Domestic Proscenium
Domestic Proscenium
Glens Falls, New York
Handsome Theo
RIP Lt. Theodopolous “Theo” Kojak,
our sweet, handsome Little Man,
aka The Little King,
2006(?) - 2024.
The knee-jerk reaction to my suggestion of picking Buttigieg or Whitmer is obvious: isn’t a black woman at the top of the ticket already asking a lot? Why go with two women, or a black woman and a gay man? Because they’re smart and they’re sharp and they’re good on TV. If you don’t like their message or platform, don’t vote for them. But if you don’t want to vote for a ticket with two women, or a ticket with gay man as VP, just because, then fuck you. Go vote for Trump, because you’re a bigot, and he’s the candidate for you. There are too many racists and sexists in America, but they’re not a majority.
Jon Gruber / Daring Fireball
Corner of Jay Street and Tillary Street, Brooklyn, New York City
King of the Hotdogs, Glens Falls, New York
Glens Falls, New York
Cousins, Brooklyn, New York City
Glens Falls, New York
Brick Wall, Glens Falls, NY
Sort of a sunflower
Brooklyn, New York
Turned on Fediverse-sharing for my Threads account. How could this possibly make anything better? We will see. More likely just another step towards dumping Meta’s social platforms.
Forsaken and discarded
Tom
I can no more account for my own past than I can that of the people I lived it with. I think of the title from John Edgar Wideman, All Stories are True: whether or not they are our stories, our own stories, their veracity is determined not so much by verification as by the telling itself. All stories are true. Looking back for example, to the telling of a given joke, a dinner out, a sound check, or whatever makes sense. If I tell the story of the joke, I become the teller of the joke, regardless of who told it in the first place. An upstanding storyteller credits the original jokester, but even in so doing the joke becomes a story and the story is theirs to tell, and then the story is their story.
I’ve read two things this morning that bring this narrative axiom to mind. First, this story in the New York Times which shares, in some ways, a good deal with my own, or at least enough that I see myself in parts of it, nd I will no doubt write about this elsewhere.
The other is Hanif Adurraqib’s heartbreakingly beautiful There’s Always this Year whose version of events is entirely poetic, not short on details or chronology but very much in a contemporary mode of Pound’s “gists & piths,” concentrations of image and feeling that supersede the requirements of conventional biography or memoir.
The telling in these examples obviates any need to factcheck or amend any part of the stories. They don’t need it. And even if part of the author’s experience is to bear witness to their own past sufferings and loves and crises and aspirations, by the time it resolves into a story they tell, the salient aspect of it all is whether or not it rings true. To extend the metaphor, bells are tuned in their making, and if they are to ring true to their intended pitch, they might require some internal reshaping to achieve it. I’m sure if you’re still reading this you catch my drift.
I face this question all the time in my own writing: how much of what I want to say do I remember correctly? And how much can I get wrong before it’s a different story? I believe that to remember at all is to retune the bell, so to speak, to reshape some portion of the story to suit how I feel now about what happened then, but to do it in a way that the overall shape of the events remains intact, so the bell still looks like a bell.
Our friend Ian Prince turned Kimberley and me on to the phrase “I need to clean my wallet” as an operative metaphor for getting one’s act together, e.g. paying bills, sorting receipts, making lists, updating, etc.
The mundane stuff that can stack up on you, especially if you’re self-employed and maintain interests outside of your livelihood.
Handsome aging Theo
In addition to a vet visit for poor Theo whose aging body just can’t seem to find any traction, we’ll be celebrating our independence today with some wallet- and housecleaning.
Mark
Rosie at Atomic Books
J. Robbins acoustic performance at Atomic Books
Janet at Atomic Books
What counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness. I hold onto the world with every gesture, to [humankind] with all my gratitude and pity. I do not want to choose between the right and wrong sides of the world, and I do not like a choice. The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? In spite of much searching, this is all I know.
Yeah, I play drums hat
Truth in hats.
Is anything as simple as we remember it? No more so than as complicated. And looking back in this case, vis à vis Peter Gabriel, is a way of simplifying things: my adolescence, my development as a musician. I’m not sure this a problem, really, or a diminishment of anything. To successfully tell the whole story of a life with no point of entry or guidepost is to enter a narration of unusual skill and lengthy and committed work, things that either elude me or are simply not where I’m at. Another digression.
Jawbox left for tour in February, 1994. For Your Own Special Sweetheart was released on February 8 that year, so it was right around then. We spent something like 6 weeks in the U.S. with Girls Against Boys, friends from previous bands and progenitors of a certain kind of life-by-night music populated most often by the wit and hustle of a single consciousness, often broke, sometimes without a ride or a home but always in the game.
L-R, White Sands, NM, February, 1994: Eli Janney, Bill Barbot, Mike Harbin (falling forward), Me (getting the finger from Bill), Johnny Temple, J. Robbins, Alexis Fleisig. Photo (probably) by Kim Coletta, but it might have been Scott McCloud or Whitney O’Keeffe.
We returned home briefly, came here to New York to do some press and television stuff before we left for Europe. Although it was our first rodeo, our first intimate experience with the mainstream entertainment business, we enjoyed it.1 We played well and found a larger audience, and those were our goals.
Our European tour is a blur. Again, memory being what it is, I’ve always thought we were there for 60 days but it was 51 days, and I thought we played 51 shows but it was 42 shows.2 I can’t say for certain but my guess is that if you asked each of us who was on that tour3 what we remember about it, we would come up with things that don’t ring a bell for the others. Nevertheless, this is my version of events as it relates to one specific thread: the presence of Peter Gabriel in my life. And so, or rather, but first:
Vague memories from Europe:
And yet I still haven’t gotten to the Peter Gabriel part. Here it is: the tour was arduous and difficult, though no more so than such things were known to have been among our cohort. But that made it all seasier to swallow, not easier to do. As it happened, though, we had few equipmwnt failures, only one prohibitive van breakdown, and got along well enough with each other. But we were pretty beat by the time we got to Amsterdam. It was the second-to-last show of the tour and we were all kind of sleepwalking by then, almost done but not quite, almost on our way home but not quite. In some confusion or other, J.’s backpack was either stolen or emptied by thieves. It was disheartening and inconvenient at a moment when bandwidth was in short supply. We weren’t chatting much.
In a hallway near our dressing room the was a piano, presumably rolled offstage to make room for our show. We’d all sort of taken turns plinking away at one thing or another. But then J. eased into the chords from “Here Comes the Flood,” a song that I had never heard anyone except Peter Gabriel play. I had never been in close proximity to that progression, and combined with the exhaustion and overelation of the day was very nearly moved to tears. I don’t rememember if J. played it all the way through. I’m sure one of us sang along, if only briefly. I’m also sure I blabbed about how we should cover the song, an impulsive reaction to its beauty and my desire to possess it and let it speak for me as it always had, an inner attenuation of doubt and racket and need expressed outwardly.
Not without some trepidation, though. I avoided press altogether for fear of botching it; and J., Kim, and Bill did their best in spite of nerves racked by adrenaline and exhaustion. Watch J. and Kim’s interview segments on 120 Minutes for a look at fried fish out of water. And yet, we were having a wonderful time!↩︎
Which is what I mean about memory. So much storytelling over 30 years can stretch and contract things more than one might think. I don’t think my misrememberance changes anything but it’s nice to have looked it up. For what it’s worth, I also saw that our last show on the U.S. tour was on March 24 and our first show in Europe was on April 1. For perspective, on April 30 we played a youth center in Poznan, Poland (it’s undergone some serious renovation in the last 30 years); on July 30 we played The Gorge in George, WA.↩︎
In addition to the band, there was Mike Harbin running sound and otherwise helping out, and Christy Colcord, an experienced tour driver who knew the U.K. and Continental ropes well. Indispensable.↩︎
Which kind of don’t exist anymore, or don’t have to for many of us.↩︎
Adam Pfahler and me, Bottom of the Hill, SF, CA, 1996
One World Trade Center as seen from TriBeCa, New York City
Reading:
Cory Doctorow, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®: the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
Ongoing:
Hanif Aburraqib, There’s Always This Year
Robert A. Caro, The Powerbroker (Follow along on 99 Percent Invisible)
Listening:
Beings, There Is a Garden
Taylor Duepree, Sti.ll
Tom Skinner, Voices of Bishara Live at “mu”
Laurie Spiegel, The Expanding Universe
Watching:
Dev Patel, Monkey Man