

Tonight, I'm having dinner with someone who went through exactly this about six months ago, and has successfully made a go of it. I'm off now to go fix up some questions.

GREAT. AMERICAN. NOVEL.
Now. Moving on for a minute.

A new Great American Novel is probably due to be written. I know for a fact that there are people (and probably bloggistes) who have the concentration, vision and mental resources to actually put a piece of work together that has the scope of a John Dos Passos or a Don Delillo (or even David Foster Wallace, my opinions all and this is of course just off the top of my head), and hey, who knows, even a Fitzgerald or a Hemingway or a Faulkner or a Burroughs is crawling around out there who can dry out enough to encompass the alpha and the omega of what-all the hell's going on in this decaying dying empire I (and so many of my friends) now call home.

... WON'T YOU TAKE ME TO ... COFFEETOWN
Oh, and this one is killing me. By the tone of that post, you'd think I was the only one willing or able to give a proper shot to writing something that all-encompassing.

I know it's pompous to even address this, but -- Piffle. First of all, that conversation we had was as fun and interesting for me as it seems to have been for her, if not more. I don't have conversations like that everyday, even among my ultra-hipster waycool buds here in Coffeetown, hell I barely talk like that to anyone except sometimes when typing and I get all caught up in the moment (like I did the first time I wrote that previous post down there, which got swallowed up by a little technological problem, again not that I'm angry about it).

To be frank, I see more unused writing talent in much of these here blog thingees than in the last couple of years of reading litterary quarterlies or most of the crap in the commercial glossy rags, even.

This ain't kissing bloggie ass or nothing neither, Paco. 90 percent of everything in the weblog world is unmitigated crap, as well, at least. But the quality, insight and variety of a lot of the logs I've been reading is the primary reason I haven't fallen back into something probably less spiritually fulfilling, like writing reviews for other zines or, you know, taking my chances in the clubs, looking in vain for a decent literate rock and roll band to save me from having to actually listen to the chorus of usual suspects in my own head. It's just nice to share a planet with people who can both think and feel. Often at the same time! You know.

My point is that the pleasure of conversing with Miz Diz last week was not only mutual, but made me feel better about a lot of other things that had nothing to do with weblogs or being part of a new cool clique or some other matter of online yadayada. And may that conversation, and many others, ever continue.

MAD PROPS
So I just got back in the front door from Philadelphia* after having played a couple of lovely nights in a couple of different clubs. Erica Smith did a wonderful job playing her neo-traditional folk stuff making some new friends and finding she had more in common with a lot of the scene rats there than merely a knowledge of the works of Leadbelly, and she better be invited back to play someplace soon.

Last night's show was fabulous. After I went up and did my thing (I wore the red pyjamas on stage for some reason, which was a bad idea as the Pontiac was boiling hot and I was soaked by the end of my set with no change of clothes at all - fortunately, Adam Brodsky and Mary Krause, my doting hosts and professional colleagues, lived about a block away from the club, so I was able to scoot home and change), Stucco Lobster Breadbox went up and were flat-out amazing. They were just five goofy kids from Delaware who did songs based on (I'm going from memory here, I was too busy shivering and schmoozing to actually take many notes) The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game, Cacti, Grimace from McDonald's, and Choad (don't ask - if you don't know what choad is, you don't want to know), with props including a homemade Grimace costume worn by the tallest member (Dennis had to be 6-7), three talk-show-sized posters of Kevin Bacon which got destroyed at the end of his song, a flip chart with funny, stupid pre-drawn pictures for their finale, assorted toy instruments and a bunch of other stuff that was hilarious.

They should totally do a show with their NYC counterparts, Fragile Male Ego.

Then Mike Leo played real well to close out the night, even though he had to play to the backs of the Stucco-studs and their fans. He's apparently moving to Boston, and Adam and Mary were both going to miss him.

Then we got to go to an after-show party (the perks of being on the road, even for a couple of days), and rolled into bed about 7:00 this morning. Which is why I'm only getting back to my home suite home this late now.

(One thing I always get every time I go to Philadelphia is a better appreciation of the whole tradition of folk music. Adam is an incredible writer himself, and his love for all folk's children is palpable in everything he does, from the way he and Mary book his tours and organize his life right down to the phrasing of his songs and even why he listens to the bands he listens to. He's a filthy-mouthed bastard with a genuine heart of gold, and I'm honored to share a corner of the music business with him.)

Anyway, the upshot is that I came home feeling a lot better about the direction I'm currently pointed than before I left. Writing a couple of decent songs on the train ride back doesn't hurt. I recommend writing on trains whenever possible. It's rather civilized, even if some poor schmuck is jabbing his briefcase in your ear and there's a screaming baby systematically beating his head against your arm.

*actually, it's three hours later now - don't get me started on my weblog-uploading problems today - I'm in a good mood, and dammit, I'll stay there if it kills me. Which it might, but my thinking is, if I die, I die. Right? Right?

ENGLISH PATIENCE
As I was putting this show listing together for emailing out to my friends, I couldn't help but think:

Stucco Lobster Breadbox actually sounds like it exists, like they saw an actual breadbox, in the shape of a lobster, made out of stucco, at a garage sale or something and decided that was as good a name for a band as anything else.

On Thursday, I promise to ask them about it and report back.

In other news, I found a copy pal for the zine last night, too (see below). The world is advancing, despite all evidence to the contrary.

So good night, sweet universe. Tomorrow, I do laundry and read Rushdie. If I'm gonna starve to death, I'll at least feel good about myself, dammit.

THEM DARNED REVELATIONS
They just keep on a-coming, don't they?

The last couple of weeks, I haven't been paying much attention to the world around me, instead looking inward to figure out maybe what might be the problem with the way I'm living that I can work for 6 months straight and make quantum leaps in every meaningful section of my life, and then run out of gas and not be able to move for a month, during which time all the things I care about just slide back down the hill and I have to repeat actions and do more work, work I've already done, just to get back to where I've already been.

The epiphany, delivered through a weekend of bonding with the band and discussing what needs to be done with them (and some excellent rehearsing - the new songs we learned are becoming easier to learn, not harder, and enthusiasm is nice and high) followed by a short and cryptic yet unmistakable chat with my housemate which just ended, is simply that I have to know how to ask for help.

You know, this isn't a big deal, really. I mean, if you're actually reading this sentence, then I can pretty much guarantee you've not learned anything in the last two minutes that's gonna matter. I don't think my revelation is even any clearer to me for having typed it.

This isn't like Archimedes naked & joyous & screaming "Eureka!" at discovering the law of displacement, or Alexander Graham Bell accidentally discovering the telephone, or something self-consciously important like that. (Self-conscious, yes. Important? Not yet.)

No, the bigger fish have yet to be fried here. My to do list looks like this right now:


1. Sleep.
2. Get final paycheck. (The Ramen-only diet has worn thin quite fast, as will I if I don't get paid.)
3. Rehearse the band.
4. Get more shows booked.
5. Write more songs.
6. Something else involving the band.
7. Another thing involving the band.


More boring lucidity come the morrow.

(See, I too [Amber, I think I can relate] am trying to develop a sense of purpose to this life, both on this page and off it. I don't really respect or trust anyone who doesn't, either. It's called continuous improvement, and if there's any hope for we humans on this little galactic dirt-patch we call home, it'll have to involve a big ole heap of it.)

HOW WE ALL SHINE ON
I'm not going to Strawberry Fields tonight.

It's not like I don't care about John Lennon (actually, he's kind of my hero), or that I have other plans tonight (turns out I do, but I could break them and no one would freak out or anything), or even that it's the first snowfall today and the ground in Central Park will be cold and stuff.

It's mostly that, well -- he's dead. He won't be pissed if I don't go. One of the main things I took from his life was that anything is possible if you believe and work hard enough. Even world peace. Even a grubby English kid becoming a great rock and roller, in a time when such an animal was unheard of. Even walking away from your masterwork at the top of your game and going on to a whole nother life, which had to have been tiring (although less tiring than keeping a no-longer-relevant facade up, I'd guess).

John did what he had to do. He lived long, and hard, and everything he did, he did with maximum gusto. So people thought he was a freak. Big whoop. They laughed at Elvis, and Joan of Arc, and Galileo, and (yes) Jesus, and probably you too.

So instead of freezing my Canuck ass off in some park with a bunch of weepy point-missers, to mark 20 years after fate finally found John Lennon, instead I'm going to write a rock and roll song. Or try. With all my might.

CLICK HERE TO, UM, CLICK HERE
Hey, cool! Linda Draper, a local singer-songwriter type, has got her own site! (Or at least a place where her site will go when she gets there.)

This got me to thinking. Every single person in this scene who has been playing for even a few months at open mics has their own web presence (that list of music links on the side there are almost all New York people, as opposed to Torontonians.) Why haven't Toronto songwriters embraced the web?

Sure, there's Kevin Quain's excellent site, and Jeremy Robinson's (although at first look the background image text looked like it said Ron Jeremy, tee hee), but ... Max Metrault's is not being updated anymore, and Nik Beeson's focuses more on his 8 billion other (equally cool) projects than on his songs, and, well, that's it. No Sandra Flores, no Jeff Oussoren or Shawn Santalucia or Walk Left Stand Right or Timothy John Robert or whoever.

I feel a little out of touch with these people, and quite frankly I kind of miss them a little bit, and would love to just check in and find out what-all's happening.

So I guess that means my complaint is selfish. So?

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE WASHINGTONS
So I finished the damned zine (Issue 61! How does one make 61 issues of anything?), and thanks to a screwup at the printers this afternoon, I'm going to take a loss on it. It's winding up costing more to print than I'm selling it for. Which brings me to the faint conclusion that maybe something's wrong with the way this is all going. If this thing is going to survive, it's going to need advertising, or someone on the staff is going to have to get a day job where they can copy it on the sly. I could never do it at work: it wasn't so much that I would have been caught, so much as the machine we had was inadequate for anything more than making grinding noises and screaming grey murder at anyone who attempted to sacrifice some painstakingly crafted invoice to its infernal document feeder-cum-memory hole. (Although pulling the thing apart searching for some shard of document that got stuck way up in that place that would be easy to reach if one arm had three elbows and a long skinny ET finger with sticky stuff on the end of it was a great way to kill off the slower afternoons.)

So I've got 40 copies (32 pages, digest size), and all the whining and kvetching about free copies for everyone stops this month. They're just not leaving my grasp until I get some Washingtons coming back the other way. The fact that I spent 50 bucks I no longer have, um, to invest in the project just makes me bitchy this afternoon.

There's probably a mood-affected-by-weather-change issue in there too. And I don't mean all this. I'll mail you a copy if you want one. Just let me know. But you'll have to wait until I sell these and find a songwriting office-drone (there's only about 5 million of them in this scene) to do some dirty work for me.

Still. I'm going to have to find a real printer, or the zine is just going to get smaller. I found out you can read 4-point type, so there may still be hope for my profit margin.

I think of you even when we are apart.
Love, Rupert Freaking Murdoch the 3rd.

REGIS AND MY GRANDMA (GO EASY THERE)
I knew, after a couple of days out on Long Island catching up with the family, that I probably would come back to the city with a rant or two (or six) in me. I didn't realize the first one would be about Christina Aguilera, of all people. But well, there you go.

ONE MORE CONCLUSION THAN THE SUPREME COURT REACHED TODAY
One thing that's helped me get out of my angst this month is that I haven't tried so hard to be empathetic to everyone I meet and know. I was getting bogged down by the sheer power of everyone's desire to do what they wanted to do, and that became immense. One person needed a play produced, another needed someone to sing on their record, someone else needed someone to do a proper paste-up for an ad they were placing in the Village Voice, someone else lost their job and needed someone to talk to, some promotional campaigns needed to be organized (many of them mine), and all of these things -- well, I could do them all, and I tried to, because I knew how much it hurt to not get the help I needed when I needed it, and I swore I'd do whatever I could, whenever I could.

That ethic has largely served me well. I have done a lot of amazing (to me) things. I have made a lot of excellent friends, many of whom return these favors when I ask. But I don't ask very often. Maybe that's part of why I started a weblog, instead of rewriting what I think isn't a very good novel (my summer project, now shelved, although with current events I might revisit it as an excuse for solitude) or forcing together an acoustic album with only a half-dozen good songs or whatever. This page you're reading might be my way of occasionally asking for help. Or learning to.

One thing I made a point of getting back to in my head while I was in England, and since I got back, was to be patient, keep my batteries from getting too drained, and let inspiration and positive energy come on its own time. I don't mean to be all hippy-dippy about it - I don't trust any solution that can't be explained logically, step by step - but it really does kind of work that way. You can bring the problems of the world on your shoulders, and they will crush you like the planet-sized issues they often are.

The facts are often ugly.
Lying, cheating dumbasses win elections.
Crime often pays.
Wars continue.
Cancer and AIDS remain uncured.
Jim Carrey is, unbelievably, the highest-paid performer in the entertainment world.
And I am not.

Many of these problems will still exist tomorrow. But maybe, just maybe, one or more of them might get fixed between now and tomorrow morning. (I hope someone else is working on those last two as hard as I am.)

My point is, people have immense capacity to accomplish things. But that capacity is not limitless. If the problems other people have get to you and cripple you, then you're no good to anyone. All you can do is all you can do. Never forget that.

"I LIKE THE NETS BUT I'D RATHER HAVE SEX, SO I'M GETTING THE HELL OUT OF JERSEY"
So last night I finally ventured out into the new world for the first time since the trip and saw some friends' bands, which it felt like it's been weeks since I've done. It was good to see the Voyces in full effect (they've really worked hard on their set, their harmonies are lovely as always, and while Brian Wayne's pompousness on stage is a bit off-putting, they're still great singalongy fun, and long may they wave), but a real special treat was to see Jim Flynn go on afterward.

Jim's this gawky tall guy who sings these incredible smartassed songs that sound soulful in their goofy stupid way. He opened last night's set with I'm Not Sorry I Didn't Get All GQ'd For Your Party, and spent the rest of the (late) night getting wordier and more bitchy. It was lovely to watch. "Hey there belly button t-shirt baby I can see your belly button, yeah, you're trendy..."

He even let Sylvia Mann come on and finish his set for him. She's a bluegrassish singer who sings real fast, and she does one song, "Trashy Girl," that is a spot on character sketch.

After the show, we all went out to the Cherry Tavern and had a few beers. They tasted like sody pop after the stuff I drank in England, but at least they were cold. It's been a while since I actually went out with people from the scene in a non-performing situation and just shot the proverbial shit.

And then I actually let myself sleep in today. I won't exercise that privilege too often, I hope. I have a lot of stuff to do, a life to get on with. Today, I wrote two songs, both of which are pretty good and rock and rolly, too. It's been a good day, and tonight at the Fort I'll maybe even play one of them. (It's Pablo from Testosterone Kills' birthday tonight, don'tcha know.)

This feels a lot more like what being a songwriter is supposed to feel like. Now all I have to do is read a newspaper or something again. You know, get out and smell the now-leafless trees and stuff.