FALL

I sat on this bench
And watched some Mexican painters
fool around with some tall ladder.
All dressed in white and talking fast,
they were trying to get the job done before dark

It was getting cooler, like
Fall was just pulling up the drive,
Almost ready to turn out the headlights,
Come in and stay a while.

He’d leave soon enough,
But he’s always welcome company, you know?

We sit in the parlor playing cards.

“The sun looked like God was trying to punch through it today.”
“Yeah, I saw that.”

He’s always glum.
But he’s someone you can never see fault in, sometimes.

“Is Summer here?”
“No you just missed her.”
“Oh.”
“Winter’s coming later.”
“I heard. But I actually should be going.”

Friends are the people you can always trust to never hesitate to leave.

if you don't mind my dog's head

also, go to www.lomaxarchive.com. sign up for a log in and stuff, it's free, and it'll open you up to the wonderful world of all alan lomax's shit. it's so good. there are photos, recordings, lists of all the field recording trips he took. so many great things.

did you know that burl ives cooperated with the joe mccarthy hearings? outing folks like pete seeger as commies? i mean, it was true, but still and all it's like ives ratted him out so he could continue appearing on kids morning TV shows and christmas specials.

anyway, i played the guy's guitar last tuesday. one of em anyway. it's just hanging out under a table in the folklife center of the library of congress. it's pretty cool. classical. like daren's old WWII greek beast.

i love the library of congress.

waiting on a subway line!

i was thinking about the john legend song "ordinary people" yesterday. i heard it while i was giving blood. but i'll get to that later. but the song, right, it's so wierd! i must have heard that song about 50 times. no joke. i mean i think i heard it in TDR last year about 40 times.

anyway, so the song, you've heard it. it was everywhere last year. a pop r&b sensation, right? but it's so unlike every other overproduced radio hit-- there's no danceable beat, no swoopy harmonies or anything. just a guy and a piano.

i used to not like the song. the words just kind of got to me. they seemed way to literal and, i guess, ordinary. i don't know. seemed like something out of a nicolas sparks novel? "though love sometimes hurts/ i still put you first." and then the phrase "we're just ordinary people" always irked me-- it's honesty was a little too much. i found myself kind of feeling icky after hearing it, you know?

but as i was sitting there, getting drained of a pint of blood, i realized how unlikely a hit the song was. how many songs do you hear on the radio that are just a guy and a piano? it's at once a reaction against the overwrought production of most radio hits, embracing simplicity and honesty in songwriting rather than posturing and booty shaking, and a continuation of the same genre, somehow appealing to the same audience as other pop standbys.

of course, my knowledge of r&b goes about skin deep.

anyway, you know when you give blood, and they fill up the bag, and then they fill up about 6 test tubes for, you know, testing. the nurse, through a series of clamping and cutting or something, somehow diverts the blood to a different tube, and into this contraption that snaps onto the test tubes (lots of tubes, sorry). the nurse snaps the test tubes onto the contraption, opening the flow of blood, and it shoots into the test tube! a fine stream of speeding blood, right before your eyes. it's unreal, like seeing a wild animal roaming the streets. normally that animal's trapped inside your veins, but now you see it running wild, filling up a little tube.

wild.

kickerkreet

we had a great show last night. the new line-up is as follows: Scotty Meinke on the cello. he was a guy who down the hall from me last year. i new him vaguely from various places before-- class, mutual friends, etc. he'd been to one of our shows before, one of the kay shows, the one we played with robert stillman's horses and flying.

(he liked us and mentioned a couple of times that if we ever needed someone to paly cello, he'd be into it. but last spring i was still in the mind set where i didn't want to put anything solid together, instead wanting a more laid back group that hardly ever practiced. ie, stupid.)

but scotty's great-- he wrote most of his own parts, and he's really into it, which is great.

Russ plays the violin. he's a freshman, i actually just met him a few weeks ago. he lives on a friend's floor, so when she saw him move in with a ton of instruments, she introduced us. he's pretty good-- a quick learner, able to pick up parts and make them his own relatively quickly.

best of all, both can do auxillary percussion parts. which is more than i can say for some folks i've worked with in the past. folks, meet a can with rice in it. now shake it. thank you.

so basically it was the most fulfilling shows in a long time. i'm hoping it'll be the first of many.

-cd

PS i'm putting all my REM albums on my computer. finally. i mean what took me so long.