Fly South

Today at 3pm Sweetheart and his banjo boarded the Silver Star in New York City. In a few hours I’ll be getting on the same train in Richmond, VA, fried chicken, cold beer, guitar and handkerchief in hand to meet him en route to south Georgia. We’re taking the fabled “Oysters Rockefeller” express down to the sea islands for Miss McKay’s birthday. On the agenda: gators, clamming, cocktails in ruins, armadillos, ghosts, sunsets, pig heavens, and- most importantly- adventures. I’ll see you all next week. Until then picture me here…

The 5:15’s

I’ve been in Virginia for a few days now, halfway down the great rolling coast en route to the spanish moss and still country of south Georgia. If I get within a hundred mile radius of my hometown on a Monday, I’ve gotta go sit in with “The 5:15’s”.

Each and every Monday, The 5:15’s meet at the “rock’n’roll office”. It used to be a dentists office my dad built and, left vacant two years ago in the recession, now it’s where people come to rock. The set up just lives there, the amazing accumulated wealth of years of gear: full drums, a wall of huge ancient speakers that still sound awesome, keyboards, multiple amps, mics, Fender tweeds, Rickenbacker 12 strings, pedal steels, SG’s and Les Pauls, electric fiddles and mandolins, my old acoustic guitar from high school, Stratocasters tuned to Keith Richards and and PRS’s hardly tuned at all, Precision and Jazz basses, and, of course, my mom on Cowbell.

It’s pretty amazing, I grew up knowing these guys, the doctor, the lawyer, the chef… and every Monday they shed skins and drink whiskey and play the songs they’ve always loved. There are the obvious classics: BADGE, Down By the River, Dead Flowers, Springsteen, The Byrds, Joe Cocker. Then there’s some more obscure stuff, Steve Earle, Delbert McClinton, Government Mule. If you want to learn to play a song, you bring a sheet: a printout of the lyrics and the chords, just make sure you bring enough copies for everyone.

These guys aren’t professionals, they just love playing together. Sometimes people hit clams or miss parts, and sometimes everyone kills it. We hit the harmonies, nail the drum break, slay the solo and the room gets that full and lifting feeling, that elevated heart-rise that happens when music is good and music is love.

They don’t play for anyone but themselves. Every Monday, starting at 5:15.

Wanderlust, Realized.

Wanderlust. When it gets just warm enough and you have to jump off of high things into wet things with your best ones. Get it? Got it. Good. Let’s roll.

Today, the Thon heads south.

So, a gift from Deke: the best starting-out-on-a-roadtrip-song I’ve heard since “Stranger in a Strange Land”.

image: from McKay’s holga, Smills in the water, me in the air, last summer, Oregon.

Feeling Alive

Chalk it up to multiple childhood readings of The Secret Garden, but I’ve always felt a kinship with plants. If you read this, you might have gathered that the dried up dead ole plant lurking in the brightest but apparently-not-bright-enough corner of my basement brownstone was making me feel dried up, ole, dead, and stuck in a dark corner. Just like when my college roommate killed my orchid by mistakenly watering it with vodka, the symbolism doesn’t go too deep there. After writing about the dying plant, I left the house to go to a meeting and returned to find Sweetheart had populated the window with two new, very green, very alive plants. The next day, it’s warm enough to have the windows open, the breeze is coming in bringing tidings of adventure, and it’s bright enough in here (at least for now) for the prisms I have hanging hopefully between the window bars like a hipster Polyanna to yield little rainbows. Sometimes all it takes is a little green and a little light.

In Living Color

With the purple carrots, rainbow chard, and def beets that have been showing their true colors on the shelf at the Co-op, this awesome food-color-chart is right on time:Bring on Spring!

Miraculous curry-alls and inscrutable mushroom mysteries courtesy of the brilliant Renee (you might remember her spot-on gingerbread brownstone).

Feeling: Wanderlust

The Exercise: I feel wanderlust when you start to think about the temperature rising and the slant of the sun as the world opens itself wide because even though this has been the most wild winter in memory it’s still left an early-dark melancholy down deep in the bones.

Sunglasses on, let’s go.

Thanks to Meags for The Feeling Wheel.

 

Committing Herbicide

This plant in my apartment:

Makes me feel like this plant from E.T.:Either spring needs to hurry up and get here or I’m going to have to phone home and get the hell out of here on a flying bike.

 

image from here (seriously ET is the best, I cried).

Soweto Gospel Choir!

The amazing Soweto Gospel Choir is playing a FREE SHOW tonight in Fort Greene! It’s through Carnegie Hall’s “community sings” program, so the whole crowd just might get involved. If you’re in the hood, stop by for Reubens at our house before (fresh made corned beef and house-baked-rye bread)… now thatsa New York.

Details:
Emmanuel Baptist Church (that’s where this was happening on marathon day)
7:30
279 Lafayette Avenue (at Washington Avenue)
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Grapefruit Revelation

Breakfast for me usually means a) just dark coffee with a fair amount of sugar or b) the full works: eggs, sidemeat, toast, mimosa. Occasionally I’ll venture into some sort of honeyed granola territory, but usually it’s all or nothing. Imagine my surprise when, down visiting McKay in Mississippi, I discovered the simple, bittersweet joys of the prepared grapefruit half. What an adult epiphany. Maybe it’s the ritual of the preparation, segmenting out each little slice, or perhaps it’s that there are specialized serrated spoons and bendy three-sided knives just for the task, the not-quite-absolutely-necessary tools that make any food experience so much better (see also: escargot tongs, olive fork, clam ram, cake stand), or maybe it’s just the juicy goodness, complex, funky, and unbelievably fresh. Whatever it is, I like it.

 

ps. this picture was taken in Miss McKay’s morning dining room. I can’t even begin to talk about the light, the daffodils, or the hot-pink-muffler that was Miss Molly’s hostess gift. More on all of that next week.