in the admiral district of west seattle, in an alley, is a dumpster, a green dumpster, a very ordinary dumpster, except this dumpster has three images on it.  two of the images i could identify even from a distance. they are two different views, very artfully rendered, of charlie chaplin. 

then i saw a third picture, clearly not charlis chaplin, but also clearly rendered by the same hand, i would guess spray painted from a stencil, about two inches square.  but who is this other imsge depciting?  could that be...? yes, it most certainly is: tom waits.  somebody has artfully rendered three images: two of charlie chaplin, and one of tom wairs, on a dumspter which currently sits in an alley in the admiral district of west seattle.   

i will soon include some photos.

Jacob Lawrence changed my mind about struggle. i saw him in a video interview, he spoke about struggle as a beautiful thing, an essential expression of life.

i had always seen struggle as a sign of weakness, something to be embarrassed about, to avoid if possible and to end as quickly and quietly as possible when encountered. but Jacob Lawrence changed my mind about struggle, i mean, not entirely, a lifetime of bias is not so easily and entirely overcome, but he set my thinking in a different direction.

now i try to see struggle the way Jacob Lawrence did, and i try to embrace struggle in my life, to not be embarrassed about it, but to enter into it with as much noble and humble courage as i can miuster.  also, i try to be positive about other people's struggles, to find the dignity in them, and to help where i can.  this feels to me like a much more mature and positive way to live compared to how i was conditioned to feel where struggle was for losers and winning was the only acceptable outcome.

we are well into work on the follow-up to Sleep Off The Hiway.  one track in particular is taking a much different shape than it ever had before, thanks largely to the peculiar genius of Christopher Macrae, and my giving him free reign.

he took my deliberately off-kilter vocal on one track and autotuned the shit out of it.  he says he was pondering the lyrics and started thinking about robots.

so now i am face-to-face with my first real autotune dilemma.  everyone loves the direction the track is taking, and i have to admit it sounds huantingly, eerily, cool, but i have this commonly-held aversion to autotune.

autotune is quite the divisive tool. it seems people either hate it, or can't get enough of it.  but the fact is: virtually every recording made in the past decade or so uses autotune.  it's just that some folks, notably the r&b hip hop and dance music sets, have made it an element unto itself, something which will define the sound of our times like gravelly voices and heavy distortion defined the early nineties.

i just don't know if i care to forever tie this track to the present era of music.  this question is quite ironic given the fact that time itself is the theme of the song.

i will recount to you virtually verbatim a conversation i just had wth a chick working the deli counter at PCC.  if you can at all, please help me understand what the hell she was saying.  if you are offended by my use of the word 'chick' i apologize.  i could spend two paragraphs trying to convey her to you and still you would have no more clear picture of her than you get when i say she was a chick working the deli at PCC.

i ordered bbq tempeh and cole slaw. as she was putting my order together, she asked me how my day is going.  i will pick the conversation up there, beginning with my reply.

"okay, i just got off work, so that feels good, how about you? you're obviously still at work."

"yeah, but i got to play earlier."

"that's cool, what kind of playing did you get to do?"

"you know the kind of playing you do when you're a kid where you just giggle a lot?"

"i guess so?"

"i just spent the whole morning rolling around on the carpet and giggling."

"so, umm... was this solo?"

"no, me and my boyfriend's... friend, we spent the whole morning rolling around on the carpet in our apartment and giggling."

by this time she was handing me my order. i bade her good day and headed off to the check out counter.  seriously though, wtf?

two weeks ago i had no idea who Jay Bennett was.  today i heard he just died.  the news is haunting me.  the only two Wilco albums i own are the Mermaid Ave series. last week I Am Trying To Break Your Heart arrived to me via Seattle Public Library, along with A.M.  i have still not heard Yankee Tango Foxtrot, i have it on hold.

last week i watched IATTBYH, and i have been thinking about it a lot since. 

Jeff Tweedy is an exceptionally gifted vocalist. i am totally infatuated with his voice. and he writes a good song.  but i was somewhat troubled by the way he was portrayed in the film, especially in terms of his relationship to Jay Bennett.  Bennett is clearly supposed to be viewed as the heavy, the guy at fault, the one who gets what he deserves when he is kicked out of the band. but i saw it a little differently.

for starters, humans are compulsive about always wanting to break thinsg down into black and white, good and bad. but the truth when it comes to human realtionships is that things are virtually never that clear.  Tweedy was portayed, perhaps predictably, as the ultra-sensitive artist, an innocent, almost childlike figure just trying to make good music but finding that his beautifully tender soul is often vexed by the crass and oafish elements in the world.  Bennet is put across as part of the problem.  here is my problem:  the scenes selected for the movie did show a Bennett who could be a bit of an ass, insecure, neurotic, compulsive.  but he did come across to me as quite courageously honest, and extremely dedicated to the music the band was making.

even people in the movie who crapped on Bennett acknowledged that he was the one person in the band most responsible for the final sound of the band's masterpeice in that he spent way more time than anyone else producing it.  yes, we know the band is all about Tweedy, they are his songs, it is his voice. i'm just saying Bennett took that raw material and did more than anyone else to fashion it into the final product. in the process be evidently alienated everyone in the band. but the fact is, he did it.

and for his troubles the ultra sensitive artist Tweedy tells him he is out of the band.  but Tweedy arranges for everybody to understand that Bennett chose to leave the band, a lie. when asked how he feels about Bennett being gone Tweedy says,

"i couldn't be happier."

Tweedy, i am a huge fan of your work, and maybe the film misrepresented what happened, but as i was watching this, having no idea that Bennet would be dead within a matter of days, i felt that what you did was a classic bitch-ass maneuver.  you seem to have chosen a cowardly way out of a difficult situation and in the process delivered a cold-blooded dose of disrespect to a fellow band mate who had worked very hard to help you sound good. and we're supposed to still see you as this gentle soul innocent indie dude?  i had a probelm with this, still do, and now i find out Bennet is dead. i hope he gets treated better posthumously than he was treated in the movie, while he was still living.

the young woman got on the bus with a baby, an especially adorable baby, the kind that radiates bemused contentment, enormous shiny eyes smiling in wonder at everything and everybody, even me.

the young woman was plain.  she had braces.  she carried herself with an effortless grace even as she struggled to get herself, and the baby, and the baby stroller onto the bus along with the rest of the crowd.

after setting the stroller near a seat, the young woman returned to the front of the bus to pay her fare.  she dug into her purse and fished out change while holding the baby, and maintaining her balance on the moving bus. as the youg woman dropped the last coin into the recepticle, she sighed.  it was a perfectly unaffected sigh, perhaps the most perfect sigh i have ever heard. after the sigh she said, with an accent i could not readily identify,

"eez so difficult."

there was not a note of self pity in her statement, she was not looking for a reply. she said it in the most matter-of-fact tone, like somebody might say, 'nice weather we're having.'  it seemed to me as though she was saying it for everyone, for all time, simply stating what we all know to be true: eez so difficult.

  

the second coyote i saw in the seattle metro area was laying by the side of the road on the west seattle bridge, right in front of the bronze figures balancing on logs.  it was a young coyote, and it looked quite peaceful there by the side of the road very early on a sunday morning, and of course it was dead.

the first one i saw about three years earlier in juanita, also early in the morning. it ran out into, and then briefly down the middle of the residential street.  then it veered quickly onto a lawn and abruptly stopped.  at first i had thought it was a dog, but it didn't quite look like a dog.  when it stopped and i got a good look at it, i could see it was a coyote.  i told everyone i knew about it. in return i got to hear everyone's stories about spotting coyotes in the city.

the story i found least credible at the time was from a woman co-worker who told me she used to see them on the ave in the wee small hours of the morning when she was getting off work from her bartending job. i found that hard to believe, but then who would expect to see a coyote on the west seattle bridge? even a dead one?

 later that morning i was flipping around the radio dial and landed on a station doing a rebroadcast of a Casey Kassem American Top Forty show from 1973. my sister used to have it on her car radio sunday mornings.  i had to ride in back while she picked up her girlfriends for church.  it was very odd to hear one of these shows again.  what struck me most was the incongruous mix of music.  where else are you going to hear Anne Murray next to Earth Wind and Fire, next to Donny Osmond, next to Bad Company?  reggae, rock, soul, country, bubble gum, novelty songs all mashed up. that was before program directing was done at the corporate headquarters based on formulas developed by marketing research designed to target one very narrow slice of the listening pie. 

from a kid's perspective the town i grew up in had effectively one radio station.  it played top forty radio, with a few hits from recently passed years mixed in. top forty radio was anything and everything that could achieve mass appeal.  since that is how i heard radio, i never learned to think in terms of genre, it was almost a foreign concept to me, and really still kind of is.  i'm glad i developed my ear for music based on the weird mélange that was top forty radio, that exotic fossil of a concept.  because of its influence i still think in terms put forward by some legendary musician, i forget who, that said there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. 

 

he looked like a middle-aged version of every guy i went to high school with in my remote little home town on the oregon coast,  sons of green chain pulleers, and chocker setters, and fishermen, rangey, wirey, wearing peterbilt caps, spitting chew into an empty big gulp cup, only this guy wasn't chewing when he came into the laundromat. he was accompanied by a native american guy, stereotypically stone-faced and silent, wearing a stocking cap pulled down to his eyebrows. the two of them entered through the door from the sidewalk and made their way across the room to some seats by the other door, which led to the small parking lot.  they had no laundry.

i was standing in front of one of the dryers that lined the back wall, i was folding my clothes. a half wall of commercial washing machines stood back-to-back between me and the two guys, such that our views of one another ended somewhere just above the waist. the white guy had been digging something out of his backpack, he seemed to be quite focused on some kind of task.

he had set his backpack in the large shelf made for folding clothes. he was standing as he went about his business. the native american was sitting in one of the seats behind him, looking straight ahead, silent. in fact neither of them had spoken since they entered.  then a wry smile came to the white guy's face.  he was holding what looked to be maybe like a small vial.  and it seemd like a joke had come to him, something too good to keep to himself, even though the native american showed no ineterst, the white guy must have felt like he had to say it out loud:

"this is laundro-SMACK."

and right as he landed heavily on the word 'smack', his eyes met mine.  evidently, he had not noticed me yet, and had thought he and his partner were alone.  his demeanor turned sheepish the instant our eyes met. he said something like, 'oh, sorry.'  but he continued about his business.  he just turned himself toward the corner, like a school boy being punished for dsiruptive behavior, and he proceeded to shoot up there in the laundromat.  he was done and they were gone before i finished folding my clothes.

 

snapple is the beverage from hell: that's the gist of the position i have held from the first time i encountered it.  when it first rolled out snapple was no different from numerous other beverages.  it's made from water and high fructose corn syrup, with various kinds of flavoring, both natural and artificial.  snapple differs from soda pop only in that it is not carbonated.  and even at that, many similar flat sugery drinks were extant when snapple appeared, but i had a special hatred for snapple. 

my special hatred for snapple stemmed from the fact that it was such an egregious case of blitzkreig marketing.  they attempted to obliterate overnight all the previously existing drinks with which snapple is identical.  this they tried to do by placing snapple everywhere on the planet immediately, and they did. it was like an alien invasion, or a communist takeover. in the blink of an eye it became impossible to leave one's home without encountering  a refrigerator full of snapple product.  i lived in fear that i might wake up one morning to find a snapple display staring at me from the corner of my bedroom.

once they got the product in your face, the snapple people used one simple tactic to persuade you to buy: they lied. they lied and they lied, they lied with the kind of lie that dares you to call it out.  i felt obliged to call it out.  thus was born my snapple rant.  as previously described snapple was no different from  numerous other bottles of crap being hawked by other companies, but snapple advertised itself as a health drink, "made from the best stuff on earth."  

i maintained that high fructose corn syrup and artifical flavors are not the best stuff on earth.  i refused to buy in. i never bought a snapple, which is not to say i had never tasted one.  for you see snapple was not only in every store, it also insinuated itself into every place that two or more gathered, and consumed beverages. every all-staff meetig, every reception, every church picnic, snapple was there.  so though i had never bought a snapple, i had resorted to drinking them on occasion, and each time they fully met my expectations, until receently that is.

recently i was stranded in a 7-11, desperately thirsty, so desperate was i that i actually took a second look at a green tea snapple.  the label made it seem fairly innocuous: no artificial flavor, no high fructose corn syrup.  i decided to give it a try.  it was delicious, not too sweet, very refreshing.  i now buy green tea snapple regularly.  i have become the very kind of person i have ridiculed for years, i am a snapple drinker.  the echoes of my snapple rant, a rhetorical staple of mine for over a decade, now condemn me as a hypocrit.  oh well, i have been a hypocrit before, after a while you get used to it.