It’s been an interesting couple of days – full of highs and lows. There still hasn’t really been a night where we performed as well as at the Custom House – and purely gig-wise, the week’s been pretty rough. Westside Arts was sparsely populated, and declined further when the people that were there to see the first two extremely folky ladies, singing songs of winter and lazy days in the sun, realized that Rob Spectre and ilyAIMY weren’t more of the same. Saturday night at Cafe Zog was very relaxed, and I experimented with wiring our sound equipment a little differently, but all in all, I think people were still a little wary of us. Sunday night at AS220 was really nice… but again kind of sparse. I’d been really worried about the fact that we were being shoved in an upstairs gallery for the night (due to a big band starting on the downstairs stage). For better or for worse, through some typically beaurocratic error in communications, that room was being painted by the gallery manager, so we ended up downstairs anywho. They’ve rebuilt the space, and it’s really nice – we put out tables (Ryan Fitzsimmons lifting and moving and directing – “Think COFFEEHOUSE!!!”) and chairs and made it into a pretty decent little acoustic space. We made a lot of friends, sold some CDs – Heather’s jewlery sales have really been rocketing, and I landed a web design job – just so’s I don’t feel useless.
The nerve-wracking thing about the Songwriters in the Round AS220 thing was the fact that we were supposed to write a new song for the night. Our topic was “confined spaces”… now, anyone who knows me knows that a) I’ve been so anally clogged with fucking writers block that if I could take mental ex-lax I would, and b) that when I do write, I just sort of spew… there are many analogies (read – tangents) that I could now use to explicate my creative process, but it really wouldn’t raise my status in the eyes of anyone… it would just be bad. It would degenerate into me explaining how we could use a plunger on my skull.
So we won’t do that.
“Confined Spaces”. Now, as ‘creative’ as I may be, I’m often a hideously literal thinker. Its one of the reasons I had a lot of trouble in art school… when it came down to it, I got frustrated with other students who seemed to be doing projects that had absolutely nothing to do with the assignment – I got frustrated that classes were often more an excercise in doing what you damn well pleased and then bullshitting your way back to the class confines than an excercise in problem solving. I get frustrated with people who get away with breaking the rules, in a way (I tried driving down a one-way street the wrong way the other day… my effort at rebellion was quickly reversed by an obstinately law-abiding Ford truck).
So, my “Confined Spaces” song was long in coming. Heather is sooo good at creating these concepts, and working around them, expanding on them… My song had “space” in the first line of almost ever iteration, and that was a major block to me, as I didn’t think Heather would appreciate such a straight-forward approach. What with the stuff SHE’S been churning out recently (the Headless Horseman song is exquisite) I’ve been kind of intimidated. That stalled me out a number of times over the past couple of weeks… but frankly, someone mentions “confined spaces” and I think of being in the car. It’s sort of understandable what with our current Life style.
So, I wrote about being in the car in the rain. And I wrote about being in the car in the fog. I wrote about being in the car with someone I Love. I wrote about being in the car with someone I hate. I wrote about driving to gigs and I wrote about driving home and I wrote about asphalt. And nothing hooked. Finally, logically, I got around to driving and compressing the car and Schwarzchilde radii and exploding. In short, I wrote about car crashes.
I went to bed Saturday night with the song half-finished.
Context: Providence, Rhode Island is home to a lot of friends from college. There was a strange cross-pollination between MICA and RISD, and a lot of my college friends had collected up in New England. Will Schaff, Sonny Roelle, Mary, Lucky – a good number of people. Providence itself is this incredible arts town. Everything is aesthetic. Even the radiator crack gnomes bang their rhythms in an artsy way. I swear. It’s shocking that the music scene isn’t better. But maybe it’s just the rain… it’s hard to tell.
So, we’ve been staying with Rob all this time, and it’s been frustrating that he and Rochelle have had to work all week. I mean, it’s the bane of the Real World – and it’s the bane of those of us who only touch its edges. So we’ve spent our days wandering RISD, Brown University, Wayland Square, Wickendon Street, Thayer Avenue… all the artsy districts. In the evenings there are occassional crossings of paths with Rob and Rochelle, but Rob works a LOT and has a band and Rochelle is being experimented on for money and that takes weird hours AND she works the morning shift at Starbucks AND she’s got an art show up. I was looking forward to the weekend as a chance to spend time with them as well… but so many people, so little time.
Cat and Jason also came up from Baltimore to see us… the weekend was just packed full of people that I Love…Jason and Cat arrived at Westside Arts just in time to howl in for Deep in the AM. It was awesome. Scared the shit out of me too…Got the visit in with Will Schaff. Got some Rob time in with a lengthy late-night conversation that made us both miss college. A political conversation that was more activism than the standard bitch-fest. We talked till four in the morning. I knew I was meeting with Mary for breakfast in a couple of hours, I knew I had a song to write, but I just wanted to talk to this guy who seems one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met….
We talked about the state of the world… but more importantly, we talked about what to do about it. I don’t know that we’ll change the world. We’re thinking about it, and in my arrogance, and in Rob’s intelligence, I saw some hope.
The visit to Will’s was almost… It’s hard to describe – almost frightening in it’s intensity. Eminem is a great rapper. Whatever else can be said about him – misogynist, homophobe, shock artist – he’s an amazing artist when it comes to the spoken word. He says all those things with intense clarity, and with a spine-tingling honesty that I have to respect. There are not many musicians out there who can get their emotions to pour through their CD… the medium filters the soul out. Eminem makes me feel a lot of anger, a lot of desperation…. he makes me feel a LOT.
Visiting with Will, being surrounded with his work and his animals, the evidence of is presence in every skull, bone fragment, aging copy of Tintin… I could feel him screaming through the walls, plus or minus the very casual conversation. He’s working on new books – frightening things full of mangled bodies and screaming skeletons and dog-headed dieties… he’s working in cut paper with unimaginable detail. Beautiful beautiful things. He always leaves me inspired.
So, Sunday morning we saw Cat and Jason off – back to Baltimore. We went to brunch with Mary and had amazing varieties of eggs Benedict. We came back home and wrote a song. There is sometimes the feeling that my songs predict the future (or cause it?) and I almost regret having written it.
So, we’re in a tunnel on 93, entering Boston from beneath. We’re sneaking through its underground, infiltrating from the underside. Traffic is making itself known, and the drivers of New England all have places to be NOW.
