( 12:09 PM )
Wednesday, June 30. Afternoonish. Music Currently Playing: Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians
Recurring Dream again last night:
I am in the old Skylark with it's brown vinyl seats and it's so hot my skin is bonding with the vehicle through my t-shirt. I am at one with the 1972 Buick. There is no AC, so the windows are down and hot air is blasting in. I am using a discarded bag from some unrecognizable fast food restaurant to grip the steering wheel. There is no stereo (there never was) so I am singing. I don't remember what I am singing. The mirage on the horizon goes all chrome on me the way that it always happens in the summer, I can see the edge of the world being incinerated, boiled away in the distance and it makes it looks as if the road I am driving on goes straight into the sky. I remember that in the backseat are loose pages and they sort of violently crash around in the wind. When I look at them in the rearview mirror I can see large words in black magic marker written all over them, but they are in a language I don't recognize. Something calligraphic almost, but sacred like Hebrew, and there are these drawings of spirals. For some reason these pages make me feel extreme anxiety. I want to know what they say, I know they are somehow important in that general way that always happens in dreams, but they are slapping around in the wind so I can't really examine them. I know I should stop the car and reach back there and collect all of them but I can't. The need to keep driving is even stronger than the need to decipher the pages. I am looking up in the mirror at the pages when I hit the rabbit. It's huge, the size of a horse. I look down from the review mirror in time to see it leap out in front of the car and then just panic, cringing, and I can hear it screaming a rabbit scream as I barrel into it. I can see it's bulging black eye right before impact. It's so black that it seems to soak up all light, and there is something about it that reminds me of the writing in the backseat. I know that the rabbit's eye and the writing are somehow connected, but I don't know how that could be. They just are. Then I slam into it. And the car buckles and then spins in circles. My forehead hits the steering wheel hard and it hurts, but it doesn't. It's like I am separated from the pain, or outside of myself somehow and so disconnected from it. The world goes crooked, everything is this nauseating, violent merry go round and then everything stops. I am shaking. There is blood in my eyes. It's warm and it sort of burns and makes everything a red blur. I involuntarily vomit on myself, all down the front of my shirt. I sit there for a very long time, as if I am confused, it just doesn't occur to me to do anything but sit there. I know somehow that the pages that were flying around in he backseat have disappeared, and I know now that is why I didn't stop, because if I did, they would go away. It's weird the way the logic of dreams works itself out this way. Anyhow, after this I wipe the blood out of my eyes and the first thing I see is the shattered windshield cobwebbed outward. I open the door of the Skylark and fall out on my side into the gravel. I don't remember wearing a seatbelt at all and I didn't unfasten one before I fell out of the car, but it occurs to me that there is no way I would have survived a head-long collision, even in a big old car like this, without having one on. I am laying on my side and the ground is scalding hot, and again it hurts but I am strangely detached from it. I am squinting in the white desert light. I can hear a hiss from the front of the car and I imagine water is steaming out of the radiator. From where I am lying I can see the rabbit in the middle of the road, only it's small now. It's still alive and it's panting. It looks at me again with that big dark eye and and it starts convulsing and after a while it stops. I know somehow that it dies. After a long time I finally manage to stand up. I take off my t-shirt which stinks like throw-up. I walk over to the rabbit and lean down and carefully pick it up in the shirt. I bring it close to my face so I can see into it's little black eyes and about then I usually wake up.
So I have no idea what it means, but I have had it often enough that I felt I should write it down.
-M.S.
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( 8:00 AM )
Tuesday, June 29, Morning. Music Currently Playing: Mike Doughty, Rockity Roll.
Wanted to say a few words about the Mike Doughty Band show Sunday night, but nothing formal enough for an official review, especially since most people who are not big gigantic fans of Soul Coughing (which I am) won't really even know who Mike Doughty is.
It was a great show. Mike has this drummer named Shazad who is literally about six and a half feet tall, but dangerously thin. I think he was south asian or black, but it was hard to tell. He had skin like dark curry. The thing about Shazad: During those songs when he was not needed on drums he sat at his kit reading a novel.
"What are you reading?" Someone called out from the audience. Shazad looked up.
"Netochka Nezvanova, one of Dostoevsky's first novels."
And what killed me about this was not that it was Dostoevsky, or that he was doing this, READING, while he sat on stage in the middle of a concert, but his tone and expression - he said this as if it was not only the most natural thing for him to be reading, but also as if it was the most natural use of time, up there on stage, in the middle of a concert. Who knew old Fyodor could be so gripping? (Well I did, but no one ever listens to me.)
Anyhow, while he read, he pulled is long, thin legs to his chest and mouthed all the lyrics Mike was singing in front of him, which made the scene all the more surreal. Mike's response to the Dostoevsky thing was to note to us that HE would never read that sort of thing.
"These days about the deepest I can go is Entertainment Weekly," he said. "No, that's not true, I also read Vibe."
The music was brilliant. Aside from the drums, and Mike playing his sort of default strumming on an undistorted Fender electric guitar, they had a guy on an old 1970's electric piano that Mike named "The Dove Man". The Dove Man added this chill, jazzy element to most of the songs, but he kept making fun of Mike by playing either Schubert, or that intro piano line to that song by Vanessa Carlton.
Show opened with Great Grey Ghost (with actual lyrics for the bridge this time), and most of the show was extremely laid back. Several of the best Soul Coughing songs were played including True Dreams of Wichita, and Rolling, Super Bon Bon (which mike played buy himself with guitar, sans piano and drum accompaniment) and ending the entire show with Janine. I was disappointed not to hear So Far I have Not Found the Science (which remains my favorite song by him) or 27 Jennifers (a track from Rockity Roll that I had previously downloaded out of curiosity.)
I should note about the venue: Solar Culture is essentially an art gallery in an old warehouse in downtown Tucson. It was built in 1908 for storage and sales of oranges and other fruit. Now it's walls are covered in all the weird folk art from local artists (some of which is brilliant and some of which it utterly uninteresting). The owner build a big stage setup in the back to host shows. Before each show, apparently, they cook a home meal for whichever band has arrived. Recent bands to play the stage include Yo La Tengo (a show I was disappointed to have missed, being rated an elitist music snob per the quiz elsewhere on this site.)
Anyhow, Solar Culture backs right up to the train tracks. They left the large storage door to the back of the building open to the tracks during the show because it was so damn hot. So during the songs, the train would blast by, expectorating it's whistle, and chugging along. This was not an interruption but a sort of blessing, it added some sort of uncanny flavor to the whole experience. And the band knew it, every time the train blasted they would grin and nod, because it was as if, for that evening, the city itself, or at least the train, was participating in their show.
I also noticed how unaffected Mike was. He just appeared totally relaxed and laid back. He paused midway through the show and told this funny story about riding the Mr. T float at the Bonnaroo music festival with members of Galaxy. I won't repeat it here because I can't really do it justice. I was also amused by the cover the band did of The Gambler. Yes, Kenny Roger's the Gambler. Mike forgot the lyrics to one of the verses so he just sort of burbled and hummed.
So anyhow, Mike was selling copies of "Rockity Roll" after the show to, as he said, "help fill the gas tank on the van for their trip to Dallas." And by selling I mean, he sat on the edge of the stage with a duffel bag and a grin and shook everyone's hands and signed each copy he sold. Which struck me as the least pretentious I have ever seen a musician act. He didn't even seem embarassed or sheepish about it which is how musicians often act if they ar confronted with a line of people who can't wait to tell them how happy they have been made. His attitude was simply, this is my music, I am selling it for gas money. I hope you like it.
So I have a signed copy of the album and it makes me feel like a total fanboy. Which, ahem, I am.
M.S.
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