So, like, I’m on a book tour.

It’s been pretty uneventful thus far—if meeting Elton John counts as uneventful, I suppose, although that had nothing to do with the booktour and everything to do with a good deed performed long ago, a good deed I won’t go into here, since I’m less comfortable fellating myself than many folks suppose. I will say this, though: Being introduced to Elton John is a bit like meeting the Statue of Liberty—you don’t know exactly what to say. “I love your work. Can’t get enough of those huddled masses/glorious pop songs.”

Anyway, Terry was with me for a few days, and we ran around and had fun and checked out boys and went out to eat in pricey restaurants and it was swell. But now I’m all alone in my hotel in Tribeca and I’ve been seized by the dread and dislocation that practically defines a booktour. Back before I wrote a single book, I occasionally listened to writers bitch about their book tours—the nice hotels, the room service meals, the tab picked up by the publisher you had somehow fooled into believing your book would be one of the very, very few that earned out its advance—and thought, “What whiners!â€� But after having been on a few—shit, this is my, like, sixth or something—I’m firmly with the whiners. You’re utterly alone, you’re interviewed for half an hour, you’re utterly alone, you’re interviewed for an hour, you’re utterly alone, you do your reading in a bookstore, you go to your hotel, you’re utterly alone.

So you order up some crud from room service and you allow yourself to have just a drink or two from the minibar—which you never, ever do when you’re paying the hotel bill (somehow $15 for a wee bottle of vodka seems more reasonable when it’s all on some massive corporation’s credit card)—and suddenly it’s midnight or one and you have to get up in a few hours and get to the airport so you can get to another city and do your interviews, be utterly alone, do your reading, and then head back to your hotel.

Anyway, I had a reading tonight in some tiny town on Long Island—no idea why my publisher thought that it would be a moral boost to have my first event in some bedroom community two hours from Manhattan by car—and spoke to a tiny crowd, and sold a few books. Depressing. Then I came back to my hotel—a fancy new place in Tribeca, the neighborhood where you could see John F. Kennedy Jr. back when he was alive, where I decided to eat at the bar, and was rewarded with a cockroach running across my plate—and now I’m in my room, a little tipsy, tucking into the minibar, wishing I was home.

Oh, and shit… a little unfinished Seattle business. Greg Nickels sent me back my money—but not all of it. I donated the $300 at a fundraising breakfast, so they only returned $275. The Nickels camp charged me $25 for some lousy food that I didn’t even eat. For shame, Team Nickels, for shame.

This year’s Decibel festival, according to everyone I spoke to and from absorbing the overwhelmingly positive vibe permeating every show I attended over the last four nights, was an unabashed success (don’t know about the financials, but artistically and organizationally, it was indisputably a triumph; much credit should go to world-class sound engineer Vance Galloway and the donated KV2 sound system). While last year’s debut abounded with fantastic performances, it also experienced flaws typical to new large-scale music events. This year, most of the glitches observed were intentionally coming out of the PowerBooks of several producers. As it should be…

Continue reading "Decibel: An Appreciation" »

After professing my love for Nine Inch Nails in The Stranger I’m happy to report that the live show was amazing. Featuring a newly shaved and buffed Trent Reznor, the performance was an audio/visual attack. Between strobe-light theatrics, screens raining bugs, guitarist Aaron North’s volatile acrobatics (ending in an instrument-destroying tantrum), and a volume so loud it could compete with a fleet of jets, the band put on one of the best performances I’ve seen all year. It was 100-percent fierce. And to think I’d nearly sworn off arena shows for not providing the same captivating experience as the more intimate club scene.

“This is the most beautiful park I’ve been to in a really long time,” said the woman—a Capitol Hill resident and city employee—on my voicemail this weekend, as she stood in Cal Anderson Park during the grand opening. It sounded like she was about to cry, she was so happy the park had reopened. “I’ve been waiting for this park for 11 years. It’s like Paris!”

Yes, the park is so grand, it moves people to tears.

Finally (in both senses of the word), my sister found this:

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) — R&B crooner D’Angelo, who won over America with his ’90s soul ballads only to fade after bouts with the law and drugs, was critically injured in a car wreck outside his hometown of Richmond.

D’Angelo, 31, born Michael Eugene Archer, was in a 2003 Hummer sport utility vehicle on September 19 when it crossed the roadway and struck a fence, ejecting the singer, State Police Sgt. Kevin Barrick said Monday. Archer wasn’t wearing a seat restraint, Barrick said… Archer was initially listed in critical condition.

Continue reading "The Last Letter" »

Another great forum debate is going on here. The topics at hand include what constitutes alternative music, an End employee’s recent firing, and the use of marketing in making playlists. Good stuff.

My sister Joseline is on a roll. She found and sent me this excellent article about Zimbabwean footballers who dumped spectacular careers in their home country for the opportunity to wash dishes in the United Kingdom. (When reading this, do not forget that there was a time in history when Europeans had to force Africans into their ships, chain them down for the trip across the sea, and whip them into cheap laborers.)

Zimbabwe footballers 8: Immigration officers 0 Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria, and Denis Campbell Sunday September 25 2005 The Observer

British immigration officials launched a nationwide hunt this weekend after eight Zimbabwean footballers vanished following an exhibition match in Yorkshire.

The players, some of them big stars at home, did not board their flights back to Harare in the days after the game in Bradford. ‘I can confirm that we are worried that some players and officials, who did not return on their scheduled flights, have actually joined those in the diaspora,’ said an official of the Zimbabwe Football Association (Zifa).

Six of the players are from Caps United, Zimbabwe’s champions, and the other two from their rivals Highlanders FC, who played each other at Bradford’s Odsal Stadium last Saturday. Several Caps personnel absconded soon after the match, while the Highlanders pair - goalkeeper Luckson Mutanga and defender Dalisizwe Dhlamini - checked in their luggage at Heathrow last Thursday, then melted into the crowd.

Continue reading "The Fuck Out Of Africa" »

Joseline, my sister, just sent me this. Like her, I wonder if it’s at all true:

by Mark Townsend Houston Sunday September 25, 2005 The Observer

It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.

Continue reading "No Way" »

Cindy Sheehan was arrested today while protesting in front of the White House.

Given how little TV coverage was generated by Saturday’s huge anti-war march in D.C., maybe Sheehan’s arrest today will provide the hurricane-obsessed broadcast media with the sexy news peg they need to also report: “Two days earlier, Sheehan and about 150,000 other people marched past the White House in the largest anti-war demonstration in D.C. since the start of the Iraq war…”

This morning brought I, Anonymous its first Stranger Genius Award-related submission.

Read the anti-SuttonBeresCuller rant, entitled, “Genius, Schmenius” here.

And while you’re in the I, Anon forum, check out the growing array of responses to the season’s hot new criminal trend, stealing disaster relief donation jars.

I attended the peace rally and march on Saturday and it was inspiring to be surrounded by so many like-minded people willing to protest and speak out.

The positive: The speakers at the rally were mostly great. There was a Dominican nun and peace activist who spent over two years in jail for protesting the nuclear arsenal at Bremerton and other places. Reverend Braxton talked about the role of Christians and the church in uplifting people and working for social justice, a direct slap to the policies of the so-called Christians in the current administration. The march was great, lots of energy and creativity.

My favorite sign at the rally: “Nice War, Asshole.”

The negative: I can’t believe how badly the daily newspapers handled the matter. There was no mention of what was going on in Washington, D.C., or right here in Seattle, on the day of the march. They completely ignored the whole issue. I went to a dinner party on Sunday night and no one there had even heard that the peace rally was going to happen. (Hellooo? Read The Stranger!)

Another positive: My longtime activist mom was there with her posse and her homemade sign—go Mom!

I will never forgive the english department at UW for losing Steven Shaviro (who now teaches at Wayne State in Detroit). Because he is gone (and will never come back—the department made almost no effort to keep him) our city is practically theoryless. UW, you suck!

Anyway, Shaviro’s recent comment about the spectacle of American poverty that dominated the world’s covers and screens three weeks ago must be read and reread by those who are wandering “what’s left” (to use an expression by Marxist thinker Nic Veroli—our city’s final theorist) at the dawn of the 21st century.

Leftist philosophers, theorists, and cultural critics have usually been worried about the seductive power of images: the way that they disarm criticism by making What Is seem self-evident, by reifying particular moments and isolating them from their contexts, by preventing any analysis that would seek to go beneath surface appearances. And indeed, it’s true that images shorn of context have often been used for the most hideous propagandistic purposes. But here, in televisual feed coming from New Orleans this past week, we seem to have the reverse situation: images that ‘speak’ starkly of the ugly facts of race and class in America today, that show how the Powers That Be of government and business have relegated large numbers of human beings to the status of non-persons, that demonstrate eloquently that, however `natural’ the disaster, the differential experience of the victims is entirely man-made; while a flood (if I can use that metaphor) of speech and discourse strives to decontextualize and normalize these people’s suffering, and to `explain’ how, even in the face of sadness and tragedy, life goes on and the USA continues to be the greatest nation on earth.