Pre-Tour Spiel!

OK!

Teaching is done...this week went on forfuckingever. Is it like this for all bands before they leave for tour? The week dragged, and I felt mixes of excitement and apprehension (leaving Sarabird sucks)...but now it's here, and we leave tomorrow...air-drumming to "Young, Loud, and Snotty," trying to actually PRACTICE the drums for once on cushioned barstools in our apartment. Johnny Mandansky...he had this dormant Bonham gene that not even punk could kill, and I like playing along to the Dead Boys...to something relatively straightforward, w/ fills--TRIPLET FILLS (John Bonham, to the white courtesy phone!)!!!--

Ready to get out of Chicago. Living here for 9 yrs.--reeling in every year--and the HIGHFALUTIN THRILL of it ain't there no mo--I don't know if it's just because it's unaffordable or if I'm just giving in to natch tendencies of jadedness--usually when I travel I appreciate Chi more than I did before--but Hoben's leaving in Sept., and you start thinking of Nelson Algren and that whole thing about "no matter how much you love [Chicago], it will never love you back..." And that's not to say I give a runny crackwhore's turd what these snarky indie-rock faggabeefy chinstrokers think, but it gets a little old being just another toothpicked horsdeouervre (did I spell that right? no? sorry...) on the tray. But then there's something special to latch onto...all the little things that make living here so goshwow neat.

But it's also like 110 degrees Celsius outside, and that's no fun. Leaving sounds like a good thing rights about now...and really...when it's all said and done...I'm just stunned that more than the four people who play in this band even give a shit about what we're doing. That in itself is tremendous fortune. It's not triple-platinum fortune, and let's not kid ourselves, it never will be, but that's definitely just as well.

I'd like to think that I will take voluminous notes while we play all these places, but I doubt it. I would love to write the definitive tour diary, but--[like, ugh!]--is there anything duller in zinedom/blogland than a guldurn tour diary? It's like the collegiate kid's hippy journey to Yosemite betwixt semesters--it seems so EXCITING when you do it--but when you actually try to write it--it's the same ol' same ol' routine of 1. get to town 2. play the show 3, be stunned by some quirky person you meet who doesn't act like people from where you live 4. drink a lot 5. etcetera (whatever that is for you) 6. lather 7. rinse 8. repeat....and don't get me wrong here because I LIKE IT and IT BEATS THE SHIT OUTTA WORKING and it is a whole lot of fun, it's just that writing about it rarely does justice to it.

Hmm...maybe I will write on here and tell you all about how it's going, but maybe I won't, and go into it later when I go back...but I feel way more optimistic about this tour than the other 2 tours we did. I don't know if it's because I'm not the one who owns the van or if the band itself feels like something less stupidly chaotic than it did 2 yrs ago, but I think it will be a real real good time.

Bananas and Arizona and Peasants with Free Milk

The night after that now somewhat-notorious Fall show in Arizona involving the banana and all that heehaw, I had an e-mail forwarded to me from a friend who had a friend who went to same Fall, describing everything that happened, the banana, the banana throwing coward running out of the club, the chants of "U! S! A!" and my two immediate thoughts were these:

1. For some reason, it made me think of Neal Cassidy dying alone, pilled up in Puerto Rico, dying while counting the number of planks on a traintrack--for "kicks," one can suppose.

2. Mark E. Smith telling Richard Meltzer (as relayed on page 551 of the Meltzer collection "A Whore Just Like the Rest") that Smith thought London was "'too French,' unlike Manchester, his home 'The Norman Conquest didn't make it that far north.'")

As for #1, it's that feeling of "what was that guy doing there?" and for #2, it tied into other comments from Mark E. Smith about his loathing for leaving Northern England. Compared to Manchester, Arizona must have been the most miserable place in the world, especially with banana squish in your hair smacked on you by some lame hipster who thinks he's being caustic and iconoclastic while a bunch of Americans yell "U!S!A!" while the whole thing goes down. I've never been there, but I've always imagined Arizona to not be that far off from Florida in terms of geographical isolation, stifling exurbs, very strange rednecks, and plentiful crap drugs. For Smith to be there...it wouldn't be that far to compare it us playing an army base in Siberia.

What an awful spectacle to have happen during the sunset of your career, after putting out some great great records. (I especially loved this quote from Meltzer re: The Fall just a few lines down: "The Fall were more intelligent, more after-the-end-of-the-world (a/k/a 'post-rock') AND more sonically compelling than Sonic Youth (if less nerd-empowering)."

Nerd empowering. I like that phrase a lot. It kinda makes me laugh. It seems that Mark E. Smith was a bit more nerd-empowering in Arizona. The nerd who hit him with the banana, after running from an obvious black belt heavyweight prizefighter like Mark E. Smith, went to that stupid indie website all the snobby indie-rockers drool over [you know the one, and i won't give you a link to it] to explain that in essence, he did it because, get this, Mark E. Smith is kind of a (drumroll please....................................) BIG JERK.

This is news, evidently. The anti-rockstar mentality of Creem has been reduced to this smarmy pussified indirect action that does nothing but foster a kind of anti-snob snobbery (those mean old jocks and rednecks don't understand me and my taste in western shirts...)---in the face of actually having to DO SOMETHING about what's happening out there-----it's much easier to just be a big dick over something as silly as MUSIC.

If the 90's turned into an age of irony over the garbage pop culutre wrought over the previous 50 years, it's clear that what's emerging in this decade (it's 2006 now, so we can make these kinds of calls) is an overarching pattern of callous, self-serving mean-spiritedness over our disagreements. Here and there, I've surely been just as bad. Just as the 90's saw rocknroll and punk get co-opted for good as SAFE PRODUCT FOR NORMALS, now we're seeing the iconoclasm of Mencken, Dorothy Parker, HST, Bangs, Bukowski, etc. etc. etc. dumbed-down and the dissent is going towards, what? Pitchfork? [There, I said it.] Vice? Chunklet? Empty barrels, signifying nothing, especially post 9/11.

There's a scene (I think it's in there, but I"m never able to find it, but it stuck w/ me) in Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch" where this group of intellectuals are going on and on about existentialism (or something) while the baby of one of said intellecuals dies right in front of them. Nobody does anything about it. They just keep talking about their smartdude stuff.

The comparisons of that to what's happening in America are obvious. I don't know what to do about it, just yet. However, we can start by saying this: If you're going to attack a punk rock legend for whatever reason with a brightly colored fruit in a town far far away (on many levels) from said punk rock legend's hometown, be ready to take a punch (and probably a weak old man punch) and not scurry away. It's a start--a small start--but a start nonetheless.