October 16, 2003

tango with the birds

In the middle of working on a long piece this afternoon, I suddenly felt desperately tired, lay down and fell asleep for two hours, dreaming of being in a hotel somewhere in a city I didn't know, and being introduced by a casual acquaintance (unknown to me outside of the dream) to his friend Bob, who turned out to be Bob Dylan; the three of us spent a while wandering around the hotel's grounds, watching waiters push fancy white cakes on carts across carpeted balconies toward grand ballrooms.

I woke up and realized it was time for me to get down to Tonic to see Pelt play to a room with maybe 18 human beings in it, counting their friends and families and the bartender. I love that they started out playing rock in a pretty-much-default way, but eventually started doing something totally non-default: amplified acoustic drone music with banjos, cello, esraj, strange percussion instruments, etc.--the music of all sorts of places with rivers going through them. I think I'd seen them only once before (shaking the spheres of the heavens at Terrastock II), but I continue to have a very soft spot for their records. Their only real conceptual peers, I think, are the Sun City Girls, who are a lot more... um... unreliable.

Also read a chunk of Barry Miles' Beatles Diary, a day-by-day description of what they were up to through the '60s. I remember seeing a quote from George a few years ago to the effect of "you have to understand that we were together everywhere all the time for eight years straight," but looking at their 1962 calendar of at least one show almost every day and often two or three--in different places--I'm realizing that they saw more of each other than most people who work together or live together. Wow.

Successful cooking experiment last night: pad thai, made according to the instructions on the package of wide Thai rice noodles, but with some extra onions and carrots for texture and flavor, plus a combination of sherry and shoyu subbing for the fish sauce and barbecue-flavored seitan instead of shrimp. More experimentation with BBQ-Thai combinations may be in order.

And I'll be helping out a bit with Michelangelo Matos' brilliant new project Boogie Fever, although probably not until I finish up the book. More R&B! The second best kind of music EVER!

Posted by Douglas at October 16, 2003 11:53 PM
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