Also, this.

bell rock jingle rock bell

Happy Christmas

About this time each year, there would be huge letters outside of the World Trade Center. They were big and silvery and would spell out "Peace On Earth".

I dont know what became of those letters, but in their absence, we seem to have forgotten.

May we all have the peace we need.

Yoko Ono took out an ad in the times last week... "War is over, if we want it."

Happy Christmas.

The Quartet

The trials and tribulations of our beloved Maxwell's Demon are the basis for a short film written by Nick Miede and Zach Zangl for submission to Sundance's ProjectDirect. While Nick says a final cut is still in the works (possibly featuring an end-scene with your very own Maxwell's Demon as 4/7's of the Castro Septet) here is the film as submitted to Sundance. Nick and company, thank you so much, this was so much fun and it looks great!

Period Great.

When dear friends from Academy ask me how life goes in the city, I invariably tell them the same thing. "Great." Not exclamation-point-great, that's the great that comes with a record contract, a book deal or a gallery show, or at the very least a car that doesn't squeak from every joint (Kay knows this dude's girlfriend). But period-great is the kind of great that goes with playing multiple gigs per month, writing in one's spare time, and knowing that your car could still smoke 95% of cars on the road, noises nonwithstanding. Usually, each November, I get sunk in an "I'll never be an artist" or an "I'll never do anything that matters" stink, where the very act of thinking calls forth mental groans and huge gaps of the existential variety.
It's December, and I still have the wintertime blues a bit. Too many of my days are spent writing for way less money than is OK and watching shows on Hulu, not enough of my days are spent building things or writing for free. But by and large...
The band has been writing new songs at a surprisingl voracious pace, and they are sounding better and better by the week. I'm finally writing the songs I want to, getting to lyrics that exorcise the year's demons, and garnering the much coveted praise of my often-more-prolific bandmates. Recently, when those "you're not amounting to anything" devils raise their heads and taunt me about that novel project I still haven't written, I push them aside to start hashing out lyrics. I'm letting my creativity flow where it may with the knowledge that thats all I can ask of it. And I think that's what a lot of it is about. I hope.

Stormy Wednesday

So Kay's brother is in town this week, coming over from the opposite coast and playing a few gigs with his girlfriend Alice, in town from France (the other opposite coast). We've been spending some time with them, and they're great fun. So after practice two nights ago I went over to Williamsburg to catch their gig. They were playing folk-rock stuff with an excellent backing band, two old friends of Kay's brother's.

So a beer or two after the show ended, the musicians were walking back to their instruments and playing along quietly with the jute-box. I'd been talking shop with the guitarist, and after a while, picked up his strat while he was playing around on bass. The bartender must have liked what was happening, because he cut the jute-box, and we launched into a rendition of Stormy Monday. I have not felt that musically "on" in the longest time. The other musicians were incredible, and we just flowed into the song like we'd been meaning to do this all night. After Stormy Monday, The guitarist and I switched, and played a few tunes, eventually the events at hand coaxed Kay's bro and Alice to come back up and polish off a second set. It was awesome.

Met a bunch of wonderful people, friends of Kay's brother from Duke, including a budding screenwriter who works at an auction house to pay for his writing habit, and this wonderful cat from rural North Carolina who studies international law and moved to NYC for a woman who left him. (we had a good long talk about South Carolina girls, as well.) It was also kind of nice to hear some real drawls again.

Last night, I saw Jay's side project, Predator Raw, Bushwick's finest stoner-metal quartet to date, and then caught up with Kay and company, and spent hours drinking and coming up with band names like "Custer's Last Band," and "Fiddle Bighorn".

I finally finally finally got a new cell phone. No more dropped txts, no more "wait, really? you called me?" and most importantly, no more waiting literally 5 minutes for the phone to boot up and find a signal, only to reboot again at random.

My phone finally kicked the bucket upstate, so I ran to Oneonta to get a new phone. The woman at the wireless store asked me for my number, and i realized that its a pretty unique thing to our generation, that our phone numbers stay with us. They become part of where we're from. I'm a 201. My whole gang of friends from way back in the day is made up of 201's. I hang out with a group of 860's, who got their phones back at school, and I date a 757.

heh, just think its kind of cool.