now. i'm in the studio, handling the meniality of backing up all the audio files of a recently recorded classical saxophone album. this means burning a lot of data cds (bach disc 5 of 6 currently being verified), which means there's lots of time for me to go webtrawling, and it's a good opportunity to begin the necessary (perhaps) recap of the past week. i'm also listening to an album by "dead cat bounce," the regular band of a jazzer who was here this morning to discuss mixing of an album he just recorded in new york with heavies like curtis fowlkes and pheeroan akLaff. cool stuff.

so, i'll try to drag myself away from the pleasures of perusing developments that have gone down in my absence (in this case, almost in my presence) long enough to date y'all up a bit. i'ma try really hard to avoid the boring details (we got on the subway again) and only get bogged down by the interesting details.

Thursday 18 July
rebecca and i left at noon - chinatown bus (not fung wah) left late and took nearly six hours to get to ny, but at least it gave me some time to read my book. and watch some (only sometimes subtitled) kung fu movies.

rae's room in astoria (take the N or the W, ride all the way to the end) is full of everything that was in it in the barn, and is maybe even bigger. dropped my stuff there (impressively managed to fit a weeks worth of stuff into my one backpack - conveniently forgetting shorts) and went into the living/dining/bed/organ room to meet friends: sarah, jeremy, sam.

grape leaves and coconut soup with wine for dinner, all of which i enjoyed in spite of myself, and lots of talk of folky music - sam is working for jorma and is way into all that stuff, while rae, she'll reluctantly admit, is reading a "biography" (apparently there's a stigma attached that genre?) of dylan/baez/fari–a.

we really wanted to go dancing, like we've always said, but age laws, ignorance of clubs, the hour, the deadness of thursday, and general fatigue conspired to unmake that plan even as far as on the subway platform.

instead rae and i took frozen confection in a back garden-patio and walked home to a mountain of dishes. retired after a mellow day, but there was better to come.

Friday 19 July
first of many swattie sightings came early today - cindy leger also purchasing nj transit tickets at penn st. ours was ill-timed, so we detoured through a koreatown grocery and munched on seaweed all the way down to south orange.

mama solomon met us at the station and welcomed into her happily spacious and well-lit suburban home, complete with tuna salad and newspapers and cowboy junkies on mountain stage. my lyric-fodder/makeshift-phone book liked it too much. there we were able to contact matt+elena, who it turned out were only 15-20 min. away, but we drove back to the city separately.

the drive back to queens (to the accompaniment of side one of "def pie 98," always a fun memory trip) was fine, as was a mad scramble for housekeys before disembarking - what was less so was that only minutes after i got on the subway for brooklyn, it started to pour. i knew this because more and more of the people getting on the train were more and more drenched.

me with little more than skimpy shins-shirt and birks for protection from elements, i was as wet as i was going to get after the short (initially misdirected) walk from the f train stop to prospect park bandshell. but whatever. it meant there was a much thinner crowd than there would have been otherwise, and i was able to meet my party (matt in family man mode, with tireless e, the "fabulous maddie" and a friend of a brother with a trail of dead tee and a positive outlook in tow) most easily.

they had two umbrellas to share between the five of us - enough but pointless except maybe to hold in some of the heat in a situation where everyone is going to get soaked regardless and they'd just better not care too much - but perhaps worth it just to shield my remarkably warming $3 plate of rice and beans from the water.

it would have been better if nobody had umbrellas, because they just made it harder to see - by the time the brooklyn celebrate crew had gotten past rain-induced fears and technical difficulties to allow the show to actually begin (a pre-show talk by the man billed as "a brookyln positive rapper" was scrapped), the number of people had considerably increased - by so much as to include mike camilleri, and others.

zap mama were tight - three singer/dancers including a hildebrand lookalike and the ringleader mama with big cloak and goofy accent, plus a funky multi-instrumentstress and a perfunctory dj (as in "zap mama dj project") who dropped that beat from "I Know You Got Soul" (what's that sample again?) and moved the group's sound marginally closer to hip hop, which i thought it was fairly close to before. sweet harmonies, and just funk, like you're going to need if it's raining that hard in a brooklyn park and you've got several hundred attitudes to perk up.

more delays before the event - talib kweli in full effect, happy to be there and really convincing me of his prodigy. i've always liked him on record, but seeing him spit live, and really being able to focus on some of his lyrics - which are perhaps the most consistently intelligent i know of - took my appreciation to another level.

the show was fast-paced, mixing in faves from blackstar ("dedication," "brown-skin lady," "respiration") and his solo record, some from hi-tek and some great new (to me?) stuff (especially one great song about his 5-yr-old son - "how'm i supposed to tell him about this f*cked-up world" kinda thing), and lots of interaction with the crowd (who knew most of the words of course), and sharing the spotlight with the band - consisting of two back-ups singers (one a jazzyfatnastee) and an amazing dj (chas i think was his name) who took one of the best beat-matching/scratching breaks i've ever witnessed. matt unfortunately left midway through, before the blazing encore of "for women" (what a song.)

but probably the best part was even after that, when the last encore tune ended and talib was up there with the dj: "hey, can we play some stevie wonder records for you people?" [crowd goes wild and the dj slips on the opening notes of "Don't Worry About a Thing," and we all sing along.]

talib says "every boy grab a girl, every girl get a boy" and, wonder of wonders, there's a girl - all alone next to me, red tank top and yellow hair, and dj chas and talib are pumping out a steady stream of 70's soul and disco hits, dropping out the choruses for us to prove we know our stuff.

it ended too soon - my partner said to wait for her while she got a drink, but never returned; they dropped "billie jean," toyed with the intro for a while then just let it play out - but for a few minutes it was a magical summer rush, especially after the failure of danceplans to gel the previous night - to unexpectedly find myself at a brooklyn dance party with nothing particular to do but whatever i wanted.

of course, the night was far from over. the rain had stopped, midway through kweli's set, and the crowd that slowly moved out of the park and towards the subway had swelled accordingly. the weirdest of familiar face sightings - alli (dan's production assistant, whom i had seen not three days earlier) was there on the platform, with some friends down on the chinatown bus that afternoon for the show.

so i made my way to the village, and after an initial rebuff made it (albeit sublegally) into rae's joint, cafZ creole. i didn't have to entertain myself long before a macktet-ish jazz quartet started up (first short set including a smith-style "let's stay together") and some friends and tangential friends of rae's dropped by as well.

first jenny and andrea - that i could deal with, but then stephanie and a whole troupe of others started coming in, ordering mai tais and blue martinis and so on. no matter, of the bunch (ten or more) that i followed out onto mcdougal and beyond (rather than sit and wait for rae to finish her shift four hours later), only one (jenny) was really a first-hand friend, and several were unknown even to her (making them friends of friends of a friend of my friend.) but most, i gather, were, at one point, brown students, which makes them all likable and relate-to-able, i guess, in a kind of way.

there was, again, discussion of going out dancing, and various locations were mentioned, but we (at least the sub-group i, rather arbitrarily, ended up with) opted again for something more homely.

after stopping at the lime tree market for a six of miller high life, jenny (reminiscent of that girl michelle who's always at rsdn dances) and i joined stephanie (reminiscent of katie [la chance] from hartwick, and also somewhat of hanna mcd. those soft curly features..) and andrea (not particularly reminiscent of anyone, but a good person, you can tell, when someone slips into her bedroom to feed the fish and put on forever changes.)

i have a theory that the older you get, the more people look alike, because the more people you have already met that other people might remind you of.

i like being with the friends of friends - as long as it doesn't feel too much like a makeshift and oddly dependent situation with weird obligations - it's a pleasant way to interact with strangers with whom (not uncoincidentally) one often finds some compatability.

anyway, these were nice people - they shared their couch, their beer, their frosty water mug, and their mens and womens magazines (for analytical comparison of images. question: why do both mens and womens magazines have women on the cover? answer: because women are hot! [don't remember who said this]) gq had a bit on elvis c's top ten of the moment (including ghost world, a temptations album i've never heard of, and "my watch." and "my friend's book."

and, john, who finally showed up a while later, from an asian film society screening, even offered me a ride back to the bar. where i waited for rae to get off and tried to ignore what threatened to become a minor brawl.

the n got us back to queens as the sun rose, to the realization that our plans to meet early for breakfast in brooklyn were ill-founded.

Saturday 20 July
but we rose anyway and arrived at john's spacious but poorly-configured apartment in park slope, still proceeding according to the vague plans that nobody else seemed to be holding much stock in anymore.

found some kick-ass cheap mexican at uncle moe's (mole poblano enchilada with beans, rice, chips, and a sweet tamarind drink for under six bucks) which served as late breakfast, and then hopped the train to coney island, diverted on the way by a magnificent cemetary, strangers playing hangman, and roofs that would make perfect skateparks.

the incredibly impressive thing about coney island is that it hasn't turned into another shiny modern amuseplex, as one could so easily envision having happened. neither has it shrivelled to a lifeless shell of its former self, of more interest to history buffs than pleasure seekers.

the "they don't sleep anymore on the beach" guy on the godspeed record says "now it's shrunk down to almost nothing," and i guess that might be sort of arguable if you compare it to the sleekness and brash bombastic excess of much of modern america, but i can hardly imagine it was any more bustling and majestic in its purported heyday.

i mean, coney island is brash and bombastic. colorful and gritty and non-pc and all that. i mean, you know this (but maybe you don't know it's still like that - i assure you, go check it out sometime.) it's that old-timey american summer thing again - different, but perhaps not all that different, from what i described in my cedar point entry a few months back.

certainly, though the paved part of the pleasure park (on the opposite side of the boardwalk from the beach, where the music was set up) was thronged on this particular day with white college kids, all dolled up in their indie finery, one easily got a sense that it would be plenty crowded even if it were any other hot summer day, from the masses of folks on the beach and boardwalk who had i'm sure never heard of sleater-kinney: families and couples, black kids, latino kids playing in the waves, the great swelling in your heart of america, the big apple, a day by the seashore.

but i, of course, was there for the music. at least mostly. our initial foursome arrived on the scene around 2:30, and wandered noncommitally, just taking it in. a few tunes by the von bondies (noisy straight-up r'n'r, good or bad), then back to the other side to catch a bit of, i guess, pretty girls make graves. then back again, an abortive shot at getting close for les savy fav.

to nobody's real surprise, at least not after a while, we ran into countless swatties; at least one every half hour or so while we were walking around. the usual olde club crowde: matt and elena w/ sister, christy and jason, jessie colman and amalle and elinore, priti, catherine gaffney, dave mccandlish and erik and kate (oooh, erik and kate), blair and pt, and, reportedly, nick jarrett.

all these semi-chance encounters; i wished i could have taken the time to hung with (at least some of) them for longer than just the initial hey! moment, particularly after rae took off early to get to work, but it didn't quite work. they were going the other way, or i couldn't get away from my current group. oh well. guess i'll see them at school.

les savy fav (matt: the best live band in the world) couldn't quite put out the kind of energy they did in olde club, for all their manic stuffed-animal throwing, and even though i now knew the words (this show sounded a lot more like the record, i think). at least, they couldn't to me, standing 150 feet away because even this early the crowd was that packed. i mean, tim harrington even trimmed his beard, looking nowhere near as much like a homeless guy as he ought. what fun is that?

so we took the opportunity to ride the cyclone, with a lively bunch of greenshirted friends of jenny's. it's a bit steep ($5), but cool that you can pay for rides individually rather than the whole park. the standing offer, which they pitch when you get off, is to ride again for $4. but somehow we managed to talk them down to $18 or so for the eight of us (it wasn't quite precise.)

oh, man! that is a quality coaster. i have to say it rivals the millenium force for my best coaster experience of the summer. first of all, there was no wait at all. nothing fancy - just an old-style wooden coaster, not too jerky. great, great, non-stop action ride. the kicker is one hill, in the middle of the ride, where you zoom up at high speed. that catches you by surprise. so. cool.

after that rae and i went off to play in the ocean, frollicking happy in the waves, though glancing back nervously at our unprotected bag on the shore. and the plastic palm tree spraying water. whee.

we had to push our way to meet back up with jenny and john, though they were quite far back in the crowd. the yeah yeah yeahs were on stage ("our friends the yeah yeah yeahs. . .are on top of the world right now" , john had said the night before.) it was poppy and catchy and i dug it - probably would have been pretty into it if i were close enough to really see and hear, but from my vantage point the lead gal seemed a little too perfect a chrissie hynde clone.

as their set ended and another great readjustment began in the crowd makeup, rae unfortunately had to take off. andrea had recently arrived as well. it was time for the serious concert-attending to begin.

following my lead, the current quartet was able to push up to center right about four rows from the fence dividing us commoners from the disproportionately spacious press section about twenty feet in front of the stage. relationship of command played and i shuffled my shoes.

stephanie, there with another gal from the night before - laurie - and her sister, i think her name's debra, was only one row back from the fence, waving aloft proudly her new bunny, pastel jelly-beans on his bowtie and green ribbon. when i got close enough to ask her a while later, i learned she had not one this but been indirectly given it by mr. harrington.

a respectable pause (and a trio of costumed can-canners) and the announcement of albequerque's finest, fresh off the cyclone with their sheepish songwriterly negative-stage-presence intact from the last time i saw them open. no alarms and no surprises. james lost his glasses.

they aren't the tightest band around (the drummer, for his inventiveness, has sucky time), but the songs, the songs, people. a nice handful of new tunes which made me excited for a new album, whenever they may get around to gracing us with it. the new ones are maybe a bit rockier, i can't tell. no "new slang" but otherwise a fine set. i wonder if they convinced many newbies though.

the donnas. i was pretty disappointed that they didn't play "40 boys in 40 nights," or much else from that record (their most recent.) of course, all the older and newer stuff sounded just the same, but it's always nice to hear the ones you know. they did open with "are you gonna hit it," though, so that was nice. and of course, "…it's easy to see that you write about me in your diary" (couldn't resist.)

their stage presence is fun but kind of awkward, like overgrown 13-year-olds trying to pretend to be sexy but forgetting how. head donna (i don't know their last names) is a little too earnest for it to work ("okay! yeah! how's it going out there!" after, like, every tune.") the bassist is scary. the drummer is funny - she holds her right stick in a strange way that looks kind of painful. nice to have seen them though.

by this point i was in the second row of heads, as close as i wanted to be. a gaggle of giggly girls appeared next to us - they introduced themselves as members of kpoww, a womens wrestling troupe from kalamazoo who had performed earlier in the day. the one who talked the most reminded me of laura hirschfeld. if you can imagine her being in a womens wrestling troupe.

another odd 'tween-sets diversion: a duo of bizarrely-costumed performers with circular saws that made sparks shoot out when they applied them to metal plates on their costumes and "guitar." one of the more creative simulated sex acts i've seen. hmm.

and then, yeah, yeah, yeah, the main attraction. (the hoarse-voiced announcer said: are you ready for sleatter-kinney!? are you ready for sleatter-kinney!!?? here they are -- sleeeaaaataar-kinnneeey!!!?) now that's some rock and roll. fine fashion sense too.

my view of janet was somewhat obscured by carrie. but otherwise, great great great. they're so tight. i didn't even know 90% of what they played. a lot of it was new - and great - and they only did two from dig me out, the one that goes "it's not what you want, it's everything" and the set-closing title track, as well as the two i'm most familiar with from ahotb (hey, cool acronym), "ladyman" and "you're no rock and roll fun."

but it didn't matter, not really - it was all that familiar s-k sound. i might have to get some more of their records. punk energy, the whole crowd was in a frenzy. nice. an unbeatable day of fun in the sun. (and not even a sunburn to suffer for it, thanks to some sunblock from somebody sometime)

ahhh. and now what. we regrouped (seven give or take a few stray acquaintances) on the beach. while i sat on my backpack and removed a goldfish from my shoe, stephanie played volleybunny, and john checked his cell messages. "there's no power in manhattan" he reported.

but a minute later it was back on again, maybe. (apparently the outage had lasted for some eight hours, but timed perfectly so as not to affect us.) so we just had to make plans.

silly girls gave in to impulse and rushed semi-nude into the ocean, while a group of blunt-totin' boyz passed by, offering their commentary ("i don't want to see no balls!") the moon shines through scattered clouds. there's my lovely swatties again.

where we ended up was back in park slope, in a diner, with an expanded entourage. i ordered a feta burger and then went into the bathroom to change out of my bathing suit and sandy birks and back into hipkid cords and adidas. over food i silently named the bunny (percy) and the sister debra explained stock market economics to us. fantastic mints. (with filling! orange, green, liquorice.)

i realized the next morning that i must have left my sandals at the diner - nowhere else really made sense, since i know i had them there (to change out of), and i remember having hands free leaving - i would have carried them so as not to get my bag sandy.

it was a bad weekend for those birks. first they got completely soaked in the rain at the talib kweli show. then they got sandy (despite my attempts to prevent it) on the beach, and i spent most of the end of the concert in barefeet, with my two pairs of shoes piled nearby. no wonder they went and got lost, i guess. but, darn, those were good shoes.

already fully exhausted, i soldiered on, hopefully not trying andrea and stephanie's hospitality by accompanying them to their place. we started watching the shining on television, but barely made it halfway through before we were all so close to falling asleep that it was a useless pretense.

so i got the directions and meandered on down to mcdougal, where rae had said she'd be able to leave work early at any point after three. singing elliott smith to myself. no good - she ended up staying there until four and after, so i sat quietly for an hour sipping my oj and watching some 80s zombie movie on the soundless tv.

the night dragged on but the promise of bed before long kept us going, past an articulate wino who melodiously summoned us - "humans don't get drunk. humans only get drunk once every seven years, and then they come out and tell other humans to be themselves. like butterflies…" and he fluttered away, following his butterfly hands. (rae said that had to go here)

also, a special graffito beneath the subway seat, which i'm not going to remember fully now: very very extra special turbo miracle [something] punch - red fish smoked. oh, man, to bed to bed to bed.

Sunday 21 July
yawn. i was in a bad mood, if not right when i got up, a short while later. my joy of imminent wanakena momentarily checked by continuing fatigue, the realization of sandal loss, and perturbation at the lateness of our start. (if we slept six hours we woke at 11:30.)

rrgh. rae, thankfully more cheerful than i despite similar exhaustion, went out on errands (bank and bread) and i called the folks, packed up and cleaned up. we decided to try looking in the diner ourselves, even though the morning crew member i spoke to on the phone had no luck finding the shoes.

that meant delaying our departure with a side-trip to brooklyn. worse, super-rae's supernatural directional powers failed her (when she was little, she used to peruse her family maps and atlases frequently, until one day an atlas that had lain too near a leaky electric outlet fell on baby rae's head, and ever since that day she's had magical powers of direction.)

yeah. we took a wrong turn and ended up going more than a full mixtape side out of our way (and we were listening to tapes of my wsrn shows, so that means 60-minute sides.) and to no avail. (i later called the joint in the evening, and that wasn't helpful either.) at least i got another fine breakfast at uncle moe's (this time with a deliciously light horchata to drink.)

some more minor direction problems, but soon we were on our way, finally, out of the city. hooray! up into the north for my favorite place.

the drive was long - due to one particular missed turn late in the day, it took much longer than it should have - we didn't get in until around 11. but mostly enjoyable.

we listened to rae's tape and more of my radio shows, and talked about music, work, the city, family, and more. i nursed rae's broken heart (a bad case, as it seems from hearing her say it - though it shows little outwardly), tried to help her understand. sad songs help and hinder - we ended up listening to "when you were mine" six times in a row, in different versions (crooked fingers' is truly magical.)

i drove the last three hours, from just beyond lake george where we stopped to call in our lateness report. took a little while to get up to speed (literally) with loose-rules back-country two-lane driving, and a bit of practice with brights operation, but it was great fun to really get behind the wheel for a good stretch.

i turned off the radiotape because of a headache, and we made up the difference for the rest of the trip singing stephin merrit tunes. the charm of the highway strip, if we remembered the words, would have fit perfectly. instead, 69 selections. rae offered thoughts on the self-indulgence or the indulgence of sad songs.

finally we got there. yes. my cute parents (as rae kept iterating.) a new bear (wooden statue. it's fun to pat.) late night again, sort of, doing artwork for martha's b-day present. and a peaceful sleep.

after all these days
on godforsaken highways
the road don't love you
and it still won't pretend to