Please excuse this momentary, yet fairy epic, chunk of narcissistic text you're about to tackle. This has been a pretty interesting process and I hope that it comes off as interesting to YOU, and that I don't come off as a complete asshole. The tour that I'm referencing was really amazing and weird and hard and overall so fun. Not dark. Good preface, eh?
I think that we all have moments, if not significant blocks of time, of this feeling: The Truman Show. That's an entire movie that we can relate to, right? Sometimes the world feels like it's spinning for us or against us. Sometimes your luck just aligns with whatever that luck aligns with and you have the golden stride. Other times you're so fucked that it becomes comic and you expect the additional layers of fucking to come, but then those expectations are even shattered with total shit and piss and more bad luck. But sometimes it doesn't feel random at all. Its grace and fury is so calculated and beautiful that it almost feels like it's happening just to make good entertainment for others. I only caught a couple seconds of this thought process recently, but I thought I should take it here and write about the feeling because it seems like good entertainment and documentation to me.
Claire and I both were experiencing extreme anxiety because of The Kitchen show in New York, so much that I eventually ended up puking out of the window of a moving cab in Brooklyn after already puking in the bathroom of an amazing restaurant that I was forced to order salad at because my stomach felt too crazy to order something good. Usually I'm not a nervous performer at all; playing drums gives you a little bit of a shield, and at this point YACHT shows come completely naturally to me...it was the fact that we were doing a new show that wasn't really about or focused on music. Even though it's totally simple and also pretty natural it really freaked me out. This is because of The Kitchen. If you check out the board of directors part of the "about" section on the site you'll see Phillip Glass, Meredith Monk, and Laurie Anderson among other fancies. So yeah, point illustrated, it's a very fancy performance space and I guess this show could have been considered the "most important" YACHT show to date.
I'd been thinking about the show for months; I talked about it, planned it, sketched out ideas, dreamt about it, and then we finally decided that we should take the show on tour before the Kitchen show to practice it, test out the technicals, and show our friends to get their input. So we went on tour with our friend Aaron Flint Jamison. He was also performing, but also not really performing music.
Flint's performance/presentation on tour was essentially about failure. After our third show with Flint I caught the feeling, suddenly I felt like everything clicked: Flint was playing the mentor character that was trying to ready me for failure! I'd been set up? This was also the first tour I employed a booking agent and the one show we really needed help with ending up being a bust. We arrived in Seattle only to find some very nice middle-aged free-jazz musicians running through what looked like an extensive sound check or live recording session. We decided to eat dinner in Seattle and drive home to Portland.
Of course these were all just coincidences and oddities, but for a second I really considered that everyone was working together to create really weird experience for me!
The entire tour is documented across (1) these (2) two entries. I had this entry sitting in draft mode for the past 4 months and I didn't really feel like finishing it until just now for some reason. I've been experiencing a lot of synchronicity the past few days and I remembered this entry and how it has been just hanging out in the wings sad and lonely. Maybe these synchronicities have been acting as guides to get me back to this editor window. Well, here I am. What happens next?
that tour was so dark. i am so glad that i spent it with you guys.