Embalmer's Delight

Here’s a scenario: your life is plodding along. By all counts, things are good. The externals on a one-sheet stack up like the modeled food they put in display windows of Japanese restaurants in Taiwan. Slick soba noodles, slick rosy pickled ginger. Slick greens. Slick sesame beef. Everything slick. All the cracks spackled. Everything feeling so reasonably decent barring the little flares (that I’d forgotten about until right this moment right this now trying to write about the perceived flat-lining of my life. )

(I apparently sometimes speak only semi-accurately about my experiences. Noted.

Anyway,) have been rehearsing lots and not reading much lately. I mean, I had a short love affair with Alain De Botton a few weeks back and before that Thomas Lynch and between, Chucky B. (everybody's favorite poet/day-puker). Felt the requisite inspiration. Internalized a small fraction of what I read. Announced to the world the need to read a little each day to feel good. Then stopped reading every day. Started to languish. Yesterday I crawled back in bed with Thomas Lynch, poet/undertaker.

How I feel about this: really excellent. It was Monday and I woke up with no particular motives for the day except a pronounced craving for cherry chocolate scones and coffee, so I got dressed, grabbed the keys, pulled a book off the mantel en route to the front door and drove to Susina’s (a tasty bakery on Beverly where they give free refills on big mugs of Italian coffee) Then I reopened Lynch’s The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade and backtracked a little from where I’d left off a couple months ago.

I want to talk about the last of the 3 essays I read that morning. It was about toilets and taking shits in the Irish hillside under a huge gaping sky and the tangible difference between that and having your excrement whisked away from you in a little whitewater circus at the bottom of a porcelain bowl. About how these are analogs to our relationship to things like decomposition, death, and the inevitable cycles of life. He goes on to talk about homes and how they used to be these multi-generational units with babies being born in one room while great-grandmothers struggled with tuberculosis in a bedroom two floors above. How life and death, beginnings and endings existed side by side so that people had a better sense of their own mortality and possibly (I think this is what the author was suggesting) a better grip on life.

I dunno. Reading his essays sorta reshuffled my brain temporarily and shifted things into some sort of perspective. I’d stop every few paragraphs to think about the people in my life and how nice it is that I have them and how nice it is that I have a life. Also couldn’t stop pausing just to notice how recent conflicts were losing their barbs, like how all the stuff that'd been harassing my brain had -- within the span of an hour and a half of reading-- become pretty utterly trivial and distant, like What’s it worth if we’re all gonna die?

So, thanks to Thomas Lynch and his willingness to synthesize his craps with meaningful thoughts, I was thrilling on life again.

Of course an hour later I made it clear to Alanna who showed up to our Fascinoma meeting wearing my black sweater that "I really need my black sweater back because you’ve had it for like four months and I really used to wear that black sweater all the time!” And it wasn’t enough to keep me later that evening from frantically loading gear in angry repressed silence while I thought of all the reasons Kim was solely to blame for yet another manic Journey to the Gig..

But in both of the above instances, harmony/stasis was found much more quickly than I’m historically known for, so Alice-dog does appear to be learning a few new tricks.

Not dead yet,
alice

Broken Bao

It's still pouring down. All this rain after me telling a customer earlier that it doesn't really rain rain in los angeles. Somehow i forgot that it rain rains in the winter. Maybe it's an early winter.

I'm on my way to my bedroom from a four-hour sleep on the kitchen couch. The windows were wide open. My sweater was too short. I imagined flea attacks. I thought about brushing my teeth, but the aftertaste of dried cranberries was kinda nice too.

What is NOT nice is the fact that sometime yesterday evening, our darling Mike Corwin, the bassiest third of the FascinomatheBand, got into a car accident. Some rabid left-turner who didn't know what he was doing (perhaps due to rain-induced deviance/perhaps due to inherent problems of dumbness) hit little do-gooder Potty Pants on his way from playing fairy godmother/guitar amp supplier for Eagle and Talon. See reportage from Kim.

I'd therefore like to take this time to meditate on the traumatized and advertise to the world that Mikey C. is an extremely rare find for a person so prone to moustaches. He's a little powerhouse hero with this incredible penchant for helping/saving people. Don't tell him you need something. He'll pull it out of his rumpus on the way to being punctual for his next appointment. He's also pretty damn good on the social harmony front. His basic way of operating is positive and proactive and all uncheesy rendering of self-help terms, and putting down the anxious/hysterical/overwhelmed rebellions of me and Alanna is apparently the name of his game. He deserves some medals (and a big ham) for the way he cut through the dire inter-sister/intra-band funk that descended on Fascinoma practice this past Monday night. Woah. Miracle of miracles.

Anyway, Sexy Bao (man of many nicknames -- "bao" is chinese for steamed bun by the way) is a joy and blessing to his new friends and I blog this formal appreciation because:
1. I (and the world) adore Sexy Bao
2. Sexy Bao has been unfairly struck with whiplash, a hurt hand and a smashed front end, causing parasympathetic pain and (in lieu of actually bringing over matzo ball soup) the strong desire to comfort through effusions on how great the Bao is
3. I'm not going to be this nice forever, so bask while lasts, Sonny-boy...

So, if anyone sees Mike slinking around their neighborhood, be sure to shower him with an extra dose or two of love and affection (even you heterosexual straight guys) to help speed his recovery.

"When bad things happen to good people, put good shit in the sequel."

mightymightymighty.


-alice

Body No. 1

(I’m feeling a little BLOGMANIA today. This is perhaps due to the fervent blogging activity of my bandmates and others in the LA musical community of late. I blame all of you.)

Woke up wrapped in a sleeping bag and a comforter with a fan blowing cold gusts over the “bedspace” (foam squares over a layer of acoustic soundboard and carpet padding crowned with a sumptuous feather bed) to defend against the fleas in the cracks of my bedding. Apparently they’re the fittest of those who have survived the fumigating that took place like two weeks ago. Yep, the exterminator came and gassed the place and still the invisible guys are taking little stabs at my legs whenever the tube socks are off. A-holes. This week I’m buying myself a bed. A good foot or so off the ground. Away from the little jerks till winter comes and freezes them proper.

I know having fleas is a recipe for pariah and therefore probably not something I should publicize, but most of my friends know anyway, and beyond the fleas, I’ve also got a bad case of BLOGMANIA whereby I’m compelled (like physically) to share the inner workings of my mind with my online peeps. Unfortunately the thing on my mind is fleas because they make my physical existence extremely uncomfortable (Evangenital Julie understands) and it’s hard to focus on more transcendent things when your leg is an inflamed war zone. Matter over mind. As my grandpa liked to say in short passionate speeches: “Body Number One!” The self-actualization kids shout “mind over matter” and they’ve got a point, but you’ve also got to respect the fact that at the end of the day, we are corporeal and that the stuff’s all connected.

Noted:

1) I am a black hole of negative energy and non-inspiration when I’ve had no sleep. I become what is affectionately known as The Poo. When I’ve slept, I’m (according to bandmates Alanna and Sexy Bao), “a completely different person.”
2) A visit to the gym or circumambulating Pan Pacific park three times have been shown to significantly reduce stress levels in lead singers of bands I play in and possibly normal people as well. Exercise brings endorphins and oxygen and tension release bring peace to the those “creative types” freaking out about life and future and destiny.
3) Snacks are the oil for smoothly functioning Fascinoma/Eagle and Talon rehearsals. Me and Kim discovered a while back that when things, i.e., we, started getting peevish or when we started hating our music, a trip to the kitchen and gorging ourselves on Sour Cream & Dill Kettlechips and Double Rainbow Double Chocolate ice cream could quickly reinstall harmony and band faith . And Fascinoma rehearsals are pretty much book-ended by meals and then punctuated midway by a visit to the Japanese market to get treats! (chili shrimp chips, gyoza, bubble gum and sierra mist). Eating makes us happy. Happiness makes us want to make more music.

So anyway, the examples could go on and on, but this is all just to say: Your body’s involved in your life. No way around it. Therefore, be attentive to the “temple” and its needs. Yes, life is still going to get whirlwindy sometimes and in the midst of all the strive and fervor, you’re sometimes gonna have to pull out the old mind-over-matter trick, but a matter-AND-mind mode of daily operations deserves serious consideration…

She can talk but can she execute?

-Alice

Daily Bread

Today I bought transmission dipstick & a quart of transmission fluid. Transmission fluid is pink. It helps your car’s gears shift. Transmission sticks are short. They should be checked with the car running said Alfred, the guy who did my smog check. He’s Middle Eastern and has 19 credit cards and tapes little scraps of paper with how much he’s spent to the face of each card. He’s going to flee the country in two months.

My car passed the check. We were both happy. Me ‘cause now I can renew my registration and drive my car into the ground as I originally intended and I can continue to have the gasoline/carwash/insurance expenses which I’ve become accustomed to and therefore bring me comfort. Much. And, yes, Alfred is happy too because he doesn’t have to deal with me eyeing the failed smog test report and saying (not-at-all-insinuating-anything) “but it passed two years ago” and him having to say, “look lady, two years ago Saddam Hussein was still in power, I still had a full head of hair, and I didn’t have an army of prescription drugs to take and you had 10,000 miles less on your odometer…”

Funny. How time is always changing things. Funny how much of this week I’ve spent trying to revive my Nissan Stanza after many months of neglect. The lessons of this year are manifold, but one for sure that keeps asserting itself is this: Life takes maintenance. To think otherwise, is to be the dumb headless chicken I’ve been for most of my life. For some reason, contrary to your education and basic observational powers, you think that everything’s resilient as worms. Auto-regeneration. You get offended when your car starts rioting after you haven’t given it an oil change in 9 months. You wonder how your love handles got to be so plush. You’re bewildered by tartar. See, I have this tendency to treat upkeep like it’s this terrible waste of my precious time. Like errands are for sissies; defragging your hard drive -- for the weak. But it’s foolish to think this way cuz neglecting the fact that entropy happens, that food molds, that in LA, fan blades get tarred and feathered spinning all that cool smog-infused air into your living room, means you inevitably end up dealing with AFTERMATH. And suddenly you’re devoting your Precious Time to putting out fires that could’ve been avoided – if you just retired that policy of cumulative neglect.

So, I’m working on it. On breathing deeply while I drive east on Hollywood Blvd with real live palm trees flanking the streets (I’m a real citizen of LA!) and feeling good that I’m on my way to North Hollywood to pick up a transmission dipstick. I’m working on liking to get up and brush my teeth when my body’s already collapsed on the couch whoop-assed from a day spent rehearsing with bands comprised of people I have the honor of really loving (Alanna, Kim, Mike, (Me)) or an afternoon building balloon websites for the unequivocal Addi Somekh. Lots of work and working on.

On good days, I remember not to whine.

In the next issue of chickengate: Alice processes the Eagle and Talon Bye Bye Bush and The Heavenly Service of Mindy Chiu shows that went down this weekend and helps the world to understand the wonderful burgeoning music scene that's in LA and the best way to slaughter procrastination. Stay tuned.

Love and sprockets,
alice

Middle Mouse Squeaks

So if you're reading this, you probably already know that Fascinoma has a new critter in its fold. But were you aware that Critter also has A BLOG? Yes, announcing the blog of new Fascinoma bass player man, Mikey C. aka MoneyinMyJeans: Founder/writer of Middlemouse.blogspot.com. MoneyinMyJeans promises juicy gossip and detailed analysies of the Fascinoma triumvirate among other things. Assurances were given that the first blog entry would be published before he went to bed tonight (Get on it, MC!).

Ladies, discover the man behind the sheeny hair. Men, discover the rich inner life that you wish you had. Yah yah, the blurts and sputters, the filters, the fogs, the Fascinoma geeks with their Blogs...

-a