The slow movement of days, tomatoes are on the vine and are becoming ready. Basil and cilantro, peppers and arugula ready for the harvest.

I spent last week spending out letters and CDs, and this week am guilty of monitoring the results. I feel that a lot of this is like fishing. Actually its like watching the tomatoes grow. You harvest what you can, what you will, what you may.

I miss Portland, I miss all the places I haven’t lived while living here. I miss being around a lot of people doing a lot of things.

Its slightly early for Summer to end, I do believe. One must read “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury before it is over.

Stay tuned for the video for ‘Closure’, approaching completion, and, still mastering “One Sung Over”, from 1997 so keep an eye out for that.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sleepy today because last night stayed up watching the lunar eclipse. It was a gorgeous mysterious sight, and we set up the telescope to take it in, as the red glow overtook the whole moon.

I’ll put up some pictures from that this week. Also: started work on the video to “Closure”. Finishing masters of my early albums for the online offerings of those.

laying low tonight as the sun set a little earlier.

This week I put together footage from the performance last weekend, and have it up on youtube, last.fm, here, et cetera.

So its there, and it is good.

I’m visualizing my life in the coming year. Who knows where I’ll be, but I have good thoughts on what I’d like to be doing. Mainly playing/collaborating. I want to meet people who want it to happen.

A hot day and a light breeze, pomegranite juice and flax seed tortilla chips.

Time to water the plants.

Power Palooza was wonderful. The experience couldn’t have gone better… a great crowd, a nice night, good sound. I played on top of this building while various lights and movies went off, it was pretty epic. People were telling me that this giant meteor lit up the sky while I played. So, that ruled, basically.

I will be posting video of the performance, so stay tuned. I’m looking forward to playing more of Midnight Door live, it went very well. The cello all big and epic and the beats booming out of big speakers, couldn’t be better for me!

Also, I have a new video from the “Song For My Father” series. AND, my pal Eric Lee Dickerson is getting started on a video for “Closure”, track 1 on Midnight Door. We have this ambitious plan to get all 20 tracks some video action… which gets me thinking… perhaps some of you can/would like to contribute to this effort.

ALSO: last night I was digitally remastering my early early recordings. I plan to offer the albums “One Sung Over” (1997), “THIS” (1998), and “Still Dream” (1999) for FREE here on the website to folks who create a user account. So stay tuned for that as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

august is more than midway, Kate and Pete have had their birthdays, Nate’s is coming up.

Last night played the Power Palooza event on top of a roof with the green lights spinning all around and the summer night. All day in the art room practicing, and coming up with a few new songs.

Yes summer

last weekend we were on the beach, Navarro beach south of Mendocino and we watched the meteor shower with the new moon keeping the sky dark. We visited the Big River Ranch where we used to live and saw Lucky the landlord. The buildings were in ill repair, all were moving out, and it flashed in my mind to take it on as a perfect life project, trim the apple orchards, get the garden going, carve the paths out of the woods. Shangri-La.

But who is to say. Kate made peach cobbler from the peaches there, we were back in reality and spending our time on music and painting, which is the way it ought to be.

Currently reading :
The Matarese Circle
By Robert Ludlum
Release date: February, 1979

Things are rolling along so fast. Today is a strange wake up day for me.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts and things going on the line. The CD “Midnight Door” is getting into iTunes as we speak, I’ve made a couple of short videos and am working on more.

Played last Thursday with Aaron Ross and the band at the Miner’s Foundry in Nevada City. The show was incredible, the most fun I’ve had playing music in a long time, and such a great group of musicians.

So yes, the other night worked out quite well. Thursday evening drove down to Davis and was helped out graciously by the nice fellows who worked there and who worked to make the sound great.

The best thing about the performance for me was that I knew that perhaps my brothers, a few aunts and uncles, my ma & pa and friends were all listening at the same time.

Radio is still a great and relevant medium, and not in the least due to the fact of its immediacy. Also, radio really does connect people within their various communities. And stations like KDVS and KVMR really do pull things together within a community. A perfect example is when, during the one big snow we had up here in Nevada City, KVMR djs were diligently on the air letting people know basically all the information they would need to know, that they really wouldn’t be able to get from anywhere else, including the internet, which is generous but sometimes not relevant.

I won’t lie, this show tomorrow night (KDVS, 11pm-12pm May 24, is making me anxious!

Why you ask? Well let me tell you that they are giving me an hour of air to fill… and people will be listening (maybe), and, and, well, you know… OK, here is one thing. It is easy for me to play to a big room of people, preferably who don’t know me well, but playing to a small room to friends is almost impossible. Its paralyzing, well, in a way, it just feels weird. So that’s why, friends, I am not always giving impromptu concerts.

And this gig is kind of in between… it will be kind of like being alone… except the mic will be on. So its like a big room with strangers, except, its also kind of intimate.

I am looking forward to it. I’m preparing for it by running through the set list and generally sinking into it. My big concept is to have improvisation play a big role in between songs… its something I never get tired of on the cello, and for me, I would love to hear more… intimate music on the radio… a person with a piano, a person with a sax, thinking, and playing, and that is what you hear. No performance basically. Anti-Performance Art.

Its getting dark. Here is what my practice room looks like right now…

Practice Room

05)17(05 its 310pm

A hazy humidity sits over the lush South Congress St. district of Austin. The bamboo sways in the backyard I’m sitting in, and the birds sing constantly. I can hear the sounds of traffic and city life, cars shifting gears, sirens in the distance, and that constant mid range hum that a city carries with it in warm weather.

I’m sitting in a reclined green lawnchair in Kate’s sisters apartment complex. It feels like home though we’ve been here only about 24 hours. Tess and Arnold and Gabriel have been warmly hosting us, showing us around their favorite spots in Austin, making sure we have everthing we need, and providing a comfy safe spot to rest up for a little while.

It has been over a month now that we’ve been on the road, and far too long since I’ve had time to sit down and sum it up. I started with the money, since that is a big thought on our mind, and a decent enough way to keep track of how its all going. We’ve been pretty good, frugal enough, three hundred dollars a month or so on food, about twice that on lodging, too much, two hundred plus on eating out, mostly burritos that we split, no big meals, and again too much on coffee, fifty bucks in a month getting coffee in coffee shops. But that’s how it goes. Money goes, and you know, I can justify the coffee, all the coffee shops we’ve been in are probably the most accurate portrayers of a particular slice of culture in a place, and if there is no coffee shop, well, that says a lot too.

For instance Austin. Yesterday we sat at a nifty hip place called Bouldin Creek Coffeehouse, ‘coffee dealers’ they advertise. We needed a place in the shade to sit while after sifting along the Congress street treasures and finding what was what in the 90 degree heat. All around us tables of young and fashionable sat, unshaven no doubt band mates, college kids leaned over big books, and thirty something liberal type families whose kids swung restlessly from the trees. And that kind of provides a good glimpse of Austin in a way: a plethora of college age kids, kind of wandering the tree lined streets, somewhat affluent and politically minded families, buying up the cute real estate and planting attractive gardens, bumper sticker buyers asserting their tendencies, and all in all, a healthy mix of easy going people.

The fact that it has been a whole crazy short and long month is hard to believe. Where we started in Yosemite feels as fresh in my mind as yesterday, on the shores of Inks Lake State Park, in the Hill Country of Central Texas. But I can feel myself changing in positive ways, I can gauge my travel smarts beginning to come naturally, and I can see Kate and I getting to be pros at the packing and unpacking game, the starting of campfires, and the cooking of healthy meals on a two burner propane stove. We’ve found ways to save money, seen more interesting sites, had a lot of fun, written a lot, taken a lot of pictures, generally loving it all.

The only thing I’m not loving is my sorry state of writing affairs, and today I want to begin catching up. Its hard not to procrastinate, as procrastination seems to be inherent with HUGE projects, and as such, I have found that even my past updates have been grossly understated.

But I’ll start from The Southwest, because that is where I still am, and hopefully I can make a little story out of it.

Ahem:

THE SOUTHWEST

Seeing the Grand Canyon is one of those things you hear about from childood when you grow up in the west. There is such a huge feeling about the whole geographic location that inevitably the mind fills itself with mythical images of it. In my mind i had pictured sort of a gian notch in the earth, a giant parenthesis filled with emptiness and bottomed out by a magnificent river. Always it seems the topic of the grand canyon ends with: …but I can’t explain it, its too big for that’. And so I pictured in my mind a really big parenthesis, so instead of this:

( )

more like this

( )

Its just how my mind explained it.

But its much more than this. The Grand Canyon is of such vastness that it is in fact many canyons with in one canyon. The bottoming out of flat land from out of Northern Arizona truly comes as a surprise, and the Canyon falls gracefully and with many hues of pink, blue, red and green down thousands of jutting points of rock. Waaaaaay down at the bottom the river moves along, from the general tourist vista nothing more than a pencil line silently there. The shapes are mystical and strange, and the vastness, no matter ow long you stare out at it, never really makes sense. I know that had Kate and I gone for a big hike to the floor and mule ride back up we would have had a much better perspective, but we had only a short afternoon.

We had only a short afternoon because we decided to miss the touristed campground. Our experience in Yosemite was fantastic save for the parking lot circus atmoshpere of the campground. We were pulling in sadly on a Saturday early afternoon, and so of course there were hoardes of people. In fact, the only disappointment in the whole of the Grand Canyon has got to be the noise. We quite word for word heard one person say “did you get the picture? good, lets go shopping!” (I promise I am not kidding or exaggerating).

The attitude of the general public at the easy to reach points of view is that they should yell at each other instead of talk, let kids run wild and scream if they get “too close” to the edge, and generally be thoroughly disrespectful to the grandeur, excitement and I would guess, though I didn’t experience, peace of the place. Tess (Kate’s sister) was telling me that the early explorers noted a sense of sadness dormant in the Canyon. I felt sad that there wasn’t at least a quiet area to sit and reflect, but was otherwise thrilled. I must admit too that I was thrilled to be able to say I saw it. Yes its superficial, but it is one of those places on earth that merit a certain “I joined the club” feeling, like Las Vegas, for instance.

Since we had resolved to avoid the tourist throngs at the Grand Canyon, we headed down through Flagstaff (again) to join the tourist throngs in Sedona. OF course, we didn’t expect this, but there is just cause to the number of people that vacation to the cool creeks and red rocks of this amazingly picturesque town. As you approach Sedona from Flagstaff you head down a winding canyon into a creek bed lined with trees, oak and pine and you get your first glimpse of the soaring spires of red rock. We had our maps pinpointed with the three National Park campgrounds along the way toward Sedona, and, since we are picky with our campsites, we took a while to choose a spot among the very crowded very busy sites. But we had to settle, we were tired, and there wasn’t a whole lot we could do that evening, aside from driving ourselves mad with stress and ignorance of options. So we settled down, and then drove into Sedona. Over coffee and bread at a ritzy balcony having coffee shop we determined that:

Sedona has easily one of the best natural backdrops of any city anywhere.

People with minidogs in their arms wear gucci sunglasses drive Lexus SUV’s and vacation or live in Sedona.

It would be neat to check out the several “energy vortexes” that surround Sedona.

As the sun set, we drove up a dirt road just outside of the town close to the most easily accessible Energy Vortex. I had determined this location by stopping in one of the many new age shops and perusing one of the many books about energy vortex. The place I found my information was called “The Center For The New Age” and was looked over by a bored looking woman and sat nicely over a rushing creek. Up at the energy vortex I must admit that the sunset was amazing in the way that light refracted among the spires of red rock. There was a creek running 200 feet below us and birds chirped serenely.

I felt a sense of meditative peace, and it may or may not have been a vortex, but it was a nice scene. Also, I had a kind of misunderstanding with Kate about an hour before and we talked it over nicely, me feeling humbled and dumb for the insensitivity I had displayed. I always consider a good look at myself and my actions a good example of meditation resolving stupidity. The tiff had occured when we were in a New Age-y gallery on the main tourist strip of Sedona. I had thought it would be interesting to purport myself as not only an art collector but as a working artist who may or may not be famous. I did this because 90% of the galleries I had been to, especially on this trip, had treated me somewhat disgustedly if I walked in in my usual trip attire with obviously no intention of buying something. And so I faked it, and sure enough, the gallery owner or worker was enthralled to know what I made, how I sold it, whether I would like to show them any works et cetera. All this when I didn’t have a “work” to show. And Kate, well, this is her world, or her deserved world. Kate is such a talented and original painter that she deserves to be selling pieces for ridiculous amounts of money in the most glitzy of yuppie galleries. But you see, that is the problem… the art world can be so pretentious that it is hard to imagine actually being excited to immerse oneself in that sort of vacant and superficial culture. And you have to immerse yourself in it to sell paintings, and Kate is young, so its this exclusive world that is intimidating, promising, and revoting all at once. My feeling is that I shouldn’t fake being an artist, and shouldn’t care about what gallery owners think of me, and that Kate will whatever course she chooses, find her way without bullshitting and pretensing her way along. So thank you energy vortex for that resolution.

The next day we visited a visitor info center to get a feel for some sights we ought to see. I asked the older white haired and healthy woman working there if she could tell us more about the “energy vortexes” and actually made the quotation mark gesture with my hands. She kind of reproached me with a serious look and told me earnestly that the vortexes affect different people in all different ways. She commented on how either way these places would be a good place to meditate and pray. I was glad she had taken a reverent approach to the whole scene. She obviously appreciated the beauty and the potentialities of Sedona and was proud of it. As we set out with our marked map for the vortexes, I earnestly wanted to be there, and to think awhile on the trip, and on our plans for the future. I wanted to pray a little, to whatever, for some guidance and protection. Alas, it was Sunday afternoon, and every spot we made it to was literally run over by people chatting, snapping pictures and generally doing anything but thinking meditatively.

We did make it to the amazing Chapel Of The Holy Cross situated on the way out of Sedona. Its architect originally envisioned it sitting on the banks of the Danube in Budapest, but the World Wars delayed the project indefinitely. It was worked, with the help of Frank Lloyd Wright to be a skyscaper sized tribute to the image of the cross as a modern testament to a living Christ. I liked a thought that the architect Margarite Brunswig Staude had about the one of the ideas, that it could be a testament to a more “modern” God, a testament to God as a contemporary. Whatever thoughts one might have of the idea of God, it was to me a peaceful building, and its reality, from conception to perfect completion, was very inspiring.

We headed out from Sedona and camped that night by a nice little river at Beaver Creek Campsite. Kate started to come down with the cold I had imported from Las Vegas casinos and we spent the evening by a huge campfire contemplating and talking.