More Love

I am madly in love with my twins. I know there is very little literary merit in a new father raving about his newborns, so I will just do it once and get over it and maybe write about other stuff. But let me just say this now: My children are so beautiful. They are pure potential, pure innocence, pure sweetness and light. Jules the boy, Jukes julio juju jujube, and Vivienne, vivvi, vivika. My loves. I love them so much, I love them completely. They are perfect. They are wonderful, they are better than me, they are simply the best. This post will be dated, but my children will endure. Everyone should experience this kind of extremely biased love. I love them. I love love love love them for ever ever ever ever.
OK, there, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

My babies, my loves

I ceased to exist when you showed up

That tiwtchy guitarist, that lonely mutt

He faded away in the floodlights

My babies, my dear ones,

All the drama, all the punch

The wretching the ego the ache

The twitching the burning, the fake

I put it on the shelf for you

My babies my angels

I started to see when you opened your eyes

A real twist in the story

A harder won glory

You opened your tiny hands

You cried like all the birds in flight

On all the oceans lit by moolight

My beating heart just got its start

My babies my beauties

I never knew pain

I never knew love

I never knew the fear of loss

The morning sun shakes me awake

Into a close and private pool of bliss

I lift you sofly to my lips

Your scent is of the soft and perfect future

So nice to finally meet you

Why make music?

My band The Snow played a CD release show last Saturday at 92Y in Tribeca. We spent two years, thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours of our lives making this CD and organizing this show. And then we played this concert for an hour on Saturday. Many people participated, whether as musicians, artists, designers and photographers who helped design our CD , videographers who helped with our promo video, or friends who came to the show. We love you all.






Every few years I ask myself the BIG QUESTION, which is "Why do I make music?" Making art is really hard. It is thankless, time-consuming, and very rarely makes any money. Since the dawn of the internet, the music industry no longer exists. People consider music a free commodity. Yet there is something in my psychic make-up that pushes me to continue to write songs, record albums, and play live shows. It is the most rewarding of useless pursuits. Let me try to break it down.

Playing music is the best and worst thing I know.  Being on stage is like doing heroin and crack at the same time. When I'm on stage, nothing else matters. It is a beautiful orgasmic feeling of love and completeness. So I keep doing it. It is wonderful. If you know what I mean, you know. If you don't know, come to the show. And if you are an investment banker, or you work for a hedge fund, or some other job where you make money off of other people's creativity, or if you are a DJ, then FUCK YOU.

LOVE

My children are here. Vivienne and Jules. Born January 25th at 3:55AM and 3:58AM respectively. I had no idea being a father would be so much fun. Watching these little baby mammals grow and develop is the most fascinating science experiment known to man. They are here and they exist and they are taking their place on the planet and it is as if they have always been here. All the cliches are true. We look into their little glassy shark eyes and we are filled with so much love, it is as if our hearts will burst. We think they are the most beautiful creatures that ever existed. Our objectivity is out the window. We are extremely biased. It's ridiculous how much we love them.

So far, at almost three months old, here's what they are into: 1. Feeding (that is, drinking milk out of Chelsea's nipples.) 2. Sleeping. 3. Farting, pissing and shitting. 4. Crying. 5. Kicking their legs and arms out in random directions. 6. Peacefully looking out at the world and being cute. 

That's about it. But  it is, at this point, more than we could hope for. We are enthralled by every activity listed above.

Some interesting points about having twins are starting to come into play. They seem to be aware of each other in a very nonchalant way, more so than they are aware of the other people in their world. They are so aware of each other that they completely ignore each other, like you would ignore your left pinky or your eyebrows. They take each other for granted. And they have very distinct personalities. Jules is very laid back, very cool, slow, thoughtful, very existential. Vivienne is more physical and reactive. She cries much louder, she is more engaged with the world. This may all change. these are my observations as a father of three-month-olds. I basically feel like the luckiest man alive every day that i get to hang out with these two angels. I have season tickets to the petting zoo.

Face the music

This week we are making room for the babies who will soon be here. We are rearranging our apartment, clearing out space in the back room that will be the babies' room. One of the things that occupies this room and which must be relocated is my CD collection. So it is with a mixture of sadness and delicious sentimentality that I have been "archiving" my CD's, putting the booklets and CDs into large notebooks, and the digipaks and jewel cases into boxes to be stored away.
I've been making and collecting music for the past twenty years or so. This means that most of the creative output of the musicians in my world, my friends and collaborators, is represented by shiny little discs. My music and that of my peers exists exactly in the era between the time when the CD first became the standard, and the present time, in which digital media is king and the CD is on the verge of obsolescence. So I have a big collection of CD's, and they mean a lot to me. Each one is a little time capsule and a magical window into a world that existed with perfect technicolor clarity. For me, the entire CD is part of the package, including the CD itself, the front and back cover, the booklet, the spine, all of it. So it a lttle painful to separate CDs into two parts.
Many of my CDs have inscriptions or autographs. This one on the left is from Vic Chesnutt, with whom I had the good fortune to play a series of concerts in New York in 200?. We rehearsed for three days in the Brooklyn basement of fellow musician T. Griffin, and then we played three shows. He paid us a very small amount, we were all thankful to be playing with one of our heroes. About a week after the shows were over and Vic had gone home to Athens, GA, I received a package of CDs in the mail. He had sent me his entire discography, every single CD signed in his shaky hand (he was wheelchair-bound and had only partial use of his right hand). I will always treasure these mementos of a time, and an artist, who are no longer with us.

And since the advent of the CD in the early 90's came at the expense of the vinyl record, many of the artists in my collection had a very ambivalent and even adversarial relationship with the CD as a medium. As they started to become the standard, CDs were considered evil and insidious by indie rockers, sonic purists, and hipsters (as they still are.) They were considered a ploy by the music industry to justify raising prices. Most featured an overabundance of packaging, making them extremely wasteful as well as over-priced. And compared to vinyl records, which emphasized the low end and added a level of compression and warmth, CDs were bright, sparkly, and cold. This Drive Like Jehu CD, called Yank Crime, came out in 1991. The only thing written on it, besides the record label info, is "CD's REALLY FUCKING BLOW."



And even my promo CDs have some eerie resonance. These two promo David Bowie CD's (which I think were given to me by someone who worked at his label) are stamped with the projected release date. Christiane F. was a soundtrack album originally release in 1981. All Saints was a compilation that originally came out in 1993. Both had the distinction of being re-released on September 11, 2001.

Breeder

In about one month I will become a father of two. My wife will give birth to two children. One boy and one girl. I will have two real live children. My kids. Mes enfants. Twins. Des jumeaux.

The thoughts swirling around my head about this subject are many and wondrous. Mostly I want to savor this feeling of ecstatic anticipation in which I abide these days. My beautiful wife, apple of my eye, gorgeous womanhead, fountain of creation, my best friend, my foil, my partner, my lover and my spouse is growing these two creatures who will soon fill my life with wonder, fear, joy, pain, work, shit, piss, vomit, crying, love, cuddles, milk, beauty, innocence, softness, loveliness, and pure joy. 

The main thing that's going on is this; I can not wait to meet the kids! I know they will be amazing, eccentric, beautiful, sensitive, annoying, strong, weak, precious, complicated people. I just can't wait to meet them.

We know what their names are and we are not telling people. We also know, deep down, what they look like, what they smell like, what their voices sound like, how they walk, how they dance. We secretly want them to be left-handed, like us. We want them to love french cooking, to love art films and Vespas and Julia Child and funk and punk and heavy metal music, to love skiing and Armagnac and reggae music and earth tones and recycling and duck breast and stupid comedies and folk music and  to be die-hard Democrats. We want them to hate littering and to be incredibly honest and to have a tolerance for pain and an unusual proclivity for helping people. We secretly know that they will love soccer and tennis and be Patriots fans and probably not be very good at math and will love to read and will love clever TV shows like Breaking Bad or whatever the equivalent will be in the year 2043. They will be die-hard recyclers, they will compost, they might even  be short order cooks in vegetarian restaurants. We have no idea about any of these things, all we know is we love them. 

And we want so much for them. We are pure expectation, unadulterated anticipation. Our children are coming. Our children. Our twins. Two of them (as is usually the case with twins). They will be born on the same day. Probably in the middle of February, in the year 2012. Little tiny human babies, very nearly blind, powerless, completely dependent on us, almost paralyzed, only able to eat, sleep, shit, cry, and be loved.

I'm a forty-one year-old has-been who has been given this incredible gift; I will have children. Why do I use the tern "has-been?" It implies that my best days are over, that my achievements are behind me. But really I will be, I am a "will-be" if you consider this achievement, this creative output. I am making people. I am putting out the most complicated double album of all time, more complex than a Magma or Beefheart album. (Or for that matter The Snow or Bad Reputation, my actual bands with which I am actually in the process of making albums which will also come out this year.)
Hopefully these people will be really good people. They will make the world a better place in some way. They will bring light and happiness and laughter and good times to some little corner of this crumbling globe we spin on. We hope.

And I love my wife so much. She is a great big wobbly growth source, a fecund, fertile valley of creative output. She is the mountain, the alpha and omega, the rich fertile crescent, the grassy knoll. I am filled with admiration and wonder. Alons-y les enfants!

What are you listening to?

What a stupid question. I guess lately

Die Antwoord
Madeleine Peyroux
Boby Lapointe
Feist
Mastodon
Battles
Joe Flood
Les Chauds Lapins
The Cure
Elbow
Carole King
Creedle
Tune-Yards
James Fletcher
Kotorino
Lionel Ritchie
Noir Desir
Quasi
Firewater
Grinderman
Baxter Dury
Justin Townes Earle
The Dead Weather
Alain Goraguer

and many more.

The Placebo Effect

I've been thinking a lot about the Placebo Effect lately. There was a story in the the New Yorker about it a few weeks ago. One of the points it was making was that the placebo effect works in physical ways that are not even understood yet. It is a clearly documented, scientific fact that believing that something will cure you can have positive effects on your health. The placebo effect works. The mind exerts a very powerful force on the body. If this is the case, why do some very positive people die? Maybe the Placebo Effect is just like any other remedy? What I would like to know is this; is a placebo more effective than no treatment at all? This is fucking with my mind. I believe in the placebo effect. In fact I believe that the placebo effect is more powerful than any drug if you can actually let your body be fooled by your mind. But this is not always easy.
I know lots of very intelligent people who cured themselves with belief. I know others who believed, and yet they still got sick and died. My mother was one of those. When I was a teenager, I swallowed the pill of religion, the pill of Jesus Christ, my personal buddy, my tough, bearded bodyguard. When i was a pimply-faced thirteen-year old, my life was crumbling around me. My parents' marriage was falling apart. My balls were growing hair and my penis was spurting white milky goo. My face was covered with acne and all i could ever think about, all day, every day, was sex. I found solace and belonging in a group of Southern California Christians. I prayed and I sang and I communed with other young, confused, sexy Christians from Orange County, California. I learned how to play the guitar so i could stand at the front of the group at bible studies every Wednesday night and join our leaders in a round of godly singing. The songs we sang were Christian and also secular, songs by Bob Dylan and Car Stevens and songs to the cool, surfing Jesus we could swallow. Being the guitar player at these church gatherings was my first taste of performance, and it filled my heart like heroin.
I recently learned from a very close friend of my mother's that the reason she died at the age of 47 was that she refused to have a double mastectomy, against the advice of her doctors and friends. Something inside her refused to believe that she had to sacrifice her body, her breasts, her feminine physique to save her life. She made a fatal error and she died for it, when i was 19 years old and my sister was 17. It was a very strange realization to make that part of my mother's undoing was something as simple as vanity. I know it's more complicated, she had been through a divorce, she had recently started a relationship with a new man, and she wanted to feel that she could still draw on the reserves of her sexuality to be desirable. She wanted to be sexy and be in love, after the nightmare of her failed marriage was finally behind her, her children were growing up (I was a freshman in college and my sister was a junior in high school) and she had a solid career as an administrator at McDonell Douglas. For her, the option to have her breasts removed to counteract the effects of a disease that seems only middy threatening and easily curable seemed like no optional all.
This is a sad story and it ended badly. I wish she could have lived to meet my gorgeous wife, my beautiful kids, my sister's family. What am i left with? An unshakeable belief in the power of entropy and randomness, and a deep mistrust of cancer. Don't fuck with cancer. The placebo effect works up to a point but then science has to step in. But then again, science is not always so smart either.
Now there are more loved ones suffering from this disease, and they must deal with it in various ways. They must summon their faith in science or nature or the divine healing energy of the earth, or a combination thereof. I love them all and wish them long life.
Adam Yauch, one of the members of the Beasty Boys, just died last month of throat cancer. He was 47 years old, the same age as my mother when she died. What does this tell me? I'm getting older all the time and I'm so thankful for all of the beauty that surrounds me. I'd like to think i've contributed to some of the world's happiness, and there's a lot more to come.