I’m writing this blog from Dallas, Texas. I’ve been on the road touring with Hermit Thrushes (I play guitar) since Friday, March 13th. So far so good. We had shows all the way down to Austin from Philadelphia, plus an in-studio radio set with KXUA and a newspaper interview in the Fayetteville Flyer, both in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Also, a highlight for me: a shout-out in Magnet, one of my favorite music magazines.
We’ve been traveling in a big retired retirement home bus that runs on diesel (we’re working on using veggie oil). To offset some of the costs, we took four extra people on the way down — Elizabeth Devlin, an autoharp player; Cheryl Nguyen, a violinist/violist who is doubling as our merchandise seller; Greg Sandler, who is possibly making a video documentary about this trip; and Gater, a guy from West Virginia who was moving to Austin. Elizabeth, Greg, and Cheryl are still with us on the way back. We also just picked up Danielle, on her way to Fayetteville.
The man who made mostly all of this happen is Sam Tremble, a PBQ editor from Philadelphia. He has a gift of finding people who are making things happen and convincing them to let the band do something, anything. He’s also been blogging about this trip in Philadelphia’s Citypaper.
Two bands worth checking out that we’ve played with so far: Invisible Hand and Quiet Hooves. Quiet Hooves, from Athens, Georgia is what I think of when I think of Athens music — bands like Neutral Milk Hotel, Beulah, Circulatory System (who I’ve just been told is coming out with another album August 4th), Olivia Tremor Control, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Major Organ and the Adding Machine. Oh, I could go on for a while about Athens bands. Circulatory System is one of my favorite albums.
We still have about one week left in the tour. We’re playing in the same places we hit on the way down. Hopefully the bus will get back to Philadelphia in one piece. I’ll have more hyperlinks next week, I promise.
Perspectives
Posted in Books, Commentary, Uncategorized on March 23, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I like tall buildings. I like tall buildings with rotating restaurants, observation decks, and those silvery view finders that make the user look like she’s manning a spotlight on a battlement instead of spotting some monument on the horizon.
This jones of mine for impossible perspectives demands to be met when I travel. (Ask Kathy—she’s got the itch too: we’re forever looking for rotating restaurants when we head out to an AWP. Any tips for Denver? Anyone?)
I love it too when this desire for impossible perspectives shows up in literature—think Gatsby’s green breast; think De Certeau’s vertiginous homage to Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center; think Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel Netherland, which culminates with a healing vision of London from atop the London Eye. His hero and his hero’s 9/11-traumatized family are reunited in one of the po-mo Ferris wheel’s pods, contained, secure, and simultaneously hoisted in a see-through bubble above the city.
So, on my recent visit to London, I made sure to hit the Eye too. My boyfriend and I (hi Jonathan!) had days and days of sunshine, odd for London, and now we’re convinced the Thames is always glittering: we missed the fog, but we could see for miles from the Eye.
Picture it: we’re in one of those plexi-glass capsules, slowly ascending the 443 foot Ferris wheel structure (it’s also called The Millennium Wheel and the whole structure a carnivalesque lark above the skyline). All my spidey-senses tingling, feeling all that god’s-eye-hubris such views inspire.
And I started to think about the way movies teach us to see. Here’s the panoramic establishing shot: ‘Ello London. Vast grey horizon glittering into the distance. (Does an establishing shot work like deductive reasoning? Is this the move that movies make from the general to the specific?)
Now cut to this: less than an hour after we’d spun over the skyline, we were on the Tube to Hampstead Heath. The Heath is a huge hunk of public park land (story goes that here Keats heard his nightingale). From its highest point you can look back and see the city skyline in the distance. So we tumble out of the station, hoof it up the hill, look at one of those “You Are Here” maps, then make our way into the bramble. The trees have not yet bloomed, so the woods feel stark, a hovering quiet shot through with blue sky and a sinking afternoon sun.
(Hang on. If the establishing shot moves the viewer from the general to the specific; does the inductive move of the specific to the general mean that a close up is a kind of inductive cinematic rhetoric?)
Now picture this, in close up. We spot a man sitting down with his back against a trash bin. I can see he’s bobble-headed, can hear he’s singing to himself—so I think, OK, a drunk in the park.
What I don’t see right away is that his pants are around his ankles. What I don’t see, until it’s too late, is that he’s got his pecker out, holds a Stella in his other hand, and greets us with a grin and, wait for it, “‘Elloooo!!!!”
London.
Read Full Post »