Thursday, April 29, 2010

a poem by the bedside...

Rain swarms and branches outside sway hello and
the even the dogs don’t look happy

There’s enough luck to go around.

My sheets are dotted green and white
and though it is time I can’t seem to change
them,
see i’ve been doing that a lot lately,
grasping onto small and unimportant objects
because they contain, like a winged creature in an amber
drop, a feeling, a menacing and nostalgic patter
of
tiny
tiny
wings
and I can’t for the life of me let them escape-
though they are not they, they are just whats or thats,
socks and the colors of the blankets together and with the curtains and the candle and drawer arrangements-
stupid, really,
to think that changing my shirt that for a few days looked good
would shift the earth, my heart, and I won’t get it back,
even
with the second rinse cycle
even
though i believed in its power as surely as i did not.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Air and light and time and Space


April. I had a neighbor named April when I was little. She came over and traded out our Peeps on Easter when my birthday fell on that day- I had a big cut on my eye with stitches and I believe it was my 7th birthday. My sisters and I didn't care much for the Peeps but traded for other gory and colorful stuff brought to us by the american holiday association.

This month has been good, maybe more than that, productive. At the beginning I went into "pre production" mode in my basement and started going a bit mad with arranging organic parts with a synth, which can paint a fine picture but also makes it hard to see the outcome. I wore the same "Dave King is my Homeboy" shirt for 3 days in a row, slept in it once, and was afraid to change it for fear of losing my momentum. My friend James was playing drums with me a bit in my little hovel downstairs and then one day my neighbor told me that she couldn't take it anymore. I asked her if there was room to budge, a good time or a bad time for us to play, and she said "No. I did the whole 'musician living in my house thing' when I was in my, like, twenties, in San Francisco". Oh. That explains it! Despite her blowing the whistle on my months of playing music down there before she up and started working from home, I haven't been much up to being there, and have been just playing around for friends and listening to the demos I do have and gripping slightly for the studio time coming up in May. I decided to do my record half at this studio in Cannon Falls (Home of the CANNON CAMERA!), Mn, called Pachyderm. My record "Lure the Fox" was recorded there. So was Nirvana's "In Utero" and PJ Harvey's "Is this Desire" among many many others, and you can hear it in the way the drums sound in the room- though the studio has changed hands and they got rid of their tape machine (sad), the room sound is hard to beat. The rest of the record we're doing at the engineer's farm house, which, I just found out, used to be a sanitorium. Alright. The cast of characters on this new record is lovely, and I absolutely can not wait for it to happen, have happened, be released. It's a wonderful and sometimes excruciating feeling, waiting on something good.

On May 20th I am participating as the musical guest on NPR's new show "Wits" recorded at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul. Apparently each show has a theme and the theme that night will be animals, so I found a couple of fun covers to do that night, and am hoping that an original animal song may appear sometime between now and then? Anyway, the guest author that night is Susan Orlean, who is famous for her book "The Orchid Theif", which I didn't read, but did see that strange movie "Adaptation", which was interesting. More information here.

In other news. Listening to: Bob Marley and the Wailers "In the Beginning", Neil Young "American Stars and Bars", The Strokes "Is this It", Samantha Crain "You (understood)".
Reading: Charles Bukowski "Last night of the Earth Poems". So good...see the one I posted below.

Thanks for reading. Happy Spring!
xo/hb




Air and Light and Time and Space by Charles Bukowski

"-you know, I've either had a family, a job, something
has always been in the
way
but now
I've sold my house, I've found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I'm going to have a place and the time to
create."

no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you're going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you're on
welfare,
you're going to create with part of your mind and your
body blown
away,
you're going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you're going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don't create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Yeah, yeah, and a birthday cake

I have been lazy with this blog. But that's okay because my MILLIONS of followers are so very patient with me. Tomorrow I will be 27 years old. I have a feeling this year will be good- all the shitstorms of 26 will rest, full, strong. And after my birthday, I will write a proper blog equipped with photos from this month and tell my eager sweating fans what the heck I'm up to these days!
xo/hb