Behind Every Gold Record is an Average White Band: reminiscing about a gift of yesteryear on my birthday.

When I finished my first official record my dear friends and helpers gave me a present for my birthday. It was my record, under glass in the official archival manner, shining with a plaque commemorating it. It looked much like the ones I'd seen in the studio we recorded at, where the house engineer, Shelly Yakus, had some of his gold records he'd done with Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks hanging on the wall. But don't think this was a very slick studio. This studio was a converted auto garage in the swamps of New Jersey behind Somer's Point. It was more like a musty outdated rancher-home coke-den of sorts. Mavis Staples had just recorded a record there the year before, and was playing to very under attended rooms before the Jeff Tweedy collaborations boosted her back into the public eye and people began appreciating again what she never stopped doing. The Dixie Hummingbirds had recorded one of their last albums their with Levon Helm on drums and Garth Hudson on organ. The place was an incubator of passionate people just as much as it was for mold.

And that gold record? I was informed by a belly laughing Devin, who produced my record, that my fancy LP under glass was actually an Average White Band record he spraypainted with metallic paint on the roof of his place.

This week my birthday came around and I sat down to collect some thoughts, I was extra aware this week, mostly because I really honed in and decided that for my birthday I was gonna appreciate, I was gonna try some new things, and I was going to make music, lots of music for people to take in and take along with them in spirit.

I reached out to Devin to check in and say hi, he's en route to Budapest to learn a mobile recording technique and work on a project of international musical collaboration. He mentioned the gold record. "Remember that thing?" Yeah, I did. Perhaps going to Budapest sounds very jet-set, but for Devin I'd say it's more a 1,000 ton wagon led by ants that got him to Turkey. He is one of the hardest working passionate people I know, and at his age, perhaps there are more expected milestones to be had, but in his own way he is carving out his own peculiar life.

Milestones. I think perhaps at some point I lined them up in a pyramid and kicked them all into the river.  I think that there are many ways to live and every one of them has beauty and balance. I hate sometimes that I have a hard time organizing for much more than playing music and ensuring I can continue to do so. Something that still makes my hands clam up is when I have to explain to relatives at a holiday party what I do, knowing I could never quite reveal to them truly how passionate and in love I am with my life, when all they may be seeing is that this 30 something year old women is working behind the counter of a tea shop. And I realize that this can be perhaps just as much self projection as relative inspection and I'm working on it.

Another birthday thing I did was list my current fears:

Fear One: That I will not be able to keep playing music.
Fear Two: That I will not live up to my potential.
Fear Three: That I will dissapoint my parents.

So I guess when one worries as such it is best to get into an old church van with no AC and head to play music for strangers? The somewhat assaulting breeze whipping about makes you feel like you are on the high seas and the sound of the engine is very much akin to a motorboat. All conversations become exaggerated over the noise. You still only end up hearing mostly reactions if you are a bench seat away, like whooping laughter or the sight of vibrating of shoulders. I sit in the back, lean into the window, and just let that soothe me. This is family. This feels the same to me as when I would be in the station wagon and my dad would play Willie Nelson cassettes. But see, I heard those cassettes in a certain way, a way that I couldn't shake.

And here I am. Here WE are, at 2pm on the Merritt Parkway with everyone else asleep but me and the driver, doing accounting in the notes section of my iPhone trying to justify how we can keep getting to these places to make this music. But then we get onto another stage, setup all our equipment (so much equipment!) and do something we feel so mysteriously compelled to do and I just can't imagine cutting this out of my life, I can't convince myself to extract what is perhaps to me my favorite thing. And I have alot of favorite things, like looking for shells on the beach, drinking tea alone, cooking soup. Songs are where I can gather all of them into the fold.

We played shows this week for many people. For a 15 year old girl who sat mesmerized by our feet and I knew the experience was perhaps effecting her whole path much in the way early experiences with music did for me. Other shows we had families out in the sunshine of a late summer afternoon, on blankets looking over their children dancing in front of us with peaceful eyes. Last night a woman who wrote poetry in tandem gave it to me at the end of the night on ripped out wire bound notepad paper and I tucked it into my jean jacket breast pocket. We were introduced with recitations of prose from Siddhartha and closed out shows with disintegrating melodies of songs that never existed before we made them ourselves.

But the record I was gifted about 8 years ago perhaps fortuitously let me know how hilarious and somewhat bastardized life was gonna get sometimes. It was gonna show me that yes, there are milestones, all kinds for all people, and while there is a grain of truth and honor to each one, there is also an average white band record underneath the veneer, metaphorically speaking of course. Or in my case, not. But the intention is real and it is loving. My friends made that for me as their way of saying, "Hey, we already believe in this, we are golden". We are musicians, we're a scrappy bunch. Resourceful.  Bound for strange times. Able to withstand long journeys both physically and spiritually with our ear always perked for the laughter amidst the roar of the wind. I think Mavis, Levon, Shelly, they all knew this. And I guess through my own living so have I and so I go....Love, bird

(the poem gifted to us at Mauchunk Opera House)

The House of Love: Where does violence fit in our lives?

yesterday i was working at the tearoom and beyond the foreground of happy friends and tea revelers i saw a young couple walking briskly down the street through the window yelling in each other's faces in a side-swiping manner akin to two sparring race cars. i followed them with my eyes and watched the man forceably throw her over a line of bushes. i ran out and started yelling at him in expletives that he in no way has the right to hit her, to which the girl thankfully and sheepishly agreed and walked quickly off one way as the man the other. he got into a car, sped off, and with my adrenaline pumping i went back into the calm of the shop.

an hour later i received a phone call on the store's landline. it was the man apologizing to me that it had happened. i was reticent to accept an apology, for it seemed perhaps an attempt to quell any calls to police, but also an attempt to dispel the occurrence through words not action. i tried to let him know that it was not an apology i wanted but for him to consider how the future should hold for him a non-violent possibility and he seemed annoyed he had even called. i was imagining the girl finding herself around the corner, literally and figuratively, and hoping that both of them in some way at some point could find it in themselves to reject this violence from their lives. that may be long off. but when it happened, whenever the first time was for them, the trust between them was changed forever.

violence is like a nuclear bomb dropped on trust and the comparison leads me right into thinking about something that i've wrestled with in my psyche as a human on this earth: that in my core i believe so truly that non-violence is the most holy of paths. it's not even something that i want to argue or debate over tables, Facebook comments, chat rooms, board rooms. i feel in my heart that trust in my life has only been able to develop to its most holy place through unabashed, some might say naive, over assuming our kindredness more than differences peaceful process. this feeling has made me feel quite strange here. i don't know where to place myself and this feeling. when i look at a photo of my grandfather in a leather bomber standing in front of a world war 2 fighter plane i look into the frozen moment's eyes and get lost, wondering what feelings swirled in their minds? am i an ungrateful brat or a child of god? or both?

violence. is it all of the same place? or can we justify fighting to get to a non-violent future? or is violence just always shape-shifting? and is it strange for me to assume what works in the microcosm of my life will work for a world at large? but if violence is involved, trust to me never feels fully realized or gained. this perhaps has come to be one of the most conflicted contemplations and spiritual journeys of my life.

and now getting back to that moment yesterday. i hope that the man who called, albeit perhaps more subconsciously, called because he saw the eyes of the community and he looked back into them. i hope he saw that more than punishment we want to see change. and not only change for her, but change for him. because life is a long dark endless night if you think violence has a place in the house of love.

avenues of sadness and the alleyways in between.

This week was peculiar. A week in which a best friend went to the hospital to discover her immune system was that of a chemo patient with no concrete reasons as to why just clinical conjecture. Each blood test that came back was a cross off of relief. Meningitis-negative. HIV-negative. A week where I found two $100 bills in the street in a way that felt serendipitous, a universe token to give to an amazing artist  waitress friend to help alleviate some stress for missing shifts due to said sickness. A week where I got to open up for one of my favorite bands in a beautiful venue because I persevered to make it happen. So it seemed in keeping when I found the dresser. The 1930's Bakelite handled, inlaid wood beauty. I kicked my old dresser yesterday morning at its brokenness. I've been kind of balancing the drawers on nails inside it and when I open the t-shirt drawer the jewelry drawer falls down into the dresser and the scarab that rests in the top of a pewter box I have falls out. Sometimes I just wait a few months to place the scarab back into its indentation knowing it'll just happen again rather than gluing it.  I made the decision I'd try and get one at a thrift store that afternoon. But instead another lovely token.

Today I went to see Howard the guitar player from the Dixie Hummingbirds with Mr. Huff in a home in Germantown. He is the only original existing member. Huff was with me to revel in the joy of the dresser find, and remarked I'd probably be one of those guys with a pick up truck with stuff hanging out the sides if I could. And as we drove further west on Germantown Avenue he asked if we could visit Howard. Huff, while 89, has not had to succumb to such a place, but he doesn't have eyesight to drive, so he's been sorrow stricken that he can't visit Howard to keep him company. Howard, whose wife passed away in the two years he's had to be there, calls the place an avenue of sadness. It is somewhat crushing to visit a musical legend in such a place, whose mind is still so acute weaving elegant thoughts, with visitors few and far between, while being on the short leash of an oxygen tank. But it is also transformative when you breakthrough the confines, when you pull off the avenues and seek love any way you can. It leaves you with that kind of day that you go home and sew those buttons back on your shirt finally because your head is clear as a monks. Mr. Huff handed him a crumbled selection of bills that amounted to about $18 dollars and Howard took it like it was a golden pirate's coin, their eyes locking and holding back tears that seemed the perfect cocktail of both happiness and disgust for how things can end up.

It was a peculiar week. But one that I felt better to go through, an affirmation, a meditation. I am ever more aware that life is best when lived knowing that there is so much that is unpredictable but also so much that is not. We will build our lives through love and meet the hardships together, and through our intentions the mystery will rise to our occasions and acknowledge us with gifts.

Levon Helm Tribute Opening Words

Levon Helm and I had never met, nor had I ever seen him play. But our lives Venn diagrammed in 2005 when I began working on my first recording at a studio in a converted auto garage in the backwater marshlands of south jersey. The project before us had been one of the last Dixie Hummingbird recordings, a gospel group from Philadelphia whose most pop culture claim to fame was singing Loves Me Like A Rock with Paul Simon. But if you went deeper, you’d find that the Dixie Hummingbirds were a serious staple of American music and anyone of the same mind, that is, with a deep sense of peace and place in that gospel tradition, wanted to be a part. Levon played drums on that last recording, so weeks before we set up for our sessions, he had been playing in the same live room and to me, all the musical history that preceded had leaked in. I was giddy to be breathing in that same musical air, putting sounds into the same microphones and sharing a sacred space. To be part of that tradition, more than autographs and handshakes, has always been my motivation.

Sometimes I imagine America as a grand piece of fabric and the musical history as a lovely rich dye and picture dipping the bottom of it into this liquid and seeing it seep up and out, into tributaries and cities, making its wild way.  Levon resided for a good deal of his impressionistic youth down south where this reaction had its first contact.  I do believe he, whether intentionally or by the default of his joyous pursuits, became a prime transmitter of this history but he also was so free in himself so as to play like no one else. He, and the band in general, has made me want to defy mediocrity and put something of myself into the world. The best always make you feel this way.

So even though I never got the chance in person, I am always greeting the spirit of Levon Helm with my music. In the joy of it. In my respect for its journey. In my ever seeking connection to listeners. In my continuing observance of this life around me.

All of us went to the tribute last night to celebrate and meditate on what he had such a huge part of bringing into this world. For, how could we not reflect back our respects like an ocean illuminated by the sun and moon? 

A Philadelphia Poem Trifecta.

Bottle Dust

 There’s that saying,

“If a tree falls in the forest...”

but here there are no trees.

So how will we know when

there has been a casualty?

At what secret hour

are all these bottles smashed?

What point does the potential become the kinetic

and cause all this glass to turn into stardust

covering the streets?

Catching in my bike tires

like thorns and booby traps.

A farthest removed cry

from someone

amongst me.  

Huff’s House

I visit Bob

every couple months.

He lives up where the stadium used to be.

They would watch the game from the rooftops until that

became unwanted

and a huge wall was put up to block the view.

But eventually

superstition and the bad karma

of exclusivity

caught up

and the wall was taken down.

Now he just spends his time in the house with the shades drawn.

An oversize aquarium tank with a small single fish

percolates endlessly.

Viv, his wife, watches T.V. in the bedroom

unless there’s a church event,

and then she dresses to the nines

in crinoline and flowers.

She likes to say, “strange things happen everyday”

and I never can quite place the

emotional tone.

Apathetic? Dismissive? No.

Perhaps more hopeful for a miracle.

Their adult son

divides time between here and Corpus Christi.

Right now he is splitting it between the opposite couch

and going across to the corner store

every twenty minutes

the veins in his neck twitching.

He talks to his girlfriend

on an old model cell phone

and winks at me from across the room.

He says he knows about two things real well,

“police and women”

and that he likes the rain "cuz it keeps niggaz inside”

but he himself seems undeterred.

His 90 year old parents shake their heads.

Done with it all but

loving enough to let him have the key.

The screen door slaps behind his son and Bob,

sitting in silence

staring at the linoleum floor without looking away

asks,

“You ever know what it’s like to have a cow that ain’t got no milk?”

Shamira

She would knock on

the door so much

that it became

part of the city’s rhythm

like car beeps or

sirens wailing

And often

it would be

just to see you

to observe you

the desire to laugh

A band of brothers

and a mother

wheelchair bound

living in the

public housing

on the corner

You’d give her presents

paintbrushes and paper

and she’d place her pictures

in her bedroom window

to catch the light

When you moved

she whined and put on

her best sad face

and that was that

Her knowledge of people

being there or not there

but her life

the distance of

the stoop to the sidewalk

and all the joy

she could find

in between

Bird Dog Grand Mini Tour: thoughts from the center of the rambling wagon wheel.

                                                   
What do you do when you realize that which makes you happy is both the easiest thing and also the most difficult to sustain? I come from a line of accountants and reality adhesionists. You go with what makes sense. Perhaps this has been one of the grandest struggles for me, the long journey away from this truth. It’s not a universal truth, but it is a truth to many. So maybe it’s just a regional truth, and the region of my brain that holds my path is just due west or south of it.

When the kindergarten teacher told my mother over her desk during a conference that she had never really encountered a child who had such disregard for adults and what she was supposed to do, that was a primer for what was to come, right? Which is this. What is this?

I do know that when I am amongst the others of this tribe, I feel a support, an affirmation that it is ok. Not just ok, but supported and celebrated.  Is it songs? Am I the defender of the importance of songs in the history of the human race? I’m trying to imagine telling someone this when they ask what I do. Does anyone really give a fuck that I have taken on this job that isn’t considered a job? Sometimes it feels like a sad secret, knowing this necessity that everyone can tend to treat as expendable. Other times it feels like I am holding the keys to a glorious kingdom and my time here is just a flash, so I need to act accordingly.


                                      

So I go out onto the stage, and I look as many people as I can in the audience in the eye and sing my heart out, even if my heart sings a little out of key and croaky as the bullfrog pond from a childhood memory of mine. I did love that bullfrog pond so I’ve taken it with me. I am the sole representative of all my memories; they DO depend on me to spread the word.  I love this. And when in love you feel elevated and a tad invincible and no matter which way you turn it’s a battle of foolishness, foolishness to pursue such an elusive thing but foolishness to leave something behind you can feel is the core of your happiness. And happiness has truly been pushed aside way to many times by too many. We are a complex nexus of time and events but happiness? Happiness dwells in its own region.

For the tribe, this region is the center of the wheel on a rambling wagon that makes no promises and guarantees no futures. We are reality abstractionists, sound distortionists, and imaginary constructionists. And we do all we can to get to you, from town to town, compromising endlessly reality adhesionist truths, so that we may transmit a spark of the eternal. It is our grand nod to that which can't be harnessed but felt totally, humanly, and fully. 

love, bird. 

                            

Antonio 1922-2012.

People are always leaving. Everyone exits in different ways. When someone has been around for so long and their body lets go slowly, this is what we’ve come to see as the most natural way. These people seem to go as quietly amidst the expectedness as the closing of a flower.

My neighbor Antonio had been going for quite sometime now.  He left us a week ago. He was 89.  He had been in his bed for the last couple months, while his cat Cha-cha walked back and forth on top of him.  I would call him a lot when it got to the point that  he wasn’t able to come down and open the door and he’d say “no one is here right now Em-o-lee” in his thick Portuguese accent. It was like he was my Rapunzel. When I came home from working late or playing a show, I’d park and look up and see his popcorn ceiling sparkles twinkling through the cracks in his curtains and wonder how he was doing in the solitude that is inevitable towards the end.  He said he had been counting the sparkles and noticed that there were only so many blue ones amidst the gold. I squinted to locate those precious few.

His story is long. It involves being shanghaied onto a cruise ship as a peasant child selling fruit on the docks of Cape Verde and ends on 46^th street in Southwest Philadelphia taking trolleys back and forth two blocks in each direction to exercise his last freedoms of movement.

I went to his funeral mass and received the xeroxed life story that mentioned workplaces, children and grandchildren. But what about how he kept a brown bag full of percussion instruments fashioned from wooden bedposts by his recliner to clank along to the radio with? Or how about his memories of the women in fields as a child, where he stood under their skirts and watched the sunlight shine through? Obituaries are not my story of choice. It seems like such a cruel succinct way to sum up our rides, why should we take comfort in such a strict form? 

My getting to know Antonio was a gift. It was and is part of my life that as a thirty year old woman I would meet this adventurer in the twilight of his life. I try to not sulk in the knowledge of how I couldn’t have been there with him when he was coasting on his bicycle as a young man. When he asked me to dance on his porch, awkwardly shuffling in the acutest of shifts, he did it with such bravado and thoughtlessness towards time that I fell right into rhythm. We would toast with some port wine tasting of grape juice and share what we could in the brightest of ways. While I’m usually quite modest when it comes to expletives, you know like, “geez louis!” , I’d like to say we  gave a big f*** you to circumstance. See look, even just then I had to star it out. Things are because that’s how they be. Get on with your life in the most celebratory fashion.

new years: customs within customs and the shooting of a star

Every moment is ready for resolve and intention. Sometimes we gather to celebrate this formally. But mostly it happens in little corners. And then, there are those times that it happens formally in little corners and if you observe you may be able to catch the fiery attempts like one catches a shooting star on the farthest corner of their blinking eye. This is how I have come to know my life. This is where my peace of mind resides.

We create our own customs within other customs and then evolve within the ones we've created to see to it that we are limitless and seeking vitality. Sometimes a song is involved, some shaking of tail feathers,a donning of a mask, and a prayer to the moon. 

Love and light to you all infinitely...  Birdie Busch 

Alien in Popland: The Pharoahs got my back.

I often feel peculiar more and more in  certain public places. Highway rest stops and summer boardwalks I move about like a ghost. This past memorial weekend, I rode a bike to the boardwalk in Ocean City on a quest to pick up a pair of dollar store sunglasses I admired of my sisters. I chained my bike to a railing and began walking the wooden boards. I stared at the sunburns on the backs of people’s legs. I awkwardly watched teenage girls awkwardly stare down their nose at their own breasts in bikinis. With each passing crack in the boardwalk I tried to squint and see couples cuddling as the famous song had alluded to but all I could decipher was the color beige, a mixture of sunlight and sand.

The boardwalk. It was and is such a rite of passage. I worked so many odd jobs here every summer when I was less of a ghost. Bob’s Lemonade stand with some Eastern European exchange students. The slide at wonderland pier where I was responsible for pushing parents and their children down in musty potato sacks.  McDonalds where I had my own visor and ate the double cheeseburger value meal almost every day. The Beachcomber where I would replace little plastic license plates into the circular display with peoples names on them. I always lamented how sad it would be to have a name they hadn’t deemed popular enough for the placards.

Many of the stores changed names. People are always turning shops over to see what works, to see how they can make all their money in three months and then go elsewhere for the off season. Freeze dried ice cream pellets. Monkey bread balls. Pop culture often dictates what goes on the t-shirts hanging from the front of the stores and I realized that I had no idea what the slogans were referencing anymore. I found myself making up odd scenarios where the slogans came from, which all referenced my own experience completely outside the world of its original intent.

The dollar store had sold out of all the sunglasses I was looking for so I wandered around looking at flip-flops and puka shell hemp necklaces. Even in the cheapest of China factory wares the element of human design is still apparent, but in a distant way, like a picture of a picture of a picture, less sharp and more dissolved, no trace of a craftsman.

I weaved in and out, studying the inventory, letting my brain stretch out to colors and smells. Old war veterans handed out red fabric carnations to passersby. All the radios in each store were playing pop stations, which have such a specific sound. I have a close friend who is older than me that says, “You know, everyone thinks pop music is a specific sound but it really is just whatever is popular at the time. There was a time when pop music was eclectic and wonderful.” Hmmm. I definitely wouldn’t call what I was hearing eclectic and wonderful. I was trying to figure out why but didn’t really want to harp on the negative so I continued moving and just concentrated on other sounds. The ocean. Bits of conversation as others moved passed me. The clinking of arcades. A break in stores brought on a little less commotion. Mini-golf with a giant guerilla was coming up. Out of the loudspeaker at the entrance came this startling but familiar sound. “Uno dos one two tres quatro!” It was the beginning to Wooley Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and it stopped me dead. Of course I have heard it so many times including in the beginning scene of Splash when Tom Hanks and John Candy are kids on a river cruise and the house band is playing it.  I leaned up against the wall next to the mini-golf and smiled and starting singing it out loud and caught a few stares my way. What was it that made it feel so electrified and alive? I was fixated. Could it be just the fact that all it was was the sounds that they could generate in their limited scope, which was their instrument and their souls and the collaborative energy between them? 

I often feel that it is this union that woos me most and something often feels missing these days because when I do feel that its like an oasis in a desert that I’ve come crawling over the sands to drink, this time, ironically, from a group of guys that dressed up like Egyptian pharaohs to play rock and roll songs about wooly mammoths from over 40 years ago. 

I stood and heard the whole song through. I no longer felt like a ghost. I realized that perhaps its not that I’m outside the circle of life but that I am so inside it that I feel like a stranger amidst the common culture and the pop that  is reflecting it. Bad art imitates bad life. Bad life imitates bad art. Have faith in finding your own personal pop. 

Love, Bird. 

Out of the Cave, Into the World.

Hello everyone who reads this. My apologies for taking so long to return here. Seasons are coming and going. The babies of the world are becoming toddlers and so on. Whole huge trees have blossomed and shed to green. I remember seeing old footage of an interviewee asking Paul Simon what took him so long to make another record, I believe it was around the time of Graceland maybe? Anyhow, he said something along the lines of, “Well, it’s a lot to think about. Thinking takes time.”

I am a lion and the spring sun is distracting me. I’m headed to go find a warm rock. But on this rock I will be pondering and very soon I will gather these thoughts.

Yours truly,

Bird. 

Lunar Christmas

Spinning vinyl is an act of meditation for me. I am only three months into my monthly residency at Johnny Brenda’s and I feel as though I am finding my center behind the perch of the DJ booth looking out onto people, pool sticks, and passing of time. This last Monday, in addition to the Christmas music I had planned for the evening, it was a lunar eclipse, and a selection of moon songs were gathered in the hodge podge of cardboard boxes I use to clumsily carry my records.

Moon songs come around fairly often over time. It’s a right of passage for someone that writes songs. You could treat it like you are roping a steer, or maybe more like gathering wind. A little of both. We confide in the moon with our loneliness, our desires known and also hidden, and go to it when everyone else is reasoning and we want undoing. But the moon’s undoing is really marked by a grand scheme of planetary order. I’ve been really intrigued lately about this moon club.

Christmas is in my blood. My father, who I’ve mentioned before in earlier posts, is Polish, and the city of Krakow, Poland is known to be the Christmas capitol of the world. I still write letters to Santa, and my mother has archived the evolution of the dialogue that happens between us in a scrapbook she keeps in a writing desk in the living room. We express a lot about the shifting of our lives, wants that have ranged from some large bungling toy to hoping lost family members will find themselves. This too is a meditation for me.

The amount of information we are expected to consume as a normal amount anymore is really getting to me and I’ve become disturbingly fascinated with how our brains and memories are changing in how we process all this information. Spinning records allows me to focus. I’ve found myself more and more on many occasions hearing something either in a public or private place and asking, “What is this?” and the person looking at me and saying, “Oh I don’t know, it’s in my playlists, I got a bunch of stuff on there.” This concerns me. Not only because it taps out on some level to the art that is moving them but also because it creates a disconnect from the creator and the work involved. If I play a record by Los Lobos and you’ve never heard Los Lobos and it turns out you freakin’ love Los Lobos after that, then by all means be aware, seek out Los Lobos, and discover more of what they do. It’s a means to connect the dots. We are just as much constellations as the creatures we’ve woven into the stars, so let the man in the moon look down on us and see our mystical lineage. Let him peer through the round wreath on the high frosted window at the end of the bar, through the lucid lights coloring the pints of beer, and enjoy the songs in his and all of ours honor. Cause really, all this music and those that make it are trying to do is give this existence some honor. It’s startling these days how there is such a lack of care for life. Everyday, in everything I do, I’m trying to counteract this disregard.

The night brought visitations from friends and strangers all confiding in me through songs that sparked memories. Remembrances of childhood, of trips, of old lovers. It is no coincidence that they are called records and not files or downloads. Even the language associated with vinyl connotates romancing and dreaming whereas the digital era has not been able to find such rounded verbiage. Into the a.m.  the bartender excitedly ran out and back in to exclaim that is was happening, that the eclipse was beginning and things were changing so much so that a clear distinction was upon us. I peered out my icy porthole to see the change, a night where both science and spirits were weaving their glorious patterns and laughing at the folks who deem the two enemies.

I saw the bar empty and played things in regard to the emptiness. The two bartenders set the pool balls and cracked a game, satisfied with the nights ending. I put on Elvis singing Peace in the Valley, and thought of how wide the valley is here. I wonder if all those country songs about lowlands were talking about a place like Philly? There are no mountains as far as the eye can see.  Sometimes I don’t even think they had ever imagined such a huge broken valley in those songs.

The fragile existence of all of us alongside each other is overwhelming but it has made me feel no other option except to be a healer. To honor and to be honored. To acknowledge the gathering of all these stars, both sky and earthbound for glory. 

epic haikus and cosmic debris blues

economy room

across from the scuba store

in Appalachia

cow pasture out back

trailer park homes faded colors

mexican migrants

history channel

special on ancient glaciers

geologists wax

18 wheelers roar

the Indian keeper recites

the internet code

 down the road aways

bbq served for decades

neon sign as proof

porcelain piggies

collected on a bookshelf

by the front entrance

 placid afternoons

mason dixon blues faint thoughts

rolling mountains soft

some civil war quilts

hung on walls in a town’s museum

hexagon pieces

fabric torn from a flag

to make a different flag

with a new intent

immigrant fathers

heartbroken by the divide

of their new country

cameo daughters

and their three syllable names

“oh dear Lucinda”

 i have never had

a life of such heartache

lost loved ones immense

sons met at fences

not even at the front door

to go off to war

 and here I am now

harrisonburg, va

same man on same bench

a few artful shops

connect the lively dodgers

of this existence

salvation army

is giving away pumpkins

to all customers

what is my work here

not born of necessity

but of my passions

to be of use

maybe that’s what I really want

in my simpler heart

in my other heart

every turn holds more muses

muses hold stories

i am a servant

to these everlasting songs

civil war trail blues

GO!

Country Mouse City Mouse. I’ve always remembered that book from when I was a child. And now, I can recall only images more than storyline, the country mouse holding on to blinds so a vacuum cleaner won’t suck it up. The city mouse sitting oddly and bored in the hollow of a tree. Yet every time I spend time in either place I  sympathize with both of the  mice and realize that perhaps that’s my human complication, I encompass so many things and places and experiences and need them all. 

 We clearly have a bunch of stuff going for us, what with speech and books and philosophy. And then there was the whole inventing of tools then machinery then the soup can and then Andy Warhol, and then a host of other things like Italian films on the leisure class and R. Crumb documentaries.

What I like about heading up to Vermont in August for what is now becoming a traditional tour stop, is staring at rocks. Huge rocks where I can see the strata and all its intrusions and cataclysms. Patterns upon patterns of violent change that hold no emotions. I harbor a desire sometimes to be a chunk of granite.

In a vintage motorboat that my friend somehow acquired (he’s got a gift for being this kind of unofficial mayor of Burlington so I guess with this job comes peculiar gifts) we headed out into the center of Lake Champlain. The rocks on the beach started turning into an encampment of gray tents and the mountains in the distance became more like gauzy ebbing waves of smoky greenish blacks. The trail of the sun was silvery and we followed it as gracefully as a 40-year-old boat can and finally cut the motor in some estimated center spot. There was not much noise out there but for the occasional other boat and us talking and my head whirring.

What an odd creature I felt like in my skin and bones and guts out there. It’s the first time in awhile I’d felt such abandon and yet still I was aware. As a lover of song and stories and details how hard it is to totally pack up and jump the ship that is my brain. We gathered back into the vessel and our captain put on a 1950’s compilation cassette on in what looked like a Walkman without headphones. The songs bubbled out of the little speaker. Songs of the love,loss, and dreams. We drank from a single bottle of wine passed around. I borrowed a bathing suit for the occasion while some gentlemen rolled up their pants. Our captain had spray painted the boat with fleur de lei stencils and a handmade patchwork flag that said “GO!” in colored duck tape snapped in the breeze. Aaahhhh, this is our own kind of leisure class. What do we call it? Money deficient but able to use creativity as buoys, anchors, and sails. We shall make things out of nothings or other somethings and bring them to life. We are, after all, humans and not rocks.

                                               

                                          

 

                               

Attention:Forecast calling for a Renaissance and Mythical Guitars!

                       (photo by Lisa Schaffer of an installation done my Angela Miles)

The temperature last night dropped 25 degrees since the afternoon. The whir of multiple window fans shifted as I turned them off into a muted hissing of locusts. Bob Dylan has a great song about locusts in which he’s talking about escaping some stifling scene to head out into the Dakota hills with a lover and the chorus reaches an exalted crescendo and he wails, in a rich nasally voice, “And the loooooooocusts saaaaaang, and they were siiiiiiingin’ for meeeeeee!”

 It really feels lately like the locusts are singing for me. Maybe I’m just regaining energy that’s been zapped for quite awhile, but the blurry almost full moon and me tonight, well, we’re rendezvousing in high-style.

Yesterday I sold sundries and sundresses at a “Punk Rock Flea Market” at a table with a friend. We were charging way on the cheap so we could just get rid of it all; we were delighting in the idea of it leaving us. The beauty of this is that there were plenty of takers. Just as I am moving into a different time others are hitting their prime in the era of flea market gluttony. Young girls in their teens and twenties held small bills in their sweaty palms looking for flashy feathers to strut their stuff. I too was once this way. Decorum is truly part of being young. Not that decorum disappears as you get older but it’s less pinned on your lapel and more running in your blood and your blood usually knows what works by a certain point and rejects things that don’t fit as it does with the wrong blood type. We no longer are looking for a purse in the shape of a goldfish to wear to a party so we can talk about the goldfish purse.

I think this process is all natural though, the goldfish and the lack of goldfish. And I know that after this flea market today all I feel like doing is getting rid of more of this stuff. I don’t even have that much stuff, but I’ve always dreamed of having a single dress in my closet, a pair of pants, my guitar, my voice, and my stories. Oh yeah, and a record player. Maybe some band-aids for paper cuts. Oh, the list gets longer. I am definitely amazed though by how much so many hold on to, or work for, or feel they need. I think I had to figure it out fast that so much could be eliminated to allow for me to have a lifestyle where I could center it around something so lucid and quixotic as songs. And now the treasures I find and do want to keep are much more backed with a story like money used to be backed by gold.

 I figured out the exact temperature drop while riding on the back of a scooter last night with my friend when we passed a digital bank clock. Being on a moped has the effect of making old things new. Restless in this newfound climate we left our respective houses to moped down to South Philly for a gin drink I had had at this bar once with muddled honeydew and candied thyme sprigs. We nightdreamed of being city planners and turning everything into park respites and turning abandoned old gas station garages into patio perfect Italian coffee klatches.

A renaissance of personal proportions is happening and I’m sending out wishes that others are feeling the same. I also think that realizing this renaissance existing in each other is crucial. Spend some time sitting with someone and listening, be his or her balm but also stoke that matchstick. If you need to, list the times in your life that you felt the most at peace on paper and by god reinvite some form of that back on in to your heart. I’m saying all this just as much for you as I am for me. I know that everything will go better if I can make peace with seasons and know that it will drop 25 degrees in a quick sashay of a breeze. Or it won’t. I should know that I may find that lost CD in another case at some point. Or I may not.  I know that a cared for notion is a seed for devotion.

I finished out this day two of the renaissance sidewalk chalkin’ with my nephews. We drew arrows to their shrubs on the stairs with the word “Bush” and then arrows into the house with the word “Busches”, group therapy I suppose for all the confusion we’ve faced. My one nephew drew a double-necked guitar not realizing that they existed beyond his imagination. “Oh they’re real” I said and debated whether to back it up with Google image fact or let him continue to draw his mythical beasts. Regardless, the renaissance definitely will involve double-neck guitars.