New Rules

I've had a general rule of not posting drawings from the live shows, mostly because I believe Show Drawings are like theatre--things that happen in the moment and are unique experiences for the folks present at the event.

But rules are made to be bent and broken.

On Wednesday night, I sat in with Michael Leonhart and the Avramina 7 and drew on the big screen while they played their mix of heavy funk psychedelia. The day before, Michael had finished the final mixes on his new album, The Seahorse and the Storyteller, so he was ready to show off.

After Soundcheck, Michael and I sat down and talked about some of the narrative and notions behind the music. The concepts are dense and the musical images vivid, so I spent a couple of hours letting them bubble beneath the surface while I wandered the city doing Christmas errands and other things. When I got to the Pub, I had absolutely no plan for the drawing, other than to try and draw the musicians and maybe capture some of the images swirling around the music.

But plans are made to be bent, broken and laughed at by the gods.

What emerged instead was the drawing above and I don't have much to say about it because it seemed pretty magic to me. It looks like we'll try to do this again a few more times, these concept concerts of funk and ink. We'll set up and play and let the music and the story take us where it will. As plans go, it seems pretty solid.

The next show is at Joe's Pub on January 9th.

By the way, the current issue of Covers magazine has a feature on Michael and his music and another on me and my drawings. Check them out; the P-funk revolution has begun!

Happy Ending

John Cameron Mitchell read and sang as part of Amanda Stern's Happy Ending Music and Reading Series at Joe's Pub last night.

Earlier in the day, the New York State Senate had voted down the Gay Marriage Bill. "They'll all be dead someday," Mitchell sighed and shrugged, before unfolding some crumpled pages and reading aloud from a journal he kept during a trip to Russia for a screening of his film, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. The screening had been part of the first gay and lesbian film festival in Russia, a festival shut down before it could screen any film and driven underground in a land still emerging from underneath it all. The memories read aloud were bittersweet and poignant, and sadly less distant on a day when even the most impassioned hopes could not move the mountain of fear.

All participants at the Happy Ending are required to take a public risk and, for his, Mitchell concluded by singing a lullabye in Russian. In days gone by, he explained, the song he chose was broadcast every night on Russian television as a sort of transition between the broadcast day and the evening news. Mitchell talked about how everyone in Russia knew it and sort of hated it as a fossilized artifact, a dust-covered tune incapable of being new.

He sang it sweetly and beautifully and the room was as reverent, attentive and fiercely present as the room gets.

It was a same old song that almost no one there had ever heard before. It once signaled the end of a day that would start again, the same, tomorrow. It was sort of beautiful and sad and I can't tell you what it meant, but it will stay with me for a while.

Selling Out

I've just listed these and a couple of other prints for sale over at Etsy. There's a very small number of them available, so if you are interested, head on over there and check out the Inklines Etsy store.

Sweet Home, Chicago

Last year I missed the big family Thanksgiving in Phoenix for the first time in about twenty years.

This year the family moved the celebrating from the chill of Arizona to the temperate climes of the greater Chicagoland area to be with my Aunt Pat, because she hasn't been up to much traveling of late. Pat is the last sister of my grandmother's generation. There were originally five sisters and one brother and they had seventeen children amongst them and then that generation gave birth to my generation.

As anyone who has been reading this blog for a couple of years will know, we're a close family and our Thanksgiving dinners usually have tables set for between fifty and seventy five folks. We're lucky enough to all enjoy each other's company; seems it never matters who you find yourself standing next to, you're just happy they're there.

So, anyway. Chicago.

This is where we're from, the Mervis clan, but it's been a very long time since we celebrated here, so I've been looking forward to the trip for some time.

When I was a kid, we celebrated holidays, birthdays, weddings and pretty much every weekend together on the banks of Honey Lake in Barrington on what was left of my great grandfather's farm. We ate together, swam together, laughed together and all the rest of it. We were well fed and there were always candy bars and soda pop and caviar and little clab craws and if it seems like a dream, it probably was. But memory makes everything better than it was, even the bad stuff, and our collective memory wears the nicest pair of rose colored glasses you're likely to find. The farm's long gone and we've spread out across the country, but we like any excuse to get together and make new memories.

So, this year in Chicago.

Then, a few weeks shy of the holiday, Pat passed away, leaving us without a member of her generation for the first time in our lifetimes. And that puts an air of sadness over everything. But this group, tends to find joy in sadness and I guess the lives of those that have passed are all the more reason to cling together and keep on churning out the good times.

So this Thanksgiving is for Pat. And Joy and Pook and Jack and Merv and Tweet and Babe. And Carolyn and Peter. And Nana and Grandpa. And Carl and Norm and Buddy and Milt and the Judge.

And for all the younger folks and new members of the clan that didn't get to meet everybody, go make enough new good times for the future generations to talk about.

It's Thanksgiving and we have so much to be thankful for . . .

Help

The Medicare and Social Security Office, 26 Federal Plaza, Manhattan, 31st floor, Room 120, Wednesday around noon.

Face Dances

Stay With Me

Ian McLagan at Joe's Pub last night.

It was one of those nights.

I'd been looking forward to this show for a while. I'm a big fan of McLagan's and I admire him. He's played on some monstrous tracks in some tremendous bands with some hugely talented people and seems to have gone through his life living it precisely the way he has wanted to, with abandon and a healthy recklessness that you can practically hear when he plays and sings. He was in the Small Faces and then The Faces, he's played with the Stones and the Who and Dylan and continues to tour frequently with Billy Bragg and with his own Bump Band. And every week he plays a free show in Austin for tips and has a grand time doing it.

As I took my place in the back and the lights went down, I began to smile with expectation. Soon after the show started, Elvis Costello snuck in and took a seat in the booth next to mine. "I didn't tell him you were coming," said a friend of McLagan's to Costello and Costello just smiled and watched from the dark this unassuming legend of the keyboard, continuing to do things his way.