Super Fat Tuesday Celebration

Like Haley's comet we recently had an extraordinary confluence events occur. Never again will so many people vote on the same day as Mardi Gras when the Giants are having their victory parade. Crazy! Well, my time in Canada is a little prematurely at an end. My show tonight has been cancelled and of course it is snowing...again. On the Republican side of things I must admit to being shocked that John McCain has all but wrapped up the nomination. How a man so reviled by the Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party could win is hard to fathom. I suppose it's more an indictment of the paucity of candidates than anything else. I mean, who couldn't beat a man named Mitt. And Huckabee, let's be serious. He is way too populist for any of those right wingers. Religion is fine as long as it doesn't involve sharing the wealth. So it comes down to McCain. Who would have thought last year that someone so in step with Bush on the war could have a really good chance of winning the presidency. Somehow the war has been spun as this huge success now. Because it is no longer a collosal horrible mess it is now a huge victory. There are strong anti war arguments to be made but the Dems are not really making them. Part of their problem was that they never really made a good anti war case beyond we shouldn't have gone in there in the first place. Yeah, true, but we did and now what? Neither side is being very truthful or realistic. Are we going to be there the next 15 or 20 years because that's at least what it is going to take. Whether or not you think the surge is working we just do not have the man power to sustain so we'll have to withdraw troops whether you are for the surge or not. Can we afford to spend a couple hundred billion a year (I'm sure it probably ends up costing even more than that). What about Afghanistan and North Korea and Iran and... Don't it make most of our threats and intimidation and influence empty when it is clear we can only just barely sustain the wars we are already fighting? On the Democratic side we're looking at a long drawn out slugfest. I suppose I'm one of these undecided people you hear about. I think I'm leaning towards Obama but I'm not entirely sure about his lack of policy details. He's great at the platitudes but it'd be nice to have some more specific proposals. At least he would avoid a quarter century of only two families ruling the most powerful country in the world (Go Democracy!). And on top of that he seems like a genuinely good guy. Not that it is necessarily the job for a good person. To me politics is like sports and I follow it the same way checking out all the scores and trades and it's pretty fascinating. The stakes happen to be a little bit higher though.

What the Hell is Wrong With Me

The problem with being a solo act is that there is no one around to tell you what an idiot you are being. It's good to have people around sometimes who will edit your stupidist ideas. Like the bright idea of touring Eastern Canada in late January early February. I drove about 15 hours yesterday to get to Antigonish, Nova Scotia where upon arriving I found out that "people really don't normally come out on Wednesday nights." The difference between playing Canada and the US is that in Canada the people at the club still pay you and put you up at a Hotel and don't complain about it. In the US the promoter tells you that unfortunately even though you had a guarantee he can only offer you a few dollars. I have to admit that upon arriving in Antigonish I had a pretty hard core "what the hell am I doing with my life" kind of moment. For some reason my constant failure of technology over the past ten hours contributes greatly to this feeling. My gps apparently isn't programmed for Canada and my cell phone is being rejected although according to Verizon everything should be working fine. Somehow not knowing quite where I am and not being able to commiserate with anyone makes it easy to question things. It's back to a map and a pay phone. Old school--circa '95. So I decide that life is actually pretty good. First off, I'm alive. The weather was pretty hairy. It rained constantly and if it had been a little bit colder I never would have made it. Fortunately it didn't get cold enough to turn to ice until I finished my drive. Not only am I alive but I get to play music--granted I've risked life and limb for 4 audience members, 1 sound guy, 1 opening band and a handful of people working and just getting off work (eventually a few more people show up but not until well after I've started). Oh I almost left out the crazy old lady playing slots in the back. One drunk, crazy old guy comes up to me and wheezes "where are you from." I tell him but he's not really listening to me. He announces that he's from Sherbrooke. I reply that that doesn't really mean anything to me but once again he's too busy popping his teeth out of his mouth to pay any attention to me. His gumps mush together against the frame of his false teeth as he contemplates his next drink. They kick him out of the bar for being too drunk before I start which is probably for the best but it doesn't reduce my actual paying audience at the time by 25 percent.

More Texas...

Just as a follow up to my last Blog I gotta mention that I am continuously amazed at the number of huge battleship-like pick-up trucks in the state of Texas. Just about every vehicle on the road is either a pick-up or an SUV. The Houston show went pretty well. Super Happy Funland is a very strange but cool place. I just left Dallas and am now in Denton. What is with Houston and Dallas. These are huge cities which have almost no music scene. Dallas especially. That should be a thriving city but even the one little area that used to have stuff going on (Deep Ellum) is pretty much close to disappearing. There is hardly any place to play anymore and those places that do exist aren't that exciting. I did take the opportunity to catch up on some movies. What else is there to do but go to the mall and do a little theatre hopping (please don't turn me in!). I saw Darjeeling limited which I thought was excellent. For some reason it's gotten lots of negative criticism but I thought it looked beautiful and had the kind of characters with whom I was happy to spend my time. I also saw Gone Baby, Gone which had some potential but was kind of flawed. Strangely enough I thought the flaws had little to do with the direction and acting (Gotta give some props to the Afflecks) but more to do with the story. For something that was trying to be super realistic I thought there were a few leaps of stupidity I wasn't sure I could buy. Spoiler alert! When they go alone to the quarry I just wasn't buying it and the whole thing with the kid being alive was a little too obvious and I just wasn't buying the number of sacrifices these guys were making. In any case it was entertaining. I also watched Eastern Promises which was pretty mediocre. If you've got absolutely nothing else to do it was ok but it doesn't go too far and didn't really feel like a full length movie.

China

So I'm back out on tour which means more blogging! Went to China late last night. China, Texas that is. After the show in Beaumont at the Vortex I went and crashed at my friend Herb's place in China. This morning he took me on a tour of his farm. They grow sun flowers and rice and grass and blueberries and a new crop called energy cane which is similar to sugar cane but is more easily converted to ethanol. Most american farmers have been making ethanol out of corn which really doesn't yield any significant energy savings because it uses just about as much fuel to make it as the end result produces. Apparently it also can't be transported in pipe lines necessitating shipment by trucks which burns a shit load of gas. Taking their cue from Brazil which is way ahead of the United States in this kind of stuff they're trying to produce ethanol in a much better fashion. The whole growing and converting thing should be up and running in a few years and hopefully will serve as a model of what can be done. I got to ride in the combine which is one scary and daunting piece of machinery. Herb also had a bio-diesel rig set up for which he gets restaurant grease and recycles it for fuel. The whole thing was pretty exciting to a city boy like me. All that stuff at the grocery down stairs from my apartment actually comes from somewhere...

Wolff at Wolf

Mixing has begun on the new records. I'm really excited. Played last night opening for The Rebirth Brass Band. It went okay. Might not seem like it cause of the tuba thing but that's not necessarily my crowd. Mostly tourists looking for the authentic New Orleans experience and I don't exactly fit that bill. I had a few people in to it though. It sounded good on the big soundsystem. Wolff at Wolf. Got a show at Mimi's on Monday which should be relaxed and fun but I'm a little worried at getting the sound right as it'll be me and a couple amps. New Orleans is definitely working that Baghdad vibe. The only police presence I've seen in the Ninth Ward has been military. At least I've seen some of that though. Last visit I don't think I saw anything the entire time I was here. The summer has been really tough on everyone here. Things have been really dead. Everybody's hoping the break from oppressively hot to just reasonably hot brings a little more action but I can tell that there's a lot of worry that business won't really pick up significantly. I gotta go meet Goat at the studio to do some mixing. More later...

It's finally happened

It's finally happened. I now officially have a website of my own. Keep in mind it's still a work in progress. I'm workin' on a couple new albums these days as well which I'm going to mix in New Orleans at the end of the month with my good friend Goat. Pretty soon I'll pretty much owe Goat everything I earn for the next decade in compensation for being so cool about helping me out. Thank God he's as insane as I am. I'm a little apprehensive about heading to Nola on this trip. It's been depressing me a bit lately especially as I've gotten a lot of mugging stories about the kind of people who would not normally be mugged. I really feel like the country has let New Orleans down and that rebuilding efforts are not what they claim to be. No way Bush gives a shit whether New Orleans returns to the way it used to be. From where he stands it's probably best not to really bother repairing the levies properly. Anyway, I didn't really want to take this first blog as a moment to rant but it was just the two year anniversary of Katrina. More to come soon...