May 24, 2005

Beat poet bums smoke in the forest, at 11.

A minivan just drove by my house with a kid in the passenger seat howling "Happy Birthday!" out the open window, into the air, to anyone, to me. Thanks kid! You're alright.

I like our new neighborhood and all of it's mysteries. Our neighbors to the left seem to communicate almost exclusively by yelling, screeching really, at each other with this crazy fierce affection. Like they are feeling the everyday stuff so intensely, they just have to LET IT OUT NOW: I'M IN THE GARAGE! CLEANING! THE! CAT! BOX! HONEY! GODDAMN! I FUCKING LOVE YOU! They drive a minivan too.

Our neighbors to the right are totally mysterious and possibly hip. They watch TV late at night when I get home from the studio, they might be daysleepers, the guy rides a cool bike, the girl dresses kinda like Ski, the are fascinatingly silent and utterly inaccessible. Minivan parked out front.

The neighbor across the street fulfills the "reprobate on the block" archetype, what with his all-hours towing biz and *really* rocking-the-Metallica penchant. He offered my wife free towing, wink-creepy-wink. He waves at me when I leave the house. I call him Cletus. I do not know his real name. 80's Ford Bronco and oversized shiny tow truck. No minivans here.

I have an afternoon, well, day off. First in a long while. Although I did get to go camping in Big Sur with Will and Brian couple of weekends ago, which was all kinds of rad. MAN CAMP 2005 is live! Basketball, moderate man-hiking, broken digi-cams, port, rivers, grills, poetry, poets, scuba divers, Mr. Show, vodka, trees, man-boots. Live! We went to the Henry Miller memorial museum, which was a tight call by Will. I had forgotten how much I love that crazy old man. Henry Miller, that is. Although I love Will too, he's just not old. Possibly as crazy.

Anyway, the tight call: the "museum" is just a vortex-like repository of Henry's later life in Big Sur and a magnet for artists and poets and weirdos and such. I wanted to stay there indefinitely and just read and talk, but we had hiking to do, and eventually, lives to get on with. MAN CAMP 2005! Here's the thing: Henry Miller strikes me as being a duder who was completely self-aware and alive and kind of in touch with the Buddha-mind, if you will. A happy, dirty old man with a fire in his gut, in his heart, to do the right thing, the only thing, the art thing, and that's inspiring to me. I found a book there I'd never seen before called "Henry Miller on Writing", a collection of ramblings and mini-manifestos and mistakes. It looks pretty good, but I haven't had time to read more than two pages, of course.

I picture MAN CAMP becoming a yearly event, as we get older and hopefully wiser and more set in our ways. The wives or girlfriends (or boyfriends) will roll their eyes as we pack up Leathermans and Rashomon DVDs and good cheese and nudie playing cards and head off to the woods or the wherevers. We'll spend as little time as possible man-bitching, then get down to the gritty gutsy truth. Or just get drunk and play "Horse" or "Sartre" til the sun goes down and the bugs eat our skin or the other campers yell at us or throw pine cones. We'll wear ridiculous hats. Invite the loony wandering beat poets in. Play poker. Journey and GBV covers 'round the campfire. You get the idea.

What am I doing in this place?

Henry Miller had friends in Sacramento, right? They wrote him postcards and visited the beach on the weekends and laughed at themselves, silly til they died.

YOUR FRIEND,
DANA

Posted by dana at 09:35 AM | Comments (3)

May 12, 2005

Untitled #1 (a quick fiction)

My brother and I are running out over the shallow grade, past the abandoned dentist's office. We have our sticks and grass-stained chins, our matted hair. The sun is low and warm between dark spotted clouds.

When the day crawls back under a rock, we climb through a crumbly fence and find a back porch to sleep beneath. Then my brother tells me about the fire trucks that used to scream down Central, past 40th and the station house and just kept on going until you couldn't hear the sirens anymore, just the cackle of panicked blackbirds and suspicious raccoons. He says our parents had an old record player and lots of records with songs about star-men. He says silver jet planes will find us soon and fly us out East. That pilots are very brave and skilled, and have special suits and helmets that protect their skin.

I usually fall asleep when my brother tells me stories. Sometimes it gets late and I can't sleep. I just lay awake and watch the satellites burn up and fall out of the clear black sky.

In the morning, we pee into the weeds against the side of the house. The sun is up and bright like the edge of a broken bottle. We walk around a bit, then sit and throw acorns at mailboxes. We hear horseshoes on cement: another carriage full of white-cloaked acolytes, clip-clopping down the avenue.

We start running again down the wide streets, wordless, in and out of the empty houses with open doors.

Posted by dana at 09:26 AM | Comments (2)

May 03, 2005

Is this all that I get in return?

Ok, hi.

We made it. After a protracted (and borderline pathological) battle with Movable Type, we're here. I've had more than my fill of CSS tags and HTML code, let me tell you. A pain in the brain, but well worth it. Celebratory victory blog action, right here, right now.

My name is Dana and, uh, you probably know me in in some way, so this introduction is kinda irrelevant. We have a FRAMEWORK, dudes. But hello anyway and thanks for reading. I've been looking forward to having an outlet for writing and have been inspired by the radical blog styley of Urban Honking and our own attempt at documenting the making of Deathray LP#2.

So here we are.
We made it.

Incredible.

The title of this entry is a lyric from a song by the Goodmornings, a very nice Sacramento band I'm recording right now. I can't get that song out of my head. Good one, fellas.

When not laboring obsessively over this here laptop, I've been quite busy with recording (or "producing/engineering", if you put your fancypants on one leg at a time). And of course, making music, sweet music. I'm sure I'll blather on about those processes from time to time, but primarily I wanted this to be a somewhat personal, and hopefully not too EMO, space.

So I'll more than likely represent with scattered thoughts, gauzy digi-pix, fiercely insular politics, gentle words of encouragement, curse words of cursing, gushing words of mush, and all of the various twists and turns you've come to expect from quality b-logs. Yeah. Alright. Yo.

I have no idea if anyone is actually reading this.

And because sleep is overrated and I have so much time thanks to inexpensive and easy-to-use Meth©, I've also been getting into Podcasting, and hope to turn that interest into a monthly (or maybe even weekly) Song Of The Month (or Week?) Podcast. Podcasting = internet radio to go. Audio content you can download via RSS/XML feeds to yr comp/iTunes/iPod/iWhatever. Truthfully, I don't even really know what an XML feed is. I have a vague grip on RSS and I think they are similar? Anyway, I like the idea of what is essentially a free, auto-updated subscription to creative content. It's nice. More on that later.

So this feels like it's about the right pitch. Like it could be something cool. I like starting something, even a something that needs to find what it is, or where it's starting. Does that make any sense?