Ghostly Figure, originally uploaded by Corbie.

I got back from L.A. late Friday. It was a great, albeit quick, trip. Vic and Jim Kaiser picked me up on Thursday morning for the journey down. We had cds and snacks and a car without a working speedometer. Vic drove most of the way, with Jim taking over right before the Grapevine. It was nice to be a passenger for once. The Central Valley has always interested me, with its vast expanse of nothingness and hazy distant hills. Here and there human beings have gone to great lengths to farm. I remember reading (or hearing) somewhere that portions of the valley have subsided over time as much as 75 feet due to aquifer depletion. That's what happens when one attempts to farm in a desert. The only real unpleasant part of the journey, as always, is the cloying odor of cow shit that assaults the nostrils of unwary travelers as the 5 makes a beeline through Coalinga.
We managed to avoid any signs of traffic congestion until we were only a few miles from our exit. Nurse With Wound were slated to play instore at Amoeba Records on Sunset Boulevard at around 7 PM, and we pulled into the store's underground parking lot at sometime around 4. This was okay by us, since we're all confirmed music junkies and Amoeba is the biggest record store on the west coast (biggest store worth a damn, anyway). Jim works at the Amoeba in Berkeley, so it was almost like going to work for him. We split up inside and I pawed through cds and vinyl for awhile before Vic informed me that Matt and the other Jim (Haynes) were upstairs. Vic had brought down a couple of boxes of printed material that he'd been asked to have printed by Ken (owner of the fledgling label Raash Records, whose inaugural release was to be the Nurse With Wound disc that this whole shindig was the release party for). By the time I got upstairs, Matt and Jim, with the help of a couple of other people I hadn't met yet, were already hard at work cutting them up, using box-cutters and a couple of tiny paper cutters. The room they were in also contained a great quantity of snack food and drink, there for the taking. Trips are all about snack food, so I had some. As there weren't any other cutting tools to use, I went back downstairs to wander around the huge expanse of cd, dvd, and vinyl racks that make up Amoeba. I picked up a few cds (mostly used, due to my budget constraints) and noted with irritation that the unfavorable exchange rate between British pounds the the U.S. dollar has caused a steep jump in U.K. import prices.
The store gradually filled up with people there for the instore. Steve arrived, as did John Contreras, who would be contributing cello to the proceedings. John was the only local member of the evening's Nurse With Wound lineup. Matt and Jim are both from the bay area. Steve lives in Ireland. Hazel resides in Texas.
Big Amoeba employees enforced fire lanes and roped off aisles. More people crowded in. The show started. Steve had a pair of turntables and a guitar that he bowed during the latter part of the set. Matt had his bass and usual bag of bits and pieces. Jim had rusty things and his own bag of tricks. John improvised with his cello. Hazel read a T.S. Eliot poem and then something of her own. My plan had been to stay up front and get a few pictures, then move back so I'd actually be on the proper side of the P.A. system, but I discovered I was hemmed in by the crowd so I stayed up front the entire time. They played for about half an hour, during which the piece rose from a soft, surreal soundscape to an ominous, unintentional drone caused by Hazel's mic feeding back. Steve later said that this was his favorite part of the show. It was strange to see this all unfold in a well-lit record store instead of a more traditional venue. I'd seen everybody except Hazel perform before, and been on stage with both Matt and Steve, but this was the debut of this particular line-up, so in some ways it made it all brand new. There is always a trade off between the mystery of not knowing how the sounds are created and the up-close observation and inside knowledge of what is going on. All you really have to do though is close your eyes and avoid rational thought . The mystery floods back in. Thirty minutes of beauty.
After the set had concluded, I went back upstairs to the little back room with the food. There was some stress surrounding the fact that the cd that this was a release party for had not actually arrived yet. It was still at the airport, but Ken was dealing with it. Ken had elected to be mysterious about what cd was actually being released, but most people had been able to figure out that it was Insect and Individual Silenced, one of the only items in the extensive Nurse back catalogue yet to see official re-release. Steve had disliked this release so much that at some point he'd destroyed the masters, so this release was made possible through the diligent efforts of people like Kevin Spencer (of Robot records) who spent time digitally cleaning up the recording using a pristine vinyl version of the release (if I'm remembering that right) and Matt, who did his usual brilliant job of tweaking/manipulating the artwork and doing the layout.
Steve stayed downstairs to talk and autograph things. I found myself talking with a couple upstairs. He was a writer. She was a singer. They'd just moved down to L.A. from the Bay Area. I found out that they knew where Sanborn park was (where I work, essentially) and we talked awhile before I asked the woman about her music. It turned out she was Jolie Holland, a singer who Jen and I both listen to quite regularly. I did one of those comical double takes, or at least I imagine I did. We talked a bit more before she asked if she could borrow a guitar. Jim Haynes went downstairs to ask Matt if it was okay, and soon she was singing and playing. It was kind of like getting a bonus concert. During this time the much anticipated cd finally arrived from the airport, and it turned out to be beautiful. It comes in a plastic slipcase inside which is a fold-out digipack. Quite stunning, actually. Steve, ever the generous type, gave me a couple of copies (one for Greg). Jolie continued to sing in the background. Who could ask for anything more?
We finally started clearing out. Vic, Jim, and I went searching for a cheap hotel to stay in for the night. Most of the rest of the crew went down the street to a bar called the Cat and the Fiddle.
After a bit of searching, we found an economy hotel (which actually had the word economy somewhere in the name) and checked in. Then we went to join everybody at the Cat and the Fiddle, unfortunately arriving too late to get any food. The waitress took pity on us and comped us a couple of rolls with butter. We all stayed until around 1 am or so, then all went our separate ways to get some sleep.
In the morning, I discovered a tick on my leg. The little critter had probably been hanging out in my pants or shoes since Wednesday, since it's more reasonable to expect to find them at my work than it is to find them in the sheets at a hotel on the Sunset strip. Damned hard to get them off without tweezers.
After I removed the tick and we'd all gotten cleaned up, we drove down to meet up with Jim Haynes and Matt. We ended up at a restaurant called Roscoe's, which served chicken and waffles in various combinations. Afterwards, we walked back to Amoeba so Jim could collect some cds he'd put on consignment the day before (he'd managed to sell a few, but not all). He gave me one too. Thanks Jim! I listened to it yesterday and it's quite nice.
Next stop was the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a favorite of Jim's (Haynes, that is). Due to missing a turn on the way there we got treated to the L.A. experience of witnessing paparazzi in action. Not sure who they were photographing, but a mob of them had their cameras directed into a store of some sort (possibly a clothing store).
The Museum itself was quite interesting. It is a maze of creatively lit (or unlit) rooms featuring displays of such things as trailer living and cat's cradles. There was a display on strange folk remedies, and one on microgaphy, as well as lots of other interesting little nooks and crannies. Some of the displays were in virtual darkness, and I had to strain to make out what they were. It added to the mysteriousness of it all. Upstairs, there was even a little tearoom where a woman with dog (some sort of greyhound or wolfhound, I think - see photo) offered me tea. We wandered, as if in trance, from room to room, with sacred sounding music and scholarly voices expounding on ridiculous subjects emanating from unseen speakers. Some of the exhibits were patently false, while others perhaps had a grain of truth to them. Werner Herzog, and his concept of ecstatic truth (he differentiates between facts, which he calls "accountants truth" and ecstatic truth, which often has nothing to do with facts). It is probably not a coincidence that among the dvds in the museum shop there was at least one Herzog dvd.
At any rate, it was like visiting a museum in a strange alternate reality.
After that, Vic, Matt, and Jim Kaiser, who were staying in L.A. another day, parted ways with Jim Haynes and I.
Jim and I hit the road and promptly got stuck in traffic which would last most of the way out of the city. Once we'd been on the 5 for awhile the cars thinned out and we made good time.

Now I'm back home. The older kids are away at their dad's Willow is sitting on my lap, playing with Easter eggs and wiggling. Last night we went to a staff house party at my work. Willow was the only kid, but basked in the attention of the grown-ups. Jen made a delightful goat cheese pasta and some yummy lemon bars. Lots of other good food was on hand as well. It was nice to hang out with my co-workers in a non-work setting. I should do it more often.