Matthew Gallaway

In the Weeds: Goodbye, Autumn

Miss u. (Read more at THE AWL).

The George Washington Bridge Project

Hey winter!

Here at last.

The Saturnine Tour Diaries Project: 1995

October 20, 1995/Detroit: We played at Zoot's with Xebec and Windy & Carl. Michael C___, who booked the show, was a total scenester -- Buddy Holly glasses, blue-striped polyester sweater, etc. I had pictured him over the phone as being kind of crunchy, so it was kind of a shock to see him. He was very nice, though, and seemed into the show. We drove back to Toledo with two of the guys from Xebec, who again seemed very young and silent, except for Rob, who told us about Toledo. They live in a big Victorian mansion in a neighborhood surrounded by slums. As we were driving toward his house, he said: 'There's Tim throwing up outside of Jeff's house.' When we asked Xebec how long it would take to get to Buffalo, one of them said, 'I don't know -- like six hours,' and another said, 'no -- eight,' and then the bass player, who had mostly been stupefied in his chair the whole night said, 'no -- it's like twelve hours.'

October 21, Buffalo: Our worst show of the tour. The day started pretty well, we drove to Buffalo and met the program director of the SUNY Buffalo station, and she interviewed us on air. She played about five our songs in the space of 30 minutes. Apparently we were number 20 on the charts there, and she had placed us in 'heavy rotation,' which means that DJs have to play us. She couldn't come to our show, though, because she had to work 12-6 at a commercial station. She was dressed sort of goth -- long skirt, black boots, long straight hair parted in the middle -- our one fan in Buffalo. Chip O___, the guy who interviewed Mike, was also at the station, but he didn't come to the show. The club, called the Continental, didn't even open until 10:00pm and we didn't go on until 12:45, although we were the second band. The upstairs section of the club consisted of an early-80s dance floor with flashing rectangles, and the downstairs was a big room with a bar and the stage. Everyone there was a strange mix of goth/industrial/punk walking around with bad haircuts and leather jackets. The sound on stage was the worst -- I couldn't hear any vocals, and I could barely hear my guitar. Jennifer's amp was feeding back and she broke a string. When we started the first song, someone hurled a cigarette at the stage which landed about 3 feet in front of me and smoldered most of the set. We played a very short set because we wanted to get the hell out of there and because the third band, State of Being, had thought they were playing second, and they sort of gave us a hard time at first. The best thing about the show was that we loaded out and were on the road about ten minutes after we finished, and we were paid $100. Upcoming bands at the Continental: Nine-Inch-Nose and Alcoholism.

October 23/Burlington. We left Syracuse on Sunday and wound our way to Burlington through the dark forests and lakes. We stayed at Zak W___'s mother's farm, where Guppy Boy was recording their first record. The house was incredible -- wooden beams, cathedral ceilings, cats and dogs (including Otto, a giant Rottweiler and a little dog named Brewster). We stopped in Burlington on the way out to the farm and picked up free pizza from Mike's friend Brian, and bought a case of beer for everyone. We woke up in the morning to find the house nestled in a valley with horses running around in the distant fields, surrounded by woods on either side. I went running down Route 108 and then came back for a hike up to Smuggler's Notch, which was nice. We hiked up to a lake at the top of the mountain and hung out for a while. Here's an annoying habit of Jim's: whenever there is a stranger we're talking to, he'll make some reference to the band, e.g., when Jennifer was taking a picture of the lake, Jim said really loudly, 'nice cover art, huh Jen?' Or we'll be hanging out with someone we sort of know and Jim will refer to some dumb inside joke that makes no sense unless explained, at which point of course it's no longer funny. Most of the jokes in the band are built around some sort of pun or small situation and then extended through a million variations, e.g., in Portland, somehow I mentioned echanasia (the homeopathic remedy), and then I said: 'Once I was in China and I really hurt myself: I broke my neck in Asia.' Jim never tires of these games once he gets started. Another example: we were talking about Babe the Blue Ox, or 'BOX' as they call themselves, or used to be called, and I said how dumb it was to use the word 'box' because there were already so many bands with box in their names, like Pearl Box, the Box Boys, Box Box King, Parliament Boxadelic, etc. Anyway, we were interviewed by this strange little kid named Glen from Johnson State College that afternoon. He seemed to want to disassociate himself from Vermont at every moment. He kept saying how he was from New Jersey and he didn't know anything about Burlington bands. That night, Jennifer tried to introduce him to this kid Jason from the UVM station and Glen mumbled something about not knowing anything about Vermont, and then walked away after saying he would see Jennifer in New York. The show itself was well attended, but the Palace Brothers were terrible; they transformed most of Will Oldham's songs into a bad sort of basement blues sound -- totally unrehearsed. He kept giving the finger to the audience for no particular reason (he wasn't being heckled), and about half the audience had left by the time they finished. He didn't say a word to any of us, and acted like a total rock star/scenester, with low-riding red pants, tight jacket with a sleeve pocket for his aviator shades. Jennifer ran out in tears at one point because they wrecked 'Blockbuster' so badly and Jeff left because he was bored. The Palace Brothers had a $500 guarantee and the door was $520, but Dennis paid us $100 anyway. Angela told me that she has to send a fruitcake to some station in California so the music director will chart us.

Time Fades Away: Lunch Hour in the Budding Grove

At lunch today I pushed through the revolving doors and walked onto Madison Avenue, which in the direct sunlight of the December day appeared almost blue, or perhaps even 'azure,' to use a word that has been appearing frequently in the volume of Proust I am currently reading.

Now that I'm a little further into the second volume, I'm less bothered by the translation; only rarely does a word jump out at me for seeming needlessly English. I am far more entranced by Proust's obsessive infatuation with the Swann family, his miraculous ability to describe not only the physical details of his surroundings -- the clothes, the architecture, the streets of Paris, the physical characteristics of the people he meets -- but also the constantly shifting emotional landscape that represents a person falling into and out of love, essentially -- to put it in something more like his terms -- replacing one self with another, so that life becomes a succession of people who inhabit the same body, as opposed to a single entity.

I crossed the street and held my iPhone camera up to the sun, as if to challenge it.

It was not a challenge I would win, at least in the long run, but for the moment I felt grateful to be relieved of the tedium of the workday, the forces of habit -- or as Proust refers to it, Habit -- that all too often obliterates our powers of observation and creativity.

Elektra

This morning felt like December, if not exactly winter; it was cold and humid, but no longer malarial, as it had seemed during the unusually warm weeks of November. I wore two jackets because I couldn't remember where I had stored my heavier one, or if I still even owned one. On the way to the subway station, I was happy to see a truck mulching the trees on the Broadway medians, which is something -- i.e., the mulching-of-trees part, not the medians -- that I've been doing quite a bit of lately.

I went to work, where time passed very quickly. I barely had enough time to check my e-mails before I sprinted back to the subway, on my way back uptown to the Met, where I was going to attend the final dress of Elektra. Leaving the subway just north of Lincoln Center, I was momentarily struck by the sensation of being in Paris twenty years earlier; it was something about the air, mostly, but perhaps also the anticipation as I rushed toward the theater to see something unfamiliar (at least in person) but exciting.

On my way out of the subway station -- to back up a few seconds -- I did pause to admire the mosaic sculpture of the diva at 66th Street. It's one of those pieces of art I hadn't paid a lot of attention to -- mostly because I almost never find myself on this side of the tracks -- but I enjoyed seeing it now, particularly since the same image is featured on the cover of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which I finished reading a few months ago.

As it turned out, the performance was tremendous, particularly when you think about the 11:00am time slot. I greeted my friends Jeff and John -- who were celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary -- along with Brian, who lives a few blocks away from us in Washington Heights, and whose party I once showed up to eight days early. (Stephen, of course, was working, and we all waved at him across the rows of seats.) What I love about Elektra is the way it moves so suddenly -- shockingly -- yet seamlessly between the most jarring and almost atonal sections of music to the lush and sweeping, so that it really feels as if you are straddling two centuries. (The piece was written in 1911 or thereabouts.) The story is equally intense, about the revenge of Elektra and her brother Orestes on their mother and her new husband for killing their father (Agamemnon), as well as the cost of that revenge, in terms of Elektra's increasingly unhinged behavior and -- eventually -- her death. (It's just like a season of Big Love, but compressed to 100 minutes!) All of the singers sounded great, with Deborah Voigt in particular magically filling up the house, her voice loud and rich but not at all piercing -- you might even say 'creamy' -- as it hovered over the orchestra.

When the opera ended, we staggered out to Lincoln Plaza -- there is no walking/strolling after being subjected to the intensity of Elektra! -- where the day remained gray and somber, but somehow more enticing than it had seemed a few hours earlier.

Time Fades Away: Goodbye Gardening Season 2k9

This morning we woke up to a clear, cold day that (finally!) felt like December.

We had a lot of chores scheduled, but not so many that we couldn't take the time to have bagels and lox (via Zabar's), which as usual were delicious.

Or that we couldn't take a 'lil nap' afterward, because after all it was Sunday.

But finally we got motivated and went to the garden, where I picked up the last of the leaves and Stephen tried to fix the broken vacuum cleaner.

Our neighbor Scott -- who runs a community garden up the street -- came by to adopt a columnar apple tree that we had been wanting to give away.

We also gave him a cherry tree that we had moved from the ground to a pot a few years ago. At one point we had visions of braiding the trunk and training the branches over the windows of the house, but it became clear that this was not the right tree for this treatment, so we were happy to send it to a new home.

After Scott left, I returned to the garden, where I looked up and was pleased to note that almost all of the leaves had fallen from the birch. I was tired of picking up so many leaves! Still, I could not help but admire the stark beauty of the tree branches against the indigo sky. I covered the garden furniture and brought all the terra cotta pots down to the basement.

Though it was mostly asleep, the garden -- I was pleased to note -- was not without 'winter interest,' and I looked forward to the first snow now that we were prepared.

Upstairs, we put in the storm windows as the last of the fading light illuminated the bloom of a Christmas cactus.

On Broadway, someone had wrapped one of the medians in a string of Christmas lights, which I suppose if you used your imagination and squinted really hard might be considered 'festive.'

The same could be said of the sad little artificial Christmas tree in the lobby of our apartment building: if you looked close enough, you could almost see the fading years of a youth that had long since disappeared.

A tugboat headed south on the Hudson through the setting sun. The George Washington Bridge waited patiently for the night, as it has done for tens of thousands of days already.

Time Fades Away: Saturday in the Fog and Light

Today was gray and dreary, which ended up being the perfect excuse to do nothing, if 'nothing' can be defined as blogging, watching teevee and having afternoon tea and strudel.

This week we've been watching 'Big Love,' the series about a polygamous family trying to 'pass' in a suburb in Utah. We're a little obsessed with the character of Nicki Grant -- played by Chloe Sevigny -- an exceedingly and often hilariously tightly wound 'second wife' of the boring husband. Because Nicki grew up on the fundamentalist 'compound,' she is by far the most complicated and compelling character on the show, one who continually struggles with modern (and to her, at least outwardly, morally repugnant) obsessions like credit card debt, gambling and birth control (if being on 'the pill' can be considered an obsession, which it probably could to a religious fundamentalist?). She alone is worth watching the series, although there are some other amazingly 'zany' and conflicted characters (the husband's mother Lois is noteworthy) who are probably only a few steps removed from people we all know and maybe love in our own lives (which is also why the show is fun and painful -- in a good way -- to watch).

At around 4:00 pm, we decided to take a tea-and-strudel break.

Here's Nicki winning at bingo.

Sometimes bad weather isn't really so 'bad' after all.

Like so many people with something to hide, Nicki is the most judgmental character on the show; in some ways she is like a closet-case whose walls are slowly crumbling as she -- often unconsciously -- throws herself into situations that will force her to leave her past behind.

The skies remained heavy over the George Washington Bridge, but for a moment were illuminated with a golden and serene light.

The Saturnine Project: Tour Diaries 1995

October 15, 1995: We stayed in St. Louis for two days at Mike's friend's apartment, since she had gone out of town. Friday night Jennifer came running back from down the street where Cicero's is located and told us that Shiner was playing. So we went down there and got in for free because we're playing there on Monday. Mike H___ was playing bass for Shiner, which is a loud band on the Jawbox label. We spent a lot of time promoting our show -- Mike talked to a few people who said they would come, except none of them did. We put up flyers and went to a record store, where they bought 10 singles from us. I went running all three days in St. Louis -- the neighborhood was located next to Washington University -- old houses, winding streets fighting off the bad neighborhoods with iron gates. We went for a drive one day and crossed Skinker and then the railroad tracks and the whole city fell apart. Store fronts were boarded up and people walked down the middle of the street. The best part of my runs was going down the alleyways in the nice neighborhood, where there were ivy-covered carriage houses lining both sides; I felt like I was running messages in the Civil War. Saturday night we went to see Yo La Tengo at the university, which was OK. This woman at the university said she would book us, and we met a DJ who wanted to interview us on Monday. Sunday we drove to Columbia and arrived at the radio station where we met Veronica. We hung out at the station and looked at the CMJ issue where we were 'most added.' The band we were playing with, unCrush, was playing its first show outside of Kansas City. They were very young and their lead singer, Kelly, had a really strong slacker/southern accent and none of us could really understand him at first. He worked as a dishwasher in some town. The played to about 10 people, and it sounded OK except all the midrange was cut out of the PA so I couldn't hear any vocals. I noticed that people in the midwest use the term 'white trash' a lot. We played to about 20-30 people, which was nice. A real teenage kid bought our disk, and we got paid $5 in change. Veronica, who put the show together, took us all back to her house, where she made spaghetti. She was the ultimate scenester in a good sense because she has promoted shows with every good indie band in the last five years and she had a hall-of-fame wall of posters. We left that night and drove back to St. Louis. Jennifer forgot her backpack, so they had to FedEx it to Pittsburgh.

October 16/St. Louis: Cicero's is a great club. We almost fell over when they sent us a postcard saying they wanted to book a show with us. We played with this band called the Highway Matrons, which featured Freddy Friction, this skinny, wiry guy in a muscle t-shirt and pearl necklace who played the spoons and the drums. In the middle of their set, these two buskers came in and played guitar and washboard (with Freddy on spoons) and played the theme from Gilligan's Island and 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'). Then the band came on and played forever. At one point, Mike turned to me and said, 'If they play another song, I'm going to cry.' Before the band went on, the band members all went up to each other and burped into each others' ears. We left at 1:30am for Pittsburgh. Mike was driving.

October 17/Pittsburgh: We arrived in Pittsburgh 10 hours later. I made a bunch of phone calls including one to this idiot promoter in Canada who told me that he couldn't book any of the shows that he had promised to book. That night, we played at Graffiti, which was probably the biggest venue we've played. We also had the biggest crowd, which was nice, except there weren't too many scenesters. We had to pay the club 10 percent of our merch, which amounted to $6.90. My sister Jan told the soundman to turn us down, and then she told me to turn down our amps. She said afterward that she felt like I barely recognized her. Actually, I did turn down a bit. Jan brought a delegation of Russians with her, including Sergei and Igor who had eaten over at [my brother]'s with us the week before. A couple of the others gave me some promotional literature and postcards and pins from their city in Siberia about two minutes before we played. I wore the pins, though.

October 18/Cincinnati: Zig-zagging across Route 70 through Ohio. Arrived at the club and met Gerald and his band who were playing with us. We ate at this Mexican place and Mike and Jennifer ordered vegetable burritos, which came out looking like a taco. Then Jimmy D found us and we went back to the club with him. Our show was OK -- not that crowded, but actually just as crowded as the Barbara Manning/Chris Knox show down the street at Sudsy Malone's. Gerald played with about 20 pedals -- it was a little too guitar player for my tastes. We spent the night at his house, which was in an old suburb of Cincinnati. Gerald told us that he thought Nectarine was a real indie-rock band because they recorded all on analog and recommended that they be listened to only on vinyl, etc. He looked great in his new short haircut, but I also had to laugh to myself when he said he liked Cincinnati because he was getting calls from major labels. Oh well. We got up in the morning and said hello to Gerald's father, who didn't seem that happy to see us. Me and Mike went out running in a rather big park and went trailblazing along the mountains. We got lost and almost ran onto the freeway. When we got back we hung around for a while and then packed and left because we didn't want to stay another night at Gerald's. We went out to breakfast and then went to Jimmy D's. After Gerald left, we went to a drum store to get Jim some stuff, and then we went to a really good thrift store -- rows and rows of shirts arranged by color, nothing more than $2. Mike said he was going to withdraw all of his money to buy shirts to bring back and sell in New York. Later, we went to Ultrasuede, where the Afghan Whigs record. We met John the bass player who runs the studio, and hung out with the Ass Ponys who were in the middle of recording their new album. They didn't seem that happy, although the songs they played for us sounded pretty good. It's amazing what bands do when they have a lot of time. The night before they had dragged out all of these speakers into the street so they could mix feedback in with the sound of the train yard. It seemed kind of Rock Star. Then the guy in Throneberry was telling us how when they recorded they would do about 12 takes of every song and then piece together the 'best' part of each rhythm track, so that it took them one day for each track. Then we went out to dinner downtown at this place called Marlene's and Jennifer went in first and then came running back to tell us that Michael Stipe was in the restaurant. This was all the more remarkable because she had met him about six weeks earlier at the Mercury Lounge and had given him our promo tape, because Angela had given one to Spike, who had it at the bar. Jimmy D bought us a great dinner and we hung out with the waiter and the chef because Jimmy D was friends with them. After we walked out, we convinced Jennifer (Mike went with her) to go say hello to Michael Stipe, which she did. She went up to him and interrupted: 'I'm very sorry, but I met you last month in New York at the Pell Mell show and I gave you a copy of our tape and I wanted to give you a copy of our record.' And he said, 'cool -- yeah, that Pell Mell show, thanks, this is cool,' and that was it. Then we went and had a radio interview at midnight with this freaky guy named Sonny. He bought like $20 worth of merch at the show, but then he accused us of stealing a Velvet Underground record from the radio station (which we didn't).

The George Washington Bridge Project: The Morning Moon

The past few nights, as the moon has grown increasingly full, Stephen and I have taken turns waking up at around 5am or so and in the middle of our anxiety-provoked, insomniac wanderings around the apartment, taken a few moments to admire the black and white sky reflecting off the rooftops of Washington Heights. The photographs were admittedly disappointing, however, and we resigned ourselves to never really capturing the essence of the moon as it sinks ever lower in the early morning sky.

This morning, however, I woke up and was amazed to find the moon still there in the sky at 7:30, something I couldn't remember having ever seen before, at least from this vantage point. The second this thought occurred to me, it also occurred to me that I hadn't been paying attention, as so often happens in life.

Whatever the case, I was transfixed by the sight.

As much as I love the swirling orange and red tones of the sunset, there's also something appealing about the bolder hues and sharp edges of the morning light; watching a tugboat make it's way down the Hudson, I felt capable and energized, ready to face the inevitable difficulties of the day ahead.

But this sense of satisfaction lasted only a few moments, and I wished that the moon -- full as it was -- could have been even fuller, and setting more dramatically over the bridge instead of the ugly post-war New Jersey apartment buildings.

I told myself that in the modern world, anything is possible if you wish for it hard enough.

'All u have 2 do is pray hard enuf, and ur dreamz will come true.'

--Dante

The Resignation Cats

Dante: Of course I like to pretend that I'm immune to the political small-mindedness that has dominated the 'gay marriage' debate for the last year (not to mention the two thousand or so before that), but no matter how jaded or cynical I try to be, no matter how low I try to set my expectations or decry marriage as an institution (because let's face it: it's problematic), it's still depressing when your political leaders -- and not even Republicans, from whom we expect such disappointment, but the Democrats, the party of civil rights, the party of JFK and Barack Obama -- fail to acknowledge the basic idea that one person shouldn't be entitled to rights that another person has, just because the former is born with a disposition to like/love/sleep with someone of his or her own gender (to the extent gender means anything, which it undoubtedly shouldn't for these purposes).

Zephyr: The failure to legalize 'gay marriage' is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the extreme hatred and homophobia that prevails in this country and pretty much everywhere else. Everyone who grows up in the United States is taught from the first images we see on television and billboards and everywhere else to fucking hate gay people (including themselves) without understanding why, and it leads to violence, not only against the openly gay but against others who might make the mistake of 'threatening their masculinity/femininity' (by somehow implying that the person in question is a 'fggt' or a 'dyke') and especially the legions of women who are in fact legally married to men (or vice versa) who don't understand why they have to be trapped in a relationship with someone who, when push comes to shove, they would rather not be sleeping with. Life is hard enough without introducing this kind of corrosive, vitriolic anger that eats away at people and makes them into cruel shadows of what they had once hoped to be.

Elektra: None of this is news, of course, and it can't be doubted that thousands of others will voice dismay over the next few days/weeks/years, but for those of us who have reached a certain age -- and have grown up with Reagan and Clinton and Bush and now Obama -- it's maybe too painful to hear about how 'change is coming' or that the 'younger generation really gets it' or that it's 'only a matter of time.' Don't tell me that things will get better, because it's dishonest, and you just don't know if that's true. I don't want to fight anymore, I don't even want to care, even in the most abstract way; I want to move to an island and be separated from the society that hates me so much; I want to read books and live with my head in the clouds and think about the potential of what life can offer, instead of what is continually withheld. (Needless to say, I do not want to give myself to 'jury duty' on December 15.)

Zephyr: Do you think we'll ever be able to 'get married' in our country?

Dante: No.