Sleep
Sleep
Vacuuming
Sleep
Sleep
It's 1:30 what are you doing in bed?
I have nothing to get up for
Get up
Up
Rwanda, coffee
Green tea
Internet
More coffee
Toaster
Fridge
Internet
Phone
I want to come help.
Well come over.
I'm gonna tell you some stuff to do
Gear
Drums
Drums
Drums
Drums
Guitar
Guitar
Guitar
Guitar
Guitar
Guitar
Guitar
Just write down what you want from the menu.
Keys, car
Road
Lights
Restaurant
Full
Eat
Full
Keys, car
Road
Home
Internet
Internet
Waiting
It was just before Christmas, and the entire family had gathered at their annual Christmas dinner - uncles, aunts, and cousins coming from all over the country to share their adventures over the past year and the Christmas spirit. As for K., she hadn't seen her parents for the better part of the year, losing touch, and indeed, interest as she took her first tender footsteps into the world of independence and the American Dream. The thing about the American Dream is, it is a jealous dream. It must be your only dream, your all-consuming thought, or else it will never share its fruits with you. It requires a supportive family, but it requires a patient family, one who is not expecting any recognition or return for their love and indulgence. Luckily, K. had just such a group of people waiting for her every time she chose to return home, as she did around the holidays.
K., this time, had introduced her parents to Rodney, who was now sitting beside her at the table, a new and unexpected guest to add to the usual assemblage. Fortunately, the proceedings of the traditional scene at this family's house were stable and robust after so many years to the point where not even the inclusion of the Third Reich into the home could in any way effect the agenda, or even the atmosphere of the gathering. Just after the whole family, 24 people in all, with K. sitting just to the right of Father and to the left of Rodney, sat down to enjoy the food and the providence of another successful year, K. stood up and cleared her throat.
"I have an announcement to make, about Rodney and me," she said confidently. Mother smiled in reflection upon what a strong-willed and assertive youngster she had managed to raise. "Rodney and I love each other very much, and we were married in September, in St. Louis."
The room quickly fell silent, and an air of dejection settled in. Mother's smile inverted into a frown, and she began to aimlessly twist at her escarole with her fork. There was a slight commotion at the far end of the table as Aunt Josephine swooned and collapsed into the arms of her loving husband. K. had already sat down again by this point, but when she noticed the change in mood brought on by her announcement, she turned her head slightly towards Rodney with a look of bewilderment.
I can't do it. I can't list my top six albums so at least I'm going to be honest about it. Sometimes, I just hate writing about music. Sometimes I think I'm just making a list to be cool. Here it is, for no reason at all:
5. Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton - Knives Don't Have Your Back
4. The Craters - Thriller
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium
2. TV On The Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain
1. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House.
I don't really want to write about it. I realize that the Red Hot Chili Peppers may not be the coolest band and that Stadium Arcadium wasn't everyone's favorite but it really did it for me so it goes up here. No indie cred. TV On The Radio was amazing, somehow disappointing, and yet still worthy of a spot on the list. Emily Haines was pretty good. I don't know. I sampled a lot of current new music this year but I guess I didn't love as much of it as I thought. The Grizzly Bear album was the only really KILLER album through and through that I've heard. It's been a recent thing to, I saw them in September with Spencer opening for none other than TV on the Radio and they've sorta outshone TVOTR since then, in my world.
I guess I just did it. But I didn't enjoy it.
The R. Bros. Official Catalogue of Wares & Household Goods.
Volume 1. Read and Revised, Mar. The First.
Item No. 20471: Crafts And Arts, Visual Support & Economic Decline.
"New and Exciting!" says the Local Tribune.
Item No. 20472: Glass Blowers Union w/ Benefits. Benefits.
Item No. 20472-b: Drawers (& Chest). Good for All Sortes of Storage.
"Storage like No Other!" says the Local Tribune.
Item No. 20473: CURE ALL! For Depression &/or Melanoma, w/ Benefits.
Be sure to Have a Pleasant day, Loyal Customer.
The alarm-clock clanging, I stepped out of bed and pounded the button, taking in the spectacle as my closed fist threatened to send gears and cogs flying everywhere under the excessive force. I stretched my arms high for a moment, and eyed the plastic bin sitting in my closet that carried my toothbrush, among other bathroom effects. It was rank with mold and mildew, as it was not a basket proper, but a plastic bin, without any holes to allow water to flow out. This is a design that, as you know, is prone to fill up with water every time it is brought into the shower, and that water of course festers as it is wont to do when it is ignored and allowed to sit for spans of time stretching into minutes, as in my case. I didn’t have much time, for my cloud appreciation class was to start in just under 45 milliseconds, and I had already been warned about my intemperate lateness this semester. With this in mind I quickly slipped a towel around my waist and stepped out into the hallway.
My sandaled foot found its place on the metal grating just outside my door. My room in the dormitory is rather modestly sized and equipped with the standard furnishings you’d expect for an undergraduate student. That’s why I always experience a wave of vertigo when I step out into the hallway, as I have for the past several years. Although it is called a hallway, it is actually a metal-grate footbridge traversing a cavernous room. There is only one flimsy hand-rail, which can be disconcerting because at this time every morning (when the students are getting ready for classes), the bridge is suspended about .83 kilometers in the air joining all of the rooms on the 240th floor, which is the students’ living quarters.
Looking down, you can see doors lining the metallic walls on every floor, and in the center of the room, the green-tinted fog gradually becomes so dense that you can’t really see more than 100 or so stories down. In some places elaborate machinery protrudes through the mist with an unsettling boldness, and even though it is actually about 300 meters away, the general consensus of the students is that it blankets the entire dormitory with a perpetual air of intrusion.
My dormitory was about halfway down the hall to the bathroom, so I lumbered over with as much resolve as I could muster having just woken up, sandals noisily clanging on the metal with each belaboured step. I passed several people on the way there, also going about their daily routines as enthusiastically as possible, although the faceless footbridge traffic seemed unusually light for a weekday morning. No matter; partially because of the clear path I made it to the bathroom door in just about 8 milliseconds, which I figured gave me enough time maybe to even shave before class for a change.
The sticky moist atmosphere allowed the bathroom to serve as the primary breeding ground for a certain species of small black gnat with huge circular wings that bore no slight semblance to Mickey Mouse. I felt a sudden urge to skip out on class and curl up with some graham crackers and old Steamboat Willie cartoons. “Living, breathing Disney advertisements”, I thought to myself, smirking inwardly at the aptness of my metaphor, and made a mental note to include that description when I wrote about the strange creatures in my blog that night. Then the thought occurred to me that I had never actually considered whether, or if so, by what facilities, insects actually breathe.
Thomas sat alone, gripping a tall glass of orange juice with vodka between his two hands. He stared down at an angle towards the floor behind the bar, and his lips moved, mouthing a certain phrase that I couldn't hear. I was sitting four seats away from Thomas, and I held my head up with my right hand, my elbow resting on the bar, staring directly at his face. There was one woman sitting in one of the seats between me and Thomas, who occasionally glanced nervously in my direction, assuming possibly that I was staring at her.
But forget about that for a moment; there was something else that, as I thought to myself, I should mention before I got into the details. Not long before Thomas began his muttering, he and I had been talking amicably. The woman, whom I just mentioned, was rehearsing lines for a play, sitting at the bar with a script in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, making wild gestures that sent small spouts of liquid shooting from the mouth of the bottle. She was intoxicated, I could tell, and I ignored her while Thomas and I raised our voices over the issue of filmmakers.
'Kurosawa,' I had said, before slamming my heel with swift force onto the tops of his toes. Thomas had shrieked, of course, before shouting 'you fucker! You only watch that bullshit because you're fucking a Japanese guy' to which I had replied 'well fuck you, and fuck Fellini too,' before stomping on his foot for a second time and downing a glass of rocks with Jack Daniels and seltzer.
The woman in question, the one who was busying herself with the silver stage, had shambled in not fifteeen minutes before Thomas had hurt his feet. At the time, of course, I was sitting right next to my friend and doing my best to recite the words to a famous poem about a black bough. He was competing with me in volume, his melodic voice tracing out the libretto to Pierrot Lunaire, even though his German was clearly not up to snuff. The woman, in her own way, had taken a series of footsteps, none of which looked like they logically followed the step that had come before, on her way to the seat directly adjacent to mine. She had then perched there for a few moments, getting her bearings, before reaching into her lavish and exaggeratedly oversized red wool coat and presenting a copy of the script to something or other by Arthur Miller. "It's for a class," she had said, before we had even had the chance to ask, or in fact before we had even stopped our shouting to gaze in her direction. Upon her exclamation, however, we had stopped for a moment, examined the script with decided disinterest, and then begun our conversation about film directors, a bad idea because I knew from experience that Thomas is a man who is not only very defensive of his tastes (a fixation on romanticism), but also oblivious of his propensity towards offensive behavior.
The fact is, I was fucking a Japanese guy at the time. But I was offended more by his brevity than by the truth or untruth of his statement. (The fact is, when he said it, he did not even know for sure, other than hearsay based on snippets of phone conversation he had heard through the walls, whom I was fucking or how.)
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror for a little while, losing myself in thoughts like "are those really my eyes? Is that really my face?" before returning to the bar and deciding, against my better judgement, to sit four seats away from my friend. The woman in question had begun reading aloud at this point. From the sound of it, she played the part of a man in the play, and a very down-and-out one, at that. It was while she was reading, competing with James Brown, who was playing over the bar's speakers, and with the fifteen or so other people who were walking aimlessly about on this Tuesday night, filling up the space behind my head in what I imagined resembled a room full of balloons slowly drifting and bouncing about, that Thomas began to mutter a phrase to himself. And the more I examined his face, (ignoring, mind-you, the woman sitting between us, as many times as she glanced nervously in my direction,) the more certain I became that he was, in fact, repeating one phrase again and again. Again and again.
'Thomas,' I called out, and he looked up from the floor and stared me in the eye, all the while continuing to mutter this certain phrase again and again, and thus we sat, the woman rattling off one-sided dialogue, for close to a minute, before I raised my glass of rocks and seltzer and Jack Daniels and he raised his glass of orange juice and vodka, and we each tilted our heads back and drank them.
J: I like women more than men because my mom raised me to.
S: I like men more than woman because my mom is an idiot.
J will be posting his top six albums of 2006 in the coming days, leading up to the NUMBER ONE album on December 31st, 2006. His resolutions for 2007 will be to like seven albums and to become a pet owner.
He couldn't understand my reaction to the news at all. He asked me what it had all beenabout and I had no answer for him.
"It was just how I felt in the moment, I guess," I said. "That's not me. You know me."
"Sure I do," he replied, pausing. "But..I still don't believe you. I undestand you pretty well and I think that for a moment, your true self came out and now you've managed to hide it once again but it's still there."
"No," I said firmly. "No, you're wrong. I'm a good person. I am. I care about people. I'm not in this for myself, I'm genuinely concerned about the well-being of others. The same goes for this case. It was a slip up. A momentary lapse of character."
He paused for a moment and stared at his empty wine glass.
"Either way, something is wrong with you."
He looked up at me.
"So what are we going to do?"
We looked across each other at the table for an uncomfortably long period of time. His gaze broke first and I silently registered my small victory in making him look away. He motioned
for the waitress, who had been conversing quietly with the manager at the back of the room, to come to our table.
I have developed a sharp burning pain in my left wrist. According to my mother, it's being caused by a reformation of the ganglion cyst that likes to appear and disappear from the back of my left hand. She says that the same fluids that filled the cyst have now made their way into my wrist joint, and that I will need invasive surgery followed by physical therapy.
The causes of the ganglion cyst, as well as my moderate cases of carpal/cubital tunnel syndrome(s), include, but are not limited to, the following:
1. Excessive typing.
2. Excessive and/or improper playing of the guitar.
3. Excessive playing of the piano.
The moral of the story:
I should start smoking.
"Each day I also try to draw. It's a similar expulsion of buildup: Milking the cows every morning. Checking the chickens' eggs. Why should that be limited to a certain medium? Shit builds up inside you on multiple levels; if you don't degrease the system it clogs. Drawing brings me back to reality by sending me past reality, a sort of out-of-body perspective. The drawings creep off the page; they have to, if you believe in liberation. They climb to the walls the ceiling, they surround… they surround the drums. (I spend time decorating our practice room, and the rest of my house.) They influence the sound; before you know it they don't want to be dislodged from each other. They cohabitate, so they actually complement. They form and inform each other: I dumped a bag of jellybeans in a shallow wood box and covered them with glue. The jellybeans were making me sick. They went from friend to enemy, now they hang on the wall. I pass them on the way to the drum room. I'm wound up on sugar, singing jellybean songs. The colors could make a nice print; the print could cover the walls; glued jellybeans all across the floor. We could and should be writing a song based on fourteen small colored circles next to each other overlapping slightly. Why not? I come out of drumming with images in my head; drumming opens valves to drawing, back and forth. "
Brian Chippendale
i was in grandma and grandpas bed in great neck and i was in bed and eva walked into the room. her hair was short and it was sorta nicer than before. i had gotten out of bed to get the door and let her in but i got back in and she got back in too. we talked for a while about things that i can’t remember. then, i told her that her hair looked really nice. this is all innocent, i swear. i had no bad intentions. she looked shocked, but in that sorta flattered i-knew-it-myself type of way. i could tell she was flattered and, i liked it, so i was alike “yeah i didn’t recognize you at first. because…i don’t know, i’m used to thinking: eva…LONG hair. and it’s short.” i’m not sure if she said anything else, but soon she had to leave and she pulled me towards her and kissed me on the ear. i didn’t think twice about it and then she kissed me on the mouth but i don’t know if it was playful or not, it was definitely weird. at this point, she was standing and i really wanted her to get back into bed with me. i feel bad about that. but yeah. i reached towards her and i was “eva! eva!” and she was like “what?” and i moved up towards her and as i did, she slowly turned into jeremy who growled at me and moved in to eat me. i’ve never been attracted to eva in my life.
if i had just delivered something that you called a song
maybe then you would have noticed there was something wrong
realize you can not sell your soul before too long
ohhh these eyes keep staring back please can you make them stop
lullabyes are sand beneath the feet of idle minds
tell me when you came here what was it you thought you'd find?
realize that no one wins and everybody lies
ohhh please won't you stop me now it's never gonna end
-- was out of sorts. He had carefully chosen all of his worst clothing for the afternoon; a ratty maroon sweatshirt that was two sizes too big, pants too full of holes to salvage, and shoes whose soles had worn down long ago. At four-thirty in the afternoon, he left his apartment and began to walk. He walked along --th street and counted the sidewalk cracks, without keeping too-close track of time. He stopped when street lights said "don't walk" and began to walk again when the lights said "walk." In this manner he walked, without paying much of any attention to where he was going, for close to two hours. It was only when the sun began to set that he looked up from the ground, blinked a few times, and tried to discern where he was.
He was in front of a bookstore. He decided to walk in.
It was a quiet bookstore, lit with dim yellow lights and with the feeling of the sorts of quaint coffee shops that adorn their walls with fake flowers and replicas of contemporary artworks. He walked through the aisles for a few minutes without really glancing at any book in particular. After a few moments of winding his way through the narrow bookshelves, and when he could no longer see the front door, he found himself in the corner of the shop where the shelves opened into what reminded him of a forest clearing. There were two small but cushioned reading chairs resting a few feet apart from each other, with a low floor lamp between them. One chair was empty, and in the other chair sat a slim woman with a red turtleneck sweater and long black wool pants. Her face was obscured almost completely behind a copy of The Grapes of Wrath,. -- stood still for a few moments upon finding the alcove, then slowly stepped towards the empty chair and sat down. He sat with his hands tucked away in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and looked off in the direction from which he had walked, without any particular thoughts settling in his mind for more than a moment.
The slim woman, who was about a third of the way done with the book, glanced at him a few times, and then returned to reading, deciding that he was just an eccentric, tired young man.
-- suddenly decided to turn towards the woman and begin to speak. He asked her a question.
She responded. "My name is --," she said.
He asked another question.
"Why do you ask?"
And another.
"Only recently," she said, allowing the book to drop a few inches below her face. "It was very recent, in fact. But why would you be interested in that?" She looked at his eyes. He looked directly back at hers, with a piercing gaze that was almost accusational. She could not discern whether he was attracted to her, or whether he was trying to read something from her face, or whether he was just an eccentric young man. After a few seconds of silence, -- returned his stare to the aisle that he had walked from, and --'s eyes returned hesitantly to the pages of The Grapes of Wrath.
Excerpts from "101 Things KIDS Can Do to Save the Environment!"
#36: write a letter to your principal requesting that recycling bins be placed throughout your school!
#61: talk to your parents about cancelling subscriptions to unwanted catalogues and magazines, as all that wasted paper just means more trees that are needlessly cut down!
Remember, when it comes to the environment, only YOU can make a difference!
Did you know that thousands of people die every day?
Did you know that seventy percent of the human body is water?
Did you know that one hundred percent of that water is DRINKABLE??
Late in the afternoon, when L. had still not come back from school, H. became concerned. He paced around the two rooms of his small apartment muttering to himself, removing his glasses from his face every few moments to wipe the lenses, and arranging and rearranging the cans of soup in the cabinets, the three activities which, not including the drink (in which he occasionally partook), when especially nervous, H. found himself uncontrollably carrying out. After close to an hour, when his glasses were becoming scratched and his soup cans were spaced exactly three quarters of an inch apart from one another, he placed a call to his sister.
S. picked up the only phone in her house after allowing it to ring a few times. "Hello?" she asked.
"Have you heard from L.? She hasn't come home from school yet."
"She's at Mom's. She told me not to tell you."
H. remained silent for a few seconds. "Okay, bye," he abruptly said, then hung up before S. had a chance to respond. He glanced at his watch, and thought to himself, "there wasn't much to do this afternoon anyway," and decided to take a trip to his mother's house.
Wendell was a tortoise who had, for fifty-four years, lived with the Greenbergs in their Upper East Side apartment. Eugene Greenberg had bought the tortoise, then only five inches from tail to end, in 1949 at a pet store in Brooklyn, and it had outlived both Eugene and his son, and now resided with Eugene's grandson, David Greenberg.
On this particular day, David woke up late in the morning, with hangover from the previous evening's activity. Wendell, secure in a small pen off in the corner of the apartment, gazed lazily from the lettuce he was pecking-at to observe the motions of David as he climbed out of bed and gazed around the room. David looked in Wendell's direction for a few moments, then looked on into the next room, where the cabinet was. Wendell's gaze was similarly fixed on David for a moment, then returned to the lettuce it was slowly chewing.
David went about his day, running off to his job teaching as an adjunct professor at Hunter College, eating a bagel with roast beef for lunch, sipping coffee from a thermos. It was later in the evening, when he came home to find Wendell's pen empty, with a small white note in black scribbles lying in its center, that his day began to pick up speed.
The note read:
We have Wendell.
WE HAVE WENDELL.
And we will do anything.
ANYTHING.
To make you pay.
1. Ate one pint of Butter Pecan Tofutti.
2. Smoked a cigarette while reading at my desk.
3. Walked back from 30th and 7th to Greenwich and Barrow.
4. Blasted Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab at ungodly levels.
5. Showered thrice.
6. Wrote a song, and declared I would forget it.
1. If four newborn babies are placed in a row, and the one on the left rolls over, it will disturb...
a) The baby adjacent to him only
b) All of the other babies
c) None of the other babies
2. If four elephants stand on the edge of a great pond, will the elephant on the left wait while the other three try to cross, or will he plunge into the icy water despite his fear of drowning?
a) Yes
b) No
c) No
3. If four vials of pink liquid are sitting side by side in a display case in a store in Soho, which will be the most expensive?
a) The one with the most liquid inside
b) The one with the least liquid inside
c) [Assuming the vials have a roughly equal amount of liquid] The one nearest extinction
4. If four questions are asked one after another, to nobody in particular, a person will NOT feel a compulsion to answer them because...
a) Questions that are asked of nobody in particular are equivelent to questions that were never asked
b) Persons that happen across questions not aimed directly at them will tend to cede responsibility for said questions
c) Questions without persons to answer them are equivelent to questions without answers, and questions without answers are not worth asking
5. If four identical toothbrushes are sitting in a line by your bathroom sink, which one will you use?
I peer around nervously. I sniff left, sniff right. Where is she? What the fuck? It's almost two o'clock and I still haven't eaten and she told me that she had a tip on a homeless man scattering bread somewhere between B and C. Why the hell are those homeless guys always giving away bread anyways? You'd think they'd want it for themselves, seeing as they are homeless. Goddamn. Shit! I shift my paws nervously, peering up at the park bench in front of me. Those other guys are gonna get to that bread first if she doesn't come back soon. Christ, I'm so hungry. It's October 3rd and it's' still 75 degrees outside. The heat irritates me, makes my muscles antsy, scratches at my spine, makes me shit all the time, makes me ANGRY. And HUNGRY! What if she got hit by a car? Jesus Christ, what if she's dead? Avenue B is usually safe but it's always possible. People never look carefully enough and people really don't care about me or about her. Goddamnit. Others are probably enjoying that feast already. It's probably all gone. Fuck them. I'm so hungry... -J
H. lay awake on the sofabed, listening to footsteps pattering in the next room. It was eleven-thirty at night. He reached for his glasses, which lay on the floor next to the arm of the sofabed, and balanced them on the bridge of his nose before sitting upright, blinking a few times, and sleepily sighing. The pattering continued, and now that he concentrated he could hear drifts of what sounded like Mozart coming faintly through the walls.
He stood up and walked to the door of L.'s bedroom. "Shouldn't you be asleep?" he asked in a low voice through the door. There was no answer, and he knocked softly.
The door opened three inches and L.'s face peered through, strands of straight brown hair falling over her eyes, and her breath slightly quicker than normal. "Yes?" she asked.
"Aren't you tired?" H. asked.
"I'm learning to waltz," L. responded, clumsily brushing hair away from her nose and mouth.
"Can't you do that in the morning?"
"I'm afraid not." The door shut suddenly, and after a few moments the Mozart and the pattering resumed. H. sat at the dining room table and opened the copy of The Metamorphosis that sat in the circular glow of the light from the lamp.
In the Post Office.
A: We've been waiting forever. When will this line move?
B: Be patient, sweetie. Look, they just opened another window.
Later, in the Chinese Food restaurant.
B: I don't know, it was a long time ago, in the college radio station. He was sitting on a stool in the record storage room, and I was carrying a stack of records, and he looked at me and said 'so, brushing up on your jazz?'
A: What was he like back then?
B: He was very shy, just like you. And... skinny. I don't know. I guess you wouldn't think of him that way, would you?
Later, in the Subway.
B: You should know this by now. We've taken this train a hundred times, honey.
A: Yeah, but I just want to make sure for when school starts.
B: Are you getting excited?
A: A little. But Zach and Emmy won't even be there, so I'll only know like four kids.
B: Well you'll just have to try and make new friends. It's hard, but... you'll manage.
Two evenings before Audrey left for London, a six-foot blanket of snow fell upon the streets of New York City. She had worked that evening as the desk manager of a concert that was held in a club that her father owned. The two of them arrived early in the evening, at around eight o'clock, just as the first drifts of snow were beginning to form beneath their feet. "Do you think anyone will come?" she asked. "Because of the snow?"
At four in the morning, when they finally, and with a weary resolve, packed up the last of the sound equipment, counted the door money and walked out the back entrance of the club, West 53rd street was unrecognizable beneath the white sheets, bright enough that it might have been confused for daytime. Her father, a briefcase full of microphones and cables in one hand, took two steps from the door before he slipped and fell on his back. "I don't think we can take the subway," he said, from the ground where he lay.
One by one, six taxicabs scoffed and drove off when she called them over and said "we're going to Brooklyn," and the hotels in Times Square were all full. The two walked for close to an hour, his suit and her black skirt long since soaked by the snow that rose to their knees. They walked from hotel to hotel, without exchanging so much as a word, their arms growing tired and their wills being weakened by the cold. "Let's just go to a diner," suggested her father, "and eat breakfast."
The two sat, warming their hands on cups of coffee refills, and slowly chewed on eggs and bagels, staring mindlessly out the window. "You know," Audrey said, after some deliberation, "soon I'll be leaving for London."
"I know," he said. "Your mother and I will miss you."
"But this blizzard had to happen just now, just before I leave." She sighed, and took a sip of coffee. "As if it weren't scary enough to be going away, first I have to watch my home being buried in white."
"Well, the snow will all be gone in a few days," he said.
"Yeah, and so will I."
Interview with various members of Caroliner, including Timber Amplifier, The Felt Pelt, Chance Century, Sore Pony Lore, Chapel Rimmer, Old Ben Spayed. From fanzine WINGNUT, Volume 3, approx 1990.
Wingnut: Where do you see music going in the next 10 years?
Timber Amplifier: At this rate, music seems to just bring an exact year-to-year duplicate of itself with the same limitations as when it started. With country music you can have a duplicate sound, but with some of the best instruments available: banjo, jews harp, slide guitar, etc. The absolute of the repeating motif of music is ultimately realized with the nostalgia act of Caroliner. Ten years from now, Caroliner will have the music down so perfect, hopefully, that we will have ways to actually nostalgically re-create the 1800's by intensifying the duplicate sound and move to the head of the music pack.
Wingnut: Do you listen to the radio? If so, what kind of station?
Timber Amplifier: There is no station locally that will respond to our requests for entire Dock Boggs lp's, demonstration of early American electronics/instruments, Hal Holbrook's Mark Twain lp's, and sounds of train routes across the U.S. Unfortunately, no radio station will respond to our specific simple requests so we don't use them.
At four-thirty in the morning, I found two Hong Kong dollars beneath my couch pillow. I held up the scratched, faded coin against the light and watched the yellow illuminated circle dance around the coin's jagged edges. "Hey Thomas," I called out, "look what I found."
Thomas had been pacing back and forth obsessively, as he is prone to do late in the evening. He had had a couple glasses of whiskey with ice which, rather than calming him, seemed tonight to be making him even more nervous than usual. "What's that?" he responded, after a few seconds of silence in which he snapped out of whatever he was thinking about and allowed my words to sink in.
"It's two Hong Kong dollars."
"What the fuck? What the fuck?" he shouted. His eyes were wide with what looked close to intense fear. "I haven't been to Hong Kong in almost six years. What's that doing in the couch?"
"I don't know, Thomas," I said. "I don't know."
The last time that I ever saw Doris Fader was in her apartment in Great Neck, sitting in her chair. By this time, she was in a lot of pain and it was obvious, although she tried in vain to cover it up. She would sit in the chair and grimace with her eyes closed and I used to think that she was wishing the end would come soon. She probably was. I had brought my laptop up for this particular trip under the guise that I was going to get something done although god knows what that was, since this was early June and I was far removed from school. I sat on Doris and Howard's couch as Doris rocked herself back and forth, back and forth. My mother and father shuttled in and out of the room, taking turns asking Doris if she needed anything. The answer was always no. My grandfather nervously paced about, periodically opening his mouth to say something but then shutting it just as quickly. I was very uncomfortable because I felt the mourning already setting in and yet, Doris was still painfully breathing. My mother approached me after a whlie and said "Maybe you should try talking to her for a bit. She's pretty unhappy now." She then left the room, leaving just me and Doris, who really only seemed partially there. I really didn't know what to say in such an uncomfortable situation, being put on the spot like that. I opened Itunes and put on "I Loves You Porgy" by Billie Holiday, because I thought she might like it. I know it's a famous Nina Simone song but I put on the Billie Holiday version that I have because I like it more. There's a lyric "It's going to be like dying" that always makes me shiver when I hear Billie sing it and I suppose I put it on for this reason, not even considering Doris' situation. I swear to you, I saw this with my own two eyes; Doris' face LIT up. She smiled and she looked at me and said "It's Billie". She started to hum along and then began to quietly sing the lyrics, her eyes closing in a very different manner than before If you can keep me/I want to stay here with you forever/I've got my man.
L., aged nine, stretched her legs con gusto across the dining room table, her chair tilted back to an inappropriate degree. Thus she sat for close to forty minutes, reading The New Yorker and sipping English Breakfast. When H., aged forty-four, found her, he sat across from her and watched for several minutes as L.'s toes wiggled in time with the turns of her pages. Finally he decided to speak up.
"L.," he said apprehensively, "don't you have homework to do?"
L. responded, without looking up from the page she was reading. "Don't be a dick, father," she said, and sipped the last of her tea.
They wouldn't let me back in my room so I walked around the block and bought an iced tea. The bike shop was closed for the first time in forever. I was afraid of getting my dad's old loafers wet. He's had them since the days that he lived here, in the city, in the early 1970s. He could've been wearing them when he saw the Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, third on the bill behind Ten Years After and Johnny Winter. Back then, they did two shows in a night, with Johnny Winter going first, then TYA. At around 2 AM, the Allman Brothers went on and played a historic four hour set that was later documented for the famous Live At The Fillmore East album. He likes to tell the story of how there was a bomb scare right before the Allmans went on and how the Fillmore East was evacuated and then, as soon as the scare was confirmed to be a hoax, everyone was let back in and the Allmans just played that much farther into the morning. Maybe he was wearing the loafers when he shuffled home, still stoned, at 8 AM to find his father sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the New York Times, which he'd already finished reading. His father always used to wake up at 5 AM or earlier. He still does. The funny thing is, my dad didn't even know he was at the concert that became the Live at the Fillmore East album until he bought the CD version, reread the liner notes, and read about that bomb scare.
Outside again, I wondered if the loafers were happy to see the city once more, thirty years later. I think they might've been depressed actually. It was a pretty dreary early morning out there; it had rained earlier in the evening while we were busy recording and I had missed the storm and it was post-rain dreary. I went back to the room and they let me in. Honestly, I was hoping that somebody would have followed me out of the room and into the streets. I always leave and hope they'll follow me.
To the extent that faulty wrists allow, it seems appropriate to undertake a writing experiment with a person named Julian. As there are friends from foreign lands asleep on my floor, I will begin briefly, and more important, quietly:
Sit.:
There were three rag dolls on top of a radiator. The rag doll on the left was made from the remains of a child's mother's dresses, which the mother had recently decided were no longer of use. The rag doll in the middle was made from a cotton cloth the mother used to wash the basement windows. The rag doll on the right was made from a canvas bag which the mother had found beneath the kitchen sink. The mother sewed the three rag dolls within a month of one another and gave them to the child on three successive days. The first day, the child cried when he heard thunder. The second day, the child breathed in muffled tones. The third day, the child closed his eyes and counted the white spots.
Q. 1:
Which doll was given on which day?
And,
Q. 2:
Which doll did the child love most?
