From Portland, Maine’s Holiday Inn: Please Reuse The Towels. . .Or I’ll Shred You With My Talons!

Yes, I got back to New York super early Saturday, but I’ve been too overwhelmed by everything until now to recount my travels.  It also didn’t help that the Greyhound I was taking from Cambridge, Mass., to New York arrived for boarding an hour late (11:30 pm instead of 10:30 pm), meaning we’d get back into Da City at 3 am instead of 2 am.  And it really didn’t help that the two women sitting in back of me chatted away on their phones like their minutes wouldn’t carry over.  At one point I had managed to fall asleep but then incredibly one of the women reached over and shook me.  “Do you know where we are?” she asked.  “I was sleeping!” I snapped.  “How was I supposed to know you were sleeping?” she countered.  At that point it was 2 am and everybody on the bus was asleep apart from those two women.  Argh!

Minneapolis

They have bunny rabbits running wild downtown!

This city was so clean it made me wanna puke. But I loved the light rail that runs from downtown to Mall of the Americas!  I totally had to go to that mall, you know, just ’cause I’ve never been there.  I ate 1/3 pound of chocolate in about 30 seconds, thoroughly disgusting myself.  Then the guy at the counter suggested I get a chocolate-covered Twinkie.  “You mean a Chocodile?” I asked him.  “What’s a Chocodile?” he said.  Nearly exploding with shocked disbelief, I commanded him in a menacing and even voice to look it up on Wikipedia.

Readings are a piece of cake, nyuk nyuk nyuk!

Yeah, Bryan Thao Worra totally got this cake decorated with the covers of his On the Other Side of the Eye poetry collection, my This Is a Bust and the No Regrets chapbook from the beautiful and talented Saymoukda “mo0ks” Vongsay.  The reading was totally cool, at the Loft Literary Center.  The most amazing thing about Minneapolis: I never met another Chinese/Taiwanese American.  Dude, the Asian community is strong in Lao and Hmong representation!  Yes! Bryan and mo0ks, thank you so much for showing me that good ol’ Midwestern hospitality!

Exeter, N.H.

 Isn’t that Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws?

I was kinda bummed that only one person in this beautiful town showed up for the reading.  I didn’t know who he was at first, but the fact that he showed up late and popped open a soda noisily in the middle should have clued me in.  It’s Brian LaRaia!  From college, man!  Jesus, I got details on this brutha!  I’ll never starve so long as I can blackmail him, ha ha ha!  We went to a Mexican place (in New Hampshire?) that was probably pretty awesome if you were drunk off your ass.  Thank you so much for having me, Water Street Bookstore and Sarah Onufer!

Portland, Maine

Boo-yah!

I had good press going in and I also had the backing of The Man Who Loves Books, Chris Bowe.

Chris Bowe of Longfellow Books, one of the most beautiful men in the world.

People there were very cool and I loved reading for them.  Check out this blog entry on the reading that includes me in my Sonics shirt!  Portland has an awesome museum of art and I loved how so many people, both men and women, had tatts. This is a tough fucking town with heart, I said to myself. I was sad to leave, but I’m definitely coming back.  Thank you so much Longfellow Books, Chris and Phyllis!

Cambridge, Mass.

Damn, how come I didn’t take no pictures?  Luckily, this dude’s blog entry tells it all!  I love the low-light picture of me reading (well, shoot, what picture of me don’t I love?).  It looks like a back-of-the-album photo from like a Mott the Hoople record or something.  I was psyched that my pals David Yoo and Alex Luu showed up.  Thank you so much for having me at East Meets West: Eugene Shih, Van Lee and Ash Hsie!

I had gotten into Cambridge from Portland at 5 pm.  The reading was at 8 pm.  I got to the bus station at 10 pm.

You know what the hell happened next.  Grrrr….

Not their first reunion, but these two shows were The Vaselines’ U.S. debut before heading to Seattle for this sellout record label’s anniversary show.

Maxwell’s

The Hoboken show, Wednesday, July 9, was nearly derailed.  Literally.  The PATH train that connects Hoboken to Manhattan went out of service at 6PM.  Anyone coming from New York who wanted to see the show had to take a PATH train to some other destination in Jersey and then get to Hoboken via the light rail system.  Simple enough for a local.  But for a native New Yorker?  It also didn’t help that light rail announcements of an approaching train didn’t simply say “Hoboken.”  They were more along the lines of “Second Street and Marshall.”  Where the hell is that? I just Googled it and got some place in Marshall, Ill.

Maxwell’s remains a wonderful place to see a show in an intimate setting.  In fact, 20 years ago (damn!) I saw Nirvana play Maxwell’s tiny stage opening for Tad.  Bleach, Nirvana’s first album, had come out already, but Tad’s God’s Balls was also out and seemed to be getting more play. At this time in their native Scotland, The Vaselines were on their last legs and broke up shortly after releasing their only LP, Dum-Dum. Of course, years later, Nirvana covering three Vaselines songs are what led to Sub Pop compiling The Way of the Vaselines, a complete anthology, in 1992. It also helped that Kurt Cobain endlessly heaped praise on the duo, Frances McKee and Eugene Kelly, as songwriters; I mean, Christ, he named his kid after McKee!

 The Indelicates actually look good here.

Opening at Maxwell’s were The Indelicates from the U.K. Hard to say what went wrong. Maybe their earnest insistence for the crowd to clap along in complicated rhythm (c’mon, they only clap for Bruce in Jersey).  Maybe it was their too-dry sense of humor (”This next song is about blowjobs.”). Maybe it was the sophisticated keyboard playing.  Yeah, that was it.  Always blame the keyboards.

The Vaselines 2008! L-R: Bobby Kildea, Frances McKee, Eugene Kelly, Richard Colburn. Out of frame: Stevie Jackson.

“Hey, how ya doing?” Kelly announced at the top. “America, you sexy bitch. We made it, eventually. We’re called the Vaselines.”  Then the show was off with “Son of a Gun” and its marching beat. It was apparent immediately that Eugene’s and Frances’ vocals hadn’t changed one iota in 20 years.  Eugene still sounded somewhat stern and slightly jaded. Frances sings like the girl who gets to do the solos during Carpenters’ songs in fourth grade: wonderfully innocent, wonderfully untrained. On the musical side, the Vaselines had ringers in the guise of 3/7ths of Belle and Sebastian’s current lineup. Bobby Kildea on bass, Richard Colburn on drums and Stevie Jackson, who was most comfortable out of sight, on guitar. Jackson added great leads, even giving “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam” an unexpected country/western feel, but how could the singer/songwriter of standout B&S tracks such as “The Wrong Girl” and “To Be Myself Completely” have his vocal contribution reduced to meowing on the chorus to the Vaselines’ “Monsterpuss”? Aw, who am I kidding. I’d meow on all fours to be in that band.

Frances said rumors that “Molly’s Lips” was about oral sex were false because “we didn’t know what oral sex was when we wrote this song. . .and some of us still don’t know.”  “I do,” countered Eugene, “Frances told me all about it. Sounds like great fun. We’re gonna try it afterwards.”  Some more joking led to a false start with Frances gasping, “I can’t. . .”

If you’re not familiar with the layout of Maxwell’s, the stage is at a dead end in the room while the dressing rooms are downstairs. Musicians need to walk through the crowd to get between the two. Most bands don’t bother to step off the stage after the regular set and merely take a breather before launching into the encore. The Vaselines chose this route, with Eugene detailing a fantasy of being brought to orgasm by Bon Jovi.  When you conjure up that name, what else can you play except “You Think You’re a Man” for the encore?  They closed out the night with “Dum-Dum.”

Southpaw

I liked them at first. . .

Local band the Crystal Stilts came out strong with cavernous vocals, a thundering stand-up drum kit and a bass sound that threatened to swallow the entire city. A few songs in, they all started sounding the same. Not the fault of the band. The mix was terrible with the rhythm section overpowering the guitar and drowning out the keyboards completely.  But still, that first song was great and certainly better than anything the Indelicates had done the night before.

Encore?

Uh, oh, it’s the Indelicates again!  The Brooklyn crowd flat out dissed them. The noise at the bar was audible through nearly every song. When they started with the handclaps again, I was like, whoa, you’ve just unleashed a weapon of mass alienation!

It’s Stevie Jackson all the way to the right!

Less joking around this night in this larger venue.  I preferred the Maxwell’s show. I think Frances and Eugene did, too, judging by the number of references they made to onstage remarks at Maxwell’s.  “You’re as young as the audience is,” Frances said at one point.  “Yeah,” muttered Eugene, “I feel about 45.”  I’d say he was about 10 years too high. No surprises song-wise for those who attended the Maxwell’s show, right down to the encore.  The entire show was a bit like an extended encore of the previous night. Still, every moment is precious.  Who knows when they’ll be back, if ever?

Yeah, that’ll work!

I’m reading in Minneapolis!  The land of Husker Du and the Replacements!  Soul Asylum! And the seldom-heralded Man-Sized Action!

I’m also going to Exeter, N.H., which is probably best known for the Phillips Exeter Academy and for this infamous UFO account.

After that, it’s Portland, Maine, and then Boston.

Although I’ve been to Boston many times, these are my first visits to the states of Minnesota, New Hampshire and Maine!  So show up, or be abducted by a UFO!

Monday July 14, 2008, 7:00 PM

The Loft Literary Center
Suite 200, Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415
612-215-2575
With Bryan Thao Worra and Saymoukda Vongsay.

Wednesday July 16, 2008, 7:00 PM

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, NH 03833
603-778-9731

Thursday July 17, 2008, 7:00 PM

Longfellow Books
One Monument Way
Broadway & 117th Street
Portland, Maine
207-772-4045

Friday July 18, 2008, 8:00 PM

East Meets West Bookstore
934 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, Mass.

You are a writer and you’ve been looking for that special contest that will recognize your talent because although you’re somewhat modest, you’re also quite competitive.

Here it is! Co-sponsored by the good people at Hyphen Magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Preeta Samarasan won this contest in 2007 and — holy shit! — now has her first novel out, Evening is the Whole Day!

I highly suggest you enter right now.

ENTER THE 2008 HYPHEN MAGAZINE/ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS’ WORKSHOP SHORT STORY CONTEST!

For more info go to: http://www.hyphenmagazine.com/content/view/93/1/

Hyphen magazine and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop are taking submissions for their 2008 Short Story Competition.
The winner pockets a $1,000 prize and has his or her story published in Hyphen magazine.

The winner of the 2007 Short Story Competition was Preeta Samarasan (for her story “Our House Stands in a City of Flowers”), whose debut novel Evening is the Whole Day will be published by Houghton-Mifflin later this year.

Writers of short fiction are encouraged to enter the 2008 Short Story Competition jointly sponsored by Hyphen and The Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW). The winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, publication in Hyphen magazine, a one-year subscription to Hyphen and a one-year membership to AAWW. Ten finalists shall also receive a one-year membership to AAWW and a one-year subscription to Hyphen.

The competition is open to all writers of Asian descent living in the United States and Canada. To be eligible, manuscripts must be previously unpublished and in English. No email submissions allowed. Only authors who have not published a book-length prose fiction manuscript are eligible. The competition is limited to short works of fiction, including short stories, novellas and excerpts from novels; the latter must stand alone as a separate work. There is no required theme or page limit.

Submissions must be postmarked by Friday, July 11, 2008 and accompanied by a $10 entry fee per story. Please send four copies of your story using paper clips. Manuscripts will not be returned and will be acknowledged only if a SASE is provided. Include a cover letter with name, address, email, daytime telephone number and a 3-sentence bio. The story title and page number should be clearly labeled on each page of the submission. Your name must not appear anywhere on the manuscript, except on the cover letter. Manuscripts should be typewritten and double-spaced on 8 1/2 X 11 plain white paper. Incomplete submissions will not be considered.

Manuscripts may be under consideration elsewhere, but please notify us immediately if your story is accepted for publication. Hyphen retains first publication rights and the right to publish a portion of the story on its website. All rights revert to the author upon publication.

To enter the short story competition, please send submission to:

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop
2008 Short Story Competition
16 West 32nd Street, Suite 10A
New York, NY 10001-3808

Make checks payable to “Asian American Writers’ Workshop.”

Entrants will be notified by or on Monday, Oct. 6, 2008.

Fuck, yes!

If I were returning from the the Land of Dead and Gone Things and I could take one thing back with me to the Realm of the Living, it would be Swervedriver.

Luckily, the band resurrected itself after a decade layoff and played at Manhattan’s Bowery Ballroom Wednesday June 11 and Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg (both sold out) on Thursday June 12. In all honesty, Swervedriver has never really formed a critical mass in terms of fandom, but their fans — dudes now in their 30s — are seriously hardcore. If they had played New York five nights in a row, I’m sure it would have sold out and that I would be one among a thousand who would buy tickets for each night. It’s difficult to describe Swervedriver’s music (they titled an EP “Space Travel Rock n Roll,” and that’s a good filler answer). I would say that the music itself seems so infused with emotion, it hits the listener on a personal, subliminal level. Witness the audience, so lost in their own worlds, standing still, playing air guitar/bass/drums. If someone stepped away to go to the bathroom, he could return to his spot, as no one would advance to take it.

The Bowery Show

The first opening band, Terra Diablo of Scotland, were all right. Nothing really stuck to me and not too many people were there at this point. Extra points for knocking their equipment around at the end of the set!

Dirty on Purpose, the second opener, wasn’t really my kind of music. The drummer took most of the lead vocals and I couldn’t get into his treble-y voice. The guitarist on the left spoke up at one point. “Hey, I just heard somebody yell ‘Swervedriver.’ They’re playing next. There’s a nice bar downstairs if you want to wait for them.” “Be nice!” someone in the audience admonished him. Dirty on Purpose was in a tough spot. I mean, Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be the band opening right before a cult favorite playing a reunion tour.

Give Swervedriver credit for not wasting any time hitting the stage. After a tuning check, (left to right) Steve George, Jez Hindmarsh, Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge came out to the instrumental, untitled track at the end of Ejector Seat Reservation’s last listed track “The Birds.” The band roared out with “Sandblasted” from first album Raise and and then peeled a sharp version of “The Birds.” The last time I had seen this band was Halloween night in 1998 at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and damned if they weren’t tighter and hungrier now.

The Brooklyn Show

Up first was The Still Out. Not my kind of thing, and there was a strange moment when during an acoustic number, the keyboard player soloed way out of key, drawing concerned looks from his bandmates.

Up next were Longwave, whose members were impossibly skinny. Right before they went on, I heard one of the bouncers grumble, “These guys are so fucking loud.” I knew they had to be good! Longwave were probably the best opening act out of all four and certainly the most appropriate. Just the right balance of dissonance and dreaminess, IMHO.

What else can I say, except they were even better in Brooklyn, played my jams “The Hitcher” and “I Am Superman” (they didn’t the first night), and just killed with “Rave Down” in the encore.

Let’s do some new songs and a new album. Please. I’m begging here.

Damn, did I milk this doorway for photos, or what?

Yo! Three things to announce.

1) “Super Hero Blues,” a short film by the amazing Greg Pak that I did a voice character for, has won a PBS award! It’s airing tomorrow (June 7) on TV or watch it here. Featured: amazingly transcendent actor Brian Nishii.

2) Looking for a writing class this summer in New York City? I highly suggest you enroll with me in what will surely be the class that ends all classes at the Asian American Writers Workshop and sets you on your way to being an independent and confident writer:

Saturdays, June 21-28, July 12 & 26, Aug 2-9, 12 - 2pm (6 sessions)
Summer Fiction Workshop with Ed Lin

It’s easy to bat around issues about character, plot, point of view, description, dialogue, setting, pacing, voice and theme (whew!) in terms of writing. But Ed Lin promises to spend as little time as possible talking about those concepts. The author of Waylaid (Kaya, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007) supports the idea that writing is akin to playing a musical instrument that no one else has ever seen or heard before and that the authors are generally right, even if they aren’t sure of what they are doing. Lin believes the best thing that can come out of a class is a group of colleagues who can continue reading each others’ work outside the class environment. If you don’t love and respect writing or are focused only on getting published, Lin doesn’t want you in his goddamned class. Ed Lin is the author of the novels Waylaid (Kaya Press, 2002) and This Is a Bust (Kaya, 2007).

@ The Workshop
16 West 32nd Street, 10th Floor
(btwn Broadway & 5th Avenue)
Cost is $175/$150 for members

3) Also, I am now set to read in both Minneapolis and Exeter, N.H., in July! I can’t think of two cities closer to each other!

Monday July 14, 2008, 7:00 PM

The Loft Literary Center
Suite 200, Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55415
612-215-2575

Wednesday July 16, 2008, 7:00 PM

Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street
Exeter, NH 03833
603-778-9731

I went to see Wire last night, who kicked off the South Street Seaport Music Festival. I wasn’t really so sure if the mix of tourists and Wall Street types would be into the band, currently in their third (fourth?) comeback. But, hey, right in front of me were four guys in their late 50s who looked like they just walked out of a casual Friday at a brokerage. They were smoking pot, chugging beers, passing around a flask of Bacardi and yelling for “Ex-Lion Tamer,” which they never got.

Die!Die!Die!’s “terrified” singer Andrew Wilson.

Openers Die!Die!Die! of New Zealand were an admirably noisy trio. Singer Andrew Wilson looped his guitar track so he could put his instrument down and prowl around the gated area set aside for photographers and get face to face with the crowd. He did this no fewer than three times during a 35-minute set. Bassist Lachlan Anderson, looking like an emaciated, youthful J.J. Burnel, also joined him in the pit. Wound-up drummer Michael Prain was a bit of a ringer for Paul Dano, circa Little Miss Sunshine. Overall a good set, even though Wilson admitted to the crowd that he was “terrified.” Their sound was like a dusty vinyl copy of Pink Flag played with a dull needle. In other words — Bravo!

“We Is Wire. . .You Is Welcome.”

Wire took to the stage and singer/guitarist Colin Newman (who now resmbles Ben Linus from Lost) noted to the crowd, “We is Wire. . .you is welcome,” before launching into a song presumably off the new album (due in July). It’s a nod to the hardcore non-conformism that they play to a huge outdoor crowd and open with a song nobody knows and don’t bother to acknowledge the absence of founding member Bruce Gilbert or that touring guitarist Margaret Fielder had taken his place. In fact, no song introductions period. Graham Lewis mock-thanked the crowd for missing a “golden opportunity” to see the Eagles, who were in the midst of playing a multi-night stand at Madison Square Garden. Newman added: “In 1977 the Eagles were one thing — the enemy!” The crowd cheered. Super lanky Robert Gotobed was having some problems, not sure what, but occasionally he got up from his drum kit and waved his hands around. At one point Lewis besought the lighting person to cut down on his predilection for strobe lights: “I’m getting epileptic up here!” Lotsa energy, lotsa rhythm, lotsa songs sung by Lewis. It’s a new prime period for Wire. The only nod to time passing was an Apple MacBook set up on a stand by Newman’s mike, but I couldn’t tell if it was to display lyrics or had something to do with his effects set up.

First encore: “Lowdown”; “1 2 X U.”

Second encore: “Pink Flag” (with Lewis’ dedication, “For all our dead friends. You’ve all got dead friends.”) With the repeated chorus, “How many dead or alive in 1955?” followed with many shouted, “How many?”s observers had to take it as a sly reference to the Iraq War.

Wire has nothing to prove. They are the proof.

And how was your Saturday night? (photo by author)

Laugh if you want. If you’re a snorin’ mofo like me, this could soon be you.

I spent Saturday night not in the arms of my lovely wife but in room 909 (anybody else know that Beatles song ‘One After 909′ by any chance?) of the sleep lab of the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary.

My snoring has been out of control. So I’ve been told. I saw an otolaryngologist a few weeks ago and he said that tissue just sags as one ages, causing drooping breasts, wrinkles and snoring.

“Isn’t there anything good about getting older?” I asked him.

“Well, you gain wisdom,” he said.

“But then you go senile and then you die.”

He had been pretty humorless up until that point, but he found that funny.

Ahead of my appointment at the sleep lab, my wife had found this video on the Internet. It’s a sleep lab demo from Rachael Ray’s show.

Look at all the crap on me and look at how relatively unburdened Mr. Colby “Smiley” Donaldson is. He probably would have shit a brick if he knew he had to put on what I had on.

Colby Donaldson, for this misrepresentation of what being monitored in a sleep lab is like, I will kick your ass any day of the week! You snore because of your mis-healed broken nose. Well I can fix that, handsome!

But enough of my hate-mongering.

In actuality, I am amazed that I was able to sleep. Two devices that felt and looked like plastic cocktail forks were shoved up my nose. I also had six electrodes connected to my head with putty that unfortunately hardened into light lumps of concrete — they hurt like hell when the lab technician pulled them out. Christ, I even had a device attached to my index finger that read the oxygen level in my blood via a light-emitting diode.

Actually, that’s kinda cool. But it felt like a mild pinch all night.

Oh and by the way, testing ended at 5:30 AM and they woke me up.

I staggered home, drank a cup of coffee and then slept four more hours.

Have an awesome Memorial Day Weekend, everybody!

Yeah, I took lotsa pics in this doorway. . .

Check out my Shuffled! feature over on boston progress radio. I talk a leel ’bout six songs picked randomly from my vast music archive.

Artists covered include: Billy Bragg, Asobi Seksu, Taiyo Na, Bad Brains, Asian Dub Foundation and Yellow Rage. I speak of all of them in a rather irreverent tone meant to amuse more than inform.

I will actually be in Boston in July to do a reading, too, man!

I’d figured this would happen sooner or later.

During the Q&A at the Asia Society reading, I was called out by an elder stateswoman of Chinatown for being merely “an observer” not only of the place, but the time (1976).

Sure, I hadn’t grown up in Chinatown. Sure, I don’t understand Cantonese and my Mandarin sucks. But apart from that, she wanted to know when my parents and grandfather came over! Shit, my whole family was under attack for not having street cred!

So far, I had shown the manuscript people who had grown up in Chinatown during that time and got their OKs. Not that I was looking for approval. This Is a Bust is a novel — not a history of Chinatown and far from a sober, objective account.

I completely understand where this elder stateswoman was coming from. “You didn’t live through it, you didn’t experience it, so you can’t understand it.” Moreover, “You have no right to tell it!”

Ah, but if we live with the conceit that no one else can understand our experiences, our culture, our struggles, then we put up these protectionist walls and in turn we stop trying to understand other people. That attitude leads to wonderful things such as homophobia, segregation by sex, ethnicity and race, colonization and wars.

My aim as an artist is to forge understanding. I believe people can find themselves in the stories of other people, no matter how radically different the observer and subject seem to be.

I try to compromise as little as possible and I’ve rubbed a lot of people the wrong way in the past. I remember one woman standing up, asking me why I tried so hard to offend people with my book Waylaid. I don’t remember exactly what I said (something like, “the purpose of an artist isn’t to please”) but I do remember thinking, “Gee, I didn’t try that hard. . .”

In any case, the audience at Asia Society was great, and Helen Koh, Associate Director of Cultural Programs, rocked like an angel. John Woo, acting director of Asian Cinevision, was his wonderful self. Thank you so much for having me!