A little night music? Okay.

A few words and no more.

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Mostly Wordless Wednesday.

Carrie Rodriguez @ The State Room, 5/19/09

Four days.

Oh, long weekend ... how I adore you. I look forward to plenty over these next few days. Plen-ty. Here are just a few groups of words that cause some crazy excitement within. The crazy excited butterflies? Yeah. They're wide awake, right this second.

Kings of Leon
Bon Iver
AA Bondy
The Avett Brothers
Zach Galifianakis
Erykah Badu
GRIZZLY BEAR
Blitzen Trapper
School of Seven Bells
Beach House
CHROMEO
Heartless Bastards

David Williams' take on Wyoming.

I don't like to toot my own horn (okay, much), but I can't quite stop watching this video. Okay, so I shot it myself a few weeks back and, yeah, I've praised local singer David Williams before, but honestly. I am being for real here, like really really real. I like the beautiful things when it comes to music, the kind of stuff that rests inside my ears and makes itself at home there. He's got that something in this song, which is a bit of a 70s country stretch for him, but he out and out owns it. Watching this, you know he knows that, too. I knew it when I sat a few feet from him with my camera and it resounds even more so now. If I could loop the thing, I would ... but I don't mind pushing PLAY over 'n over, either. Do you dig it?



This makes me excited to hear what his solo album is gonna sound like, the still untitled one that comes out in July sometime. I just hope it's full of the slow twangy burners like this one.

Wordless Wednesday.

Bands in my backyard ... all over again.

UPDATE: Their site has been updated, at long last. I'm a little tired of waiting for the Twilight Concert Series to update its website already. It's a good thing there are others in the know enough to reveal things for us before they get around to it. Various forms of this list have been floating around for weeks now, but Dave shared the final one today. You can thank City Weekly's own Jamie Gadette for helping him out in the first place. But enough talky talk already. To see the list of who's coming, you need only click HERE and be amazed. Alla those bands for free? In my backyard?! They just continue to outdo themselves each year. Not sure how they do it, but they do. My hat is off to the lot of 'em.

I have the good fortune of doing my radio show on Thursday nights, something that caused me to miss every single one of these shows last summer, but I'm going to have to change a few things this year. There's just no way I can miss some of these, notwithstanding what I know will be some absolute insanity in the way of massive crowds. I must see the Black Keys, even though I've seen them do their blues-rock madness before. I gotta check out Iron & Wine touring on his latest album, too, with Okkervil River as an opener (that combination alone makes my excited musical mind do backflips). And, lastly, the only band I haven't seen but have wanted to see since I heard his music is Black Joe Lewis. He's an opener by the looks of it, but that doesn't much matter. He will light the stage on fire. You will dance till your bare feet-on-the-grass can't dance no more. Looky HERE for an example.

Am I excited? Ridiculously so.

It is the season for bonfires.

I warmed myself by one last night. I got mesmerized by it, too, staring long and hard at it its center while sticks and logs were repeatedly thrown on and conversation kept up and a guitar was passed around and song after song after song was sang ... all in the name of a good friend getting older. It was nice. Still smelling of smoke the this morning was a good way to wake up, I don't care what anybody else says otherwise.

One of the best parts about it, though, happened when someone I didn't know began playing what sounded like Cat Stevens' "Father And Son." I like that song enough to sing along and turn the lyrics over in my head and go so far as to apply them to my own life. And nobody ever does that with a song, do they? Anyway, the following couple lines were plucked out of a conversation that really happened.

ME: "Oh! This sounds like Cat Stevens! You know Cat Stevens?"
SHE: (following a pause) "She went crazy, right?"

Reminds me of a certain line about Billie Holiday from Clueless. Remember the one? I laughed long and loud. It'll happen again, too, I can pretty much guarantee that.

Today is too beautiful to be here.

So go back outside, to where the sun is still shining and the summer beckons bare feet to walk around on the grass. Wander around until the sun sets. Bask in the new weather, the perfect kind that makes you want to stay up all night, relishing in it, biking around in it, rolling down its hills. This is when bad moods are no longer allowed. Dash them away and smile from now through at least August. It is that time.

I'm just passing the message on from Mother Nature, in case you didn't get the memo. I think she's got more things to share, too, so I'll cut this short. Like, right now, even.

David Williams and his Echo.

It wasn't too long ago that I was able to manage getting Utah's own David Williams into the KRCL studio to play a few songs. I had to leap a few obstacles in a single bound in order to make that happen but, once all fell into place, I was pretty happy with this acoustic afternoon. I've seen him perform before this and after a couple times even, but there's something about sitting at a musician's feet (well, near them) and hearing his heart poured into one of his songs that makes it hard for you to want to hear it any other way. It was Band of Annuals who went on to make this relatively famous round these parts, but David is the one who penned, recorded, sang and played it before they got their hands on it. I almost thought I had to choose one over the other, too, but that was before I decided I can like 'em equally. What do you think of this tune?

Snippets of the nighttime thinkers.

11:24 PM me: someone asked me today if i ever feel alone

i don't like to think about it

11:29 PM she: why not?

do you?

11:30 PM me: i do. sometimes.

11:31 PM is feeling alone different from pangs of loneliness?

she: hmmm

that's an interesting question

i am just on the initial notes my of journey learning how to be alone

but i do know that sometimes pangs come

and things seem worse than they really are

11:32 PM and i know that the next day i almost always feel better. i reconnect with a friend, i take some time for myself, i run, i do something in the garden

and it passes

but i do believe that humans are built for companionship

11:33 PM and i haven't quite figured out yet what to do with the part of me that likes having someone next to me when i sleep, or there at the dinner table to talk to

it's quite the beast

this loneliness

me: true.

11:34 PM the deeper the connection with someone, the less lonely i feel.

11:44 PM me: i might never quite get this life

or my place in it

she: for what it's worth,

me: though it makes me think

she: i think you're doing exceedingly well

me: think so, eh?

11:45 PM that's nice of you

she: yep

i do

me: i enjoy each day

i find beauty in a lot

i like to give to others

11:46 PM much more than receiving

i like discovery

i appreciate a sense of mystery

there is such possibility around every corner

she: it's utterly refreshing

12:02 AM

she: goodnight, you

me: goodnight moon

Louisiana hayride.

Louisiana was good to me. Someday I'll recall all the delicious Cajun eats I put in my mouth there but, for now, I'll only recall I was fed very well, on account of some good cooks and old-fashioned Southern hospitality. The photos below reveal at least one of those eats: crawdads. There were lots and lots of those poured over a table. We wasted no time in learning how to pop them open and proceeded to make a very, very small dent in the mountain before us. If you should think of visiting anytime soon, shoot for crawdad season, eh? What kind people to provide as much as they did. I can practically still taste the hand-squeezed lemonade. I'll likely always remember that welcome humidity even, along with the gnats that came with it. Perfectly played.

In other news, I think I'm walking fairly okay, four or five days after The Incident. The one where I ran across a street to snap a photo on the wrong side of the tracks (natch), only to find a broken beer bottle with my foot, the one that went clear through my shoe? That one. I prolly have glass lodged in my foot still, but at least I can run on the thing. Yesterday proved that for three miles straight. No more gimpy limp for me! And, you know? The fact my phone stayed behind someplace is fine by me. Lost, misplaced or left behind, it's been a welcome challenge learning how to live without. I rather like it. Life made simpler is a better life indeed.

Desperately seeking suntan.

I am in Phoenix and searching all over for one. I think I'm gonna get lucky, too. Rumor has it they've loads of them by the pool. Time for investigative action? Maybe, just maybe.

Wannabe Mariachi.

It's not too many hours before I board an airplane for Louisiana. I've never been, but I hear it's crawdad season over yonder. I also hear the person we're going to visit/interview/shoot is accustomed to alligators hanging out in her backyard. Sounds almost good enough to be an all-new country, right? The anticipation factor for this one is high, but the many hours that make up a long layover in Texas sure don't sound all that nice. Nature o' the beast, I say ... nature o' the beast.

Before I do my disappearing act yet again, though, I did want to share this little video. Maybe this is the kind of thing that gets created when a man has lived too long alone? Nah. This has begged to be made a long time now. I think the mustache was all that was needed to allow it to come out is all.

May it give you a big toothy grin.

I can't shut my big yapper.

I am in Denver and I can't stop with the people watching. It won't stop! Like, well, there was this "woman" on my plane that looked a bit like a Barbie doll, only her face revealed the fact that she was likely a he at some point. Maybe she still is, even? So, that was a bit of a train wreck to observe. The men couldn't stop looking away, no matter where she/he was in the airport, but, well, couldn't they see the fairly male face on top of the plastic oversized breasts spilling out of her top and those tight spandex pants? I mean, I could. I really could. Anyway, the person won what "she" was looking for ... so many gawkers. Males were simply powerless around her. If only they'd spent some time on her face.

Switching gears a tick, the sunshine spilling in the windows everywhere and the immediate nap I scored on the ride over and the fact I get to wander like a nomad all over this city after a short bus ride (coming right up), these things all swirl together to bring me some kinda unspeakable joy. I'd explain it better if I could, but that's all I can muster. This moment, this long moment and the ones that will follow into tomorrow, they are good ones to live for. I get to do cartwheels on the inside and nobody will ever know.

That's enough. I wanted to share a poem by the magnificent Billy Collins that I re-read on the plane. It, too, stung me with a pang or three of the happy. I love it for so many reasons. I hope a few out there at least like it some. (You can listen to him read it by going over HERE, too, something I'd recommend. Give it a second, patient ones ... it'll come.)

Marginalia

By Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,

skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive—
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!"—
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page—
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil—
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet—
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Happy Cinco de Mustache, everybody!

Hope alla your staches fared well.
To next year then, eh?

Jenny Owen Youngs in the Utah.

9 things making me happy tonight.

1. Combing through my mustache with a special fine-toothed mustache comb and realizing that I can no longer see my upper lip. It is as thick as it is beautiful. It's taken six weeks or so to get to this point, but it's been worth it. I can't wait to reveal this thing in a couple of days, but parting with the beard will be some sweet, sweet sorrow.

2. Sandalwood incense burning up a storm and filling my room with an impossibly good scent.

3. A spring cleaned bedroom. It took most of the day, but I now have clean sheets and vacuumed floors and an organized end table and on and on. I don't mind it when it's messy, but I sure love it when it's not.

4. A stack of poetry books now waiting patiently on the aforementioned end table. I need to reacquaint myself with my old friend Billy Collins. It's been far too long.

5. Being hugged by my bed while writing. It feels like it's been reborn. Maybe I ought to wash my sheets and blankets and such more often? This is one big King-sized cloud now, it is.

6. The chill in the air. I've finally gone ahead and closed my window, but ... my run at the park tonight should have lasted five hours long. If only my legs would have allowed it. It was electric and invigorating and clean. Perfect running weather.

7. Talking with a good friend and attempting to figure out together the intricacies of life and love out. Having empathy and bouncing ideas off of one another and knowing, for whatever mysterious reason it is that I don't quite get, that everything will work out eventually. It sure sounds cliche, too, but it always, always does.

8. Rediscovering the last Spiritualized album and finally understanding its worth to discerning ears everywhere.

9. Being alone on a Saturday night and not feeling the slightest bit lonely.

Cinco de Mustache on Tuesday.

You know what this means, right?
That's right ... a change is gonna come.
Stay tuned.