we all melted a little bit softer

There is a table heavy with lit candles and houseplants at one of the longest room in a nice white house in a bad part of town. Musicians play in front of it, warm voices, golden instruments, while the rest of us are arranged on the floor and on chairs, a cozy audience of friends and friends of friends, even as autumn is whipping the last of summer away with rain while we’re nestled safe within. The duo up front, a slim violinist with long chestnut hair and a man in a hoodie on an acoustic guitar, fill the space with their music, keeping us safe with lyrics about cigarettes and love. They call themselves Two Stoned Birds and can’t remember the lyrics to the Bob Dylan cover they offered to play. They fumble and sip from a brown paper bag and it all fits right in.

Jess Hill played earlier, as memorable and flawless as the after image of a lightning strike. I love her, as always, as ever. She gets a little better every time she performs and I’ve been watching her for years now, sitting on floors, following her invitations to coffee-shops and backyards. If she asks, I will come. Anywhere. I am so proud of her, I can feel it in my blood. It is her house we’re all crammed in and she made the chai that’s simmering on the stove and filling our cups. She put together this night. Possibly she made the borscht, too, but I don’t know is that’s true.

James Lamb is next, a young man denim jacket and a steel embedded electric guitar. He’s the first to use the amp. Two other men play with him, the man with the hoodie on bass and a drummer cleverly brushing an ersatz kit on the floor, (a cookie tin, a bass drum put on its back), but James is the show. He steals and keeps our attention. He tells fun stories between his songs that have nothing to do with the music, but help glue the moods of them together. It is obvious that his set is what Jess has been waiting for all night and as soon as he sings it’s obvious why. He’s incredibly talented. The songs are powerful, lovely creatures that make me think of worn out vintage trains. They seem to travel from one coast to another as the singers harmonize, melodies eroded by salt spray, lyrics sharp with the taste of oil yet as warm and comfortable as freshly combed wool. The urge to sing along unrolls naturally out of the notes, even when what’s coming out of the guitar is almost too complex to follow.

Meanwhile, we’re taking photos with our phones and putting them up on Instagram and pushing the buttons that populate them everywhere else. We’re humming along and tagging photos of the performers and audience as we go. We’re sipping tea and nodding our heads to the beat and clapping between songs, happy to be here, glad to be part of it. The concert wraps up with a song about living in a small town called “Everybody is an Expert” and our voices are huge as they join the chorus. Our voices are larger than even the rain. And everything, absolutely everything about this concert, is just right.

The music of Zoë Keating, tossed on incredible, magical waves of wonder and fascination.

Andrew called me up yesterday during Twin Peaks Tuesday at eleven:thirty at night to ask, “You know how sometimes when you’re unemployed and broke, awesome things happen to you? This is one of those things.” Suddenly ignoring the show, I sat a little straighter. “Do you still have a passport?” He had scored two tickets over twitter to see Zoë Keating at one of Chase Jarvis‘ boutique, nearly private, invitation-only livestream studio sessions in Seattle. Of course I said yes. I said yes before I even knew what was going on, before I properly heard “Seattle” or “concert”.

Which is why my alarm went off at five:fifteen this morning, even though I only went to bed around two a.m., the better to be ready when Andrew dropped by to pick me up at six, and I spent the day in Seattle, exhausted and emotional. Her music is sublime, a densely woven carpet of bitten off bird’s wings, rich with melody, clarity, and grace, and to have her play in such an intimate setting was an amazing experience. The interview, too, was beautiful, a sweetly compelling glimpse into a sparkling, beautiful wit. She speaks with an admirable sincerity, and often, while she was talking, I had to repress an urge to cheer.

So, as a glitchy-future souvenir of my unexpected, fantastic day down south, I welcome you to share that precious hour as I present to you the video of the entire event:


We’re in the front row, stage left.

finally, a pause

Friday was close to being a complete write-off. First I went downtown to take someone’s photo, only to stand about waiting for an hour in the cold, at home a note sent through the digital, “stuck in a meeting, sorry!”, my lack of cell phone stranding me yet again. Things cheered up briefly when I walked home to find an invitation to a job interview, only to find out, once I’d trekked back downtown, that it wasn’t for legitimate employment, but instead with a guy who wants a girl to “boss around” his home. “Oh good, you’re pretty enough.” Pardon? I explained he should be advertising in the personals section and left, but not before he referred to special needs people as “feebs”, (the second person to do so in my presence in as many days, ugh), and demanded I pay his bar tab. The entire experience lasted perhaps a total of fifteen miserable, uncomfortable minutes, but felt like a shotgun blast to the day. Walking home from that was even worse than the morning’s photography failure. And, of course, at soon as I’m home again, home again, there is a voice mail message with my name on it, from the non-profit I interviewed on Wednesday, “we’ve gone with another applicant”.

But David got home in time for me to borrow his bus pass to go to the Ayden Gallery opening, where I met up with my brother Kevin, in from Montreal, his friend Nicholas, and Diego, recently back from Spain, and the art was nice and the company nice and Diego gave me a pretty necklace as a holiday gift and we got slurpees on the way out of the mall and cadbury cream eggs and there was a clutch of hipsters at the bus-stop all wearing fake mustaches and it snowed a little and I got to show my brother Nightwatch when we got back to my place and everything turned out pretty well after all. Hooray.

Saturday was significantly better. Kevin took me to breakfast at Locus, one of my favourite Vancover restaurants, and we wandered around in the thin crust of snow a bit, talking about our mutual love of Montreal, before I dropped him off at a friend’s place and bussed home. He’s grown from an angry, unpleasant child into someone I am glad to know, for which I am thankful. It spills from me like water in cupped hands, brimming past the edges of our sad memories of childhood, a slow moving river that is going to take some time to get used to.

Then Aleks came over and napped in my bed with the cats for awhile before driving us over to Andrew & Sara‘s for an in-house Molly Lewis concert that was stuffed to with spectacular people. She sang about Myspace and having Stephen Fry’s baby and generally charmed the heck out of everyone and for the first time all week I relaxed. It was wonderful.

Eventually the clever after-party dismantled for a trip to The Whip and though outside it was cold, it was beautiful, with snow, real snow, the dry, enchanting stuff, floating down like feathers after a televised pillow fight. We sparkled up the street, running in bursts then sliding along the frozen road on the flats of our shoes, arms akimbo, all transformed into ten years old. The group splintered at the bisto-bar, breaking off to different tables, mine against the far wall, the kitchen party, with Michael and Andrew and some folks from Seattle. We talked about terrible twitter jokes and a scandalous lot about nothing, but it was as full of odd glory as the weather, if inevitably more silly.

When it was time to go home, we skated down the road again, sliding even farther, whooping with cackling laughter, occasionally colliding, but never remembering to fall. Plans were made, Sherlock mentioned, and I fled down the street, trying and failing to get Andrew with the one tiny snowball I managed to make. S. drove me home, spinning the car down one of the back streets near my apartment, just because he could, with the sort of wicked joy usually reserved for roller coasters and haunted houses, toothless darkness and danger followed by ice-cream in the sun.

eleven:eleven:eleven – I don’t know him but I love him now

Jason Webley gave us such a gift this evening, a beautiful, marvelous experience, far beyond what anyone could call a concert.

Not to knock the concert, which was a blasting cap of a show, topping out almost everything else I’ve ever seen, (literally dancing in the aisles, jumping up and down levels of crazy amazing, that show. It just did. not. quit. ravishing. Melodies and shouting and poetry and snow made of feathers and surprise guest performances and identical twins and home-made instruments thrown into the audience and.. wow!), but the truly incredible part came after – when he silently walked off the stage and out of the hall, at the very end of the music, his fist tightly wrapped in the strings of a massive bouquet of giant red balloons, and swept almost the entire crowd into the street with him, everyone singing the last refrain of the last song over and over as the band played everyone out.

As we walked, hundreds strong, still singing, all the way to the water, down a cobblestone hill, under an overpass, over an overpass, Rafael and I arm in arm, up at the very front, sharing smiles with Jason, the leaders of a surreal parade that trailed four blocks long, thick enough to block traffic, the tune still soared with every step, as if the song kept our feet from touching the ground, as if the song was what kept us enchanted, a spell that he made but that we created, until we finally reached a smooth stone beach where a yacht was anchored, lit only with candles, fifty feet from shore.

He motioned us all to stop, then, and began to dance quietly where the shore sloped into the waves, gesturing to us with the great red balloons, a poem in motion, throwing our attention to the dazzling, full moon, then whimsically shifting from joyful pose to joyful pose, his heart bursting for us as he was painted with the flashes of a hundred cameras, like a strange, moving art fresco at the side of the sea. Eventually he paused at the top of some rocks, every inch the grand jester, both the king and the fool, suffused so thoroughly with glittering exultation that his face was a miracle, and finally began to say goodbye, certain, I suppose, that everyone had arrived.

He continued the act without saying a word, tying his treasured trademark hat to the balloons and, with a series of Chaplin-esque gestures, releasing them bumping into the sky. He lay on the rocks, watching them go, the red of the balloons weirdly lit by the moon, the saddest, most happy, fiercest gentle creature that ever lived, all the while as we, his crowd, kept singing, until they were nearly out of sight. Some people cried. (He might have too. It’s hard to say, even though I was close, one of the very front line.) Next he began to strip, unbuttoning his shirt, peeling off his pants, unhooking his shoes from his feet, then he waved to us, we the hundreds, crammed onto the beach, spilling out, farther back, still singing, some stuck all the way back on the street, and we waved back, felicity incarnate, and many shouted, “goodbye!” and “until next time!”. He looked at everyone, posing as he did so again for our cameras, as if it had all been rehearsed, the camera flashes picking him out for our eyes, then turned, satisfied, and bravely waded into the cold, black sea, the blackest thing, the coldest, and swam for the boat.

And that was that. Except that it wasn’t. Telling you what happened doesn’t explain what it felt like, how extraordinary it was, how perfect and clever. I could tell you how we cheered when he reached the yacht, how the crew that eventually emerged was dressed all in theater blacks or what it was like the police arrived to break us up or why my shoes got soaked or even more about the astoundingly good concert, but these are details and, in a way, unimportant. We were transported, as truly if we slipped sideways through space in that theater and briefly inhabited another world only a few molecules away, but happier in every respect. That was the magic. We were there as audience, but we were part of it and essential, all of our voices required, all of our eyes and hearts and minds.

THAT 1 GUY AT CHOP SUEY TONIGHT

Artist Profile: That 1 Guy from Pale Blue Pictures.

Mike is kicking off the Seattle City Arts Festival as That 1 Guy tonight at 7 pm at Chop Suey.

I’m so incredibly glad Mike’s in town. His tour with Pogo, (the video remixer known most famously for Alice), seemed to have him touring everywhere but the Pacific Northwest, leaving me to miss him even more than usual! (I was quite looking forward to finally meeting Pogo, too, but something went down last week and he had to cancel the rest of the tour and skip back home to Australia. Don’t know what happened yet, but hopefully nothing too dire.) Still, the timing seems perfect, given the onset on fall and its overbearing skies. Even though it’s been several years since we split, I still find there’s something soothing and perfect about him, as if his delightfully puckish and easy-going good nature is literally infectious, an airborne pathogen that makes everything okay.

love songs

Tony had a wonderful surprise for me when I arrived in Seattle: two tickets to the beautiful and bizarre Billy Nayer Show, the band that birthed That 1 Guy and one of the best movies of all time, The American Astronaut.

jhayne & the billy nayer

Flanked by Bobbie Lurie and Cory McAbee on the first night of the newest Billy Nayer Show tour. This one’s for you, Mike! We all love you!

REMAINING TOUR DATES:

October 23 – Portland, OR
October 24 – Arcata, CA
October 26 – San Francisco, CA
October 27 – Seaside, CA
October 28 – San Diego, CA
October 29 – Los Angeles, CA

there is no such thing as too much devotion

Crash Test Dummies Crash Test Dummies

At my insistance, Tony and I blew off all of our other plans to go to the Crash Test Dummies concert at the Chan last night, which turned out to be an acoustic show promoting their new album, Ooh Lah Lah, the first music they’ve released in six years. (Also for sale, Ellen Reid’s out-of-print opus, Cinderellen, which we also scored. Purr.)

It was epic. I am inspired.

Oh my stars.

That is all.